Kamala Harris' campaign for president has reversed course on her past positions on fracking, ICE, Medicare-for-All and mandatory gun buybacks.
Vice President Harris, in the week since she launched a new bid for the presidency following President Biden’s departure from the race, is now backing away from several far-left stances she once promoted.
To garner attention during her primary run for president years ago, Harris catered to the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. She discontinued that campaign in December 2019, and just months later, in the summer of 2020, aligned more with the new radical ideals pushed by Democrats following George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis and the Black Lives Matter anti-police protests and riots that rocked the U.S. afterward.
In resurfaced clips that began airing in ads by Republican David McCormick’s campaign for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania, Harris is seen on camera opposing fracking, stating she would "think about" abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), describing hiring more police officers as "wrongheaded thinking" and weighing the proposal of permitting felons to vote. Harris is also seen saying she was in favor of a "mandatory buyback program" for guns and said private health insurance should be eliminated, according to a summary of the ads’ content by the New York Times.
On fracking, which is particularly important to the economy in Pennsylvania, a key battleground state during the 2024 race, the Harris campaign reversed course on Friday. An official with Harris’ re-election campaign told The Hill that she will not seek to ban fracking if she is elected president.
That contrasts with what Harris told CNN while campaigning for the 2020 presidential nomination.
"There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking," Harris said at the time.
Former president and Republican nominee Donald Trump told rallygoers in Minnesota on Saturday how Harris had opposed fracking.
"Oh, that’s going to do well in Pennsylvania, isn’t it?" Trump said.
"Remember, Pennsylvania, I said it. She wants no fracking. She’s on tape. The beautiful thing about modern technology is when you say something, you’re screwed if it’s bad."
A Harris campaign official told the Times that Harris staffers plan to paint Republicans who drudge up Harris’ past statements espousing left-wing ideas as exaggerated claims or lies about Harris’ record. The campaign also plans to paint Harris as a candidate with deep ties to law enforcement by highlighting her record as a local prosecutor and state attorney general in California, according to the newspaper.
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At a November 2018 confirmation hearing, then-Sen. Harris asked Ronald Vitiello, Trump’s nominee to lead ICE, if he was "aware of the perception" of parallels between ICE and the KKK.
Harris campaign officials, meanwhile, told the Times this week that she now supports the Biden administration’s budget requests for increased funding for border enforcement, is no longer in opposition to a single-payer health insurance program and supports Biden’s call to ban assault weapons – but is now against any requirement for private gun owners to sell those weapons to the federal government.
Regarding health insurance, that means Harris is no longer promoting Medicare-for-All.
"Kamala Harris spent 20 years as a tough-as-nails prosecutor who sent violent criminals to prison," Brian Fallon, a Harris campaign spokesman, told the Times. "Her years spent in law enforcement and her record in the Biden-Harris administration defy Trump’s attempts to define her through lies."
The Trump campaign on Monday highlighted how Harris said in 2019 that she was "open to conversation" about expanding the Supreme Court. But the Harris campaign released a statement this week endorsing Biden’s Supreme Court reform proposal for term limits and ethics guidelines for justices. That proposal does not include adding additional justices to the nation’s highest court.
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Regarding video of Harris espousing far-left views, "the archive is deep," Brad Todd, a Republican strategist and ad maker working with McCormick and other campaigns, told the Times. "We will run out of time before we run out of video clips of Kamala Harris saying wacky California liberal things. I’m just not sure that the rest of this campaign includes much besides that."
