Vice President Kamala Harris is letting unnamed subordinates announce major policy shifts on issues such as fracking and “Medicare for All,” rather than remarking on them herself, a strategy that helps immunize her from criticism of previous positions while keeping her flip-flops at least somewhat below the radar.
She is “playing politics,” a Republican strategist says.
While the Harris campaign appears to be pushing a reworked agenda, another strategist told Fox News Digital that “anonymous, on background, campaign staffers do not take public policy positions, candidates and elected officials do.”
Dallas Woodhouse, State Director for American Majority-North Carolina, a nonprofit conservative training organization, said that Americans should assume that every position taken by Harris during her previous presidential campaign for President and the positions taken by the Biden-Harris administration are exactly hers today, “until she herself explains otherwise.”
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“The American public will never accept a candidate changing all their stated positions from just a few years ago without thorough examination and explanation,” he added.
Harris advisers recently told Axios that “Harris doesn’t want to be completely defined by the Biden-Harris record.” The publication reported that she is seeking to distance herself from Biden on several issues, including his economic policies.
Fox News Digital asked the Harris campaign if she plans to personally announce her new stance on the key issues but did not receive a response.
These are some of the major issues on which she has reversed or walked back her views.
Harris said during her first presidential bid in 2019 that she would ban fracking if elected – a key issue among a critical voting bloc in battleground states like Pennsylvania.
“There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking, I have a history of working on this issue,” Harris said in 2020.
Republicans, including former President Trump, have used her past comments on the issue to blast her in several campaign ads since she launched her 2024 campaign.
But campaign officials for the Democratic nominee are now saying that Harris will not ban fracking if she’s elected president.
Harris published a plan for “Medicare for All” during her 2019 presidential election, writing that her goal was to “end these senseless attacks on Obamacare” and that she believes “health care should be a right, not a privilege only for those who can afford it. It’s why we need Medicare for All.”
“The idea is that everyone gets access to medical care. And you don’t have to go through the process of going through an insurance company, having them give you approval, going through the paperwork all of the delay that may require. Let’s eliminate that,” Harris wrote in 2019.
Additionally, then-Sen. Harris cosponsored Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Medicare for All Act of 2019.
Despite her past support, a campaign official told Fox News senior White House correspondent Peter Doocy that Harris will not push the subject of “Medicare-for-all” this cycle.
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Colin Reed, a Republican strategist, previous campaign manager, and co-founder of South and Hill Strategies, expressed skepticism regarding the credibility of Harris’ recent policy change.
“When Vice President Harris ran for the White House five years ago, she was a sitting U.S. Senator and the former attorney general of the largest state in the nation. In other words, an extremely accomplished individual with plenty of time on the national stage to form opinions on the big issues,” Reed told Fox. “The idea that she could, over the span of five years, just change her tune on a dime on a slew of major big ticket items strains credulity,”
Reed said her shift on Medicare For All “would cost $44 trillion dollars – more than our entire $35 trillion dollar national debt.”
“Either she was wrong then or is playing politics now, and voters will figure it out whenever she decides to answer questions in an unscripted setting.”
Harris endorsed a mandatory buyback program for assault rifles during her first presidential campaign.
“We have to have a buyback program, and I support a mandatory gun buyback program,” Harris said at MSNBC’s Gun Safety Forum in October 2019. “It’s got to be smart, we got to do it the right way. But there are 5 million [assault weapons] at least, some estimate as many as 10 million, and we’re going to have smart public policy that’s about taking those off the streets, but doing it the right way.”
A Harris spokesperson now says that she would not push a mandatory buyback program for assault rifles that she once supported.
Under the current Biden-Harris Internal Revenue Service rules, taxpayers must report all tip money as income on their tax returns. Harris has supported measures that allowed the IRS to track and tax workers’ tips and even cast a tie-breaking vote in 2022 to pass legislation that increased IRS funding for this exact purpose.
However, Harris recently said that she supports ending taxes on tips for service worker employees – an idea floated earlier this summer by Trump, who received plenty of positive feedback.
“We’ll continue our fight for working families of America,” Harris said at a recent campaign rally. “Including minimum wage, and eliminate taxes on tips for service and hospitality workers.”
Harris has previously supported rolling back Trump-era border policies but appears to be taking a tougher stance on the southern border crisis as she runs for president in 2024.
During an appearance on MSNBC in 2018, Harris suggested “starting from scratch” with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Harris also said she supported the decriminalization of border crossings during her 2019 campaign. The then-presidential candidate promised to offer protection to illegal immigrants brought to the U.S. as minors through the expansion of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival (DACA) and shield illegal immigrant parents of U.S. citizens and green card holders from deportation.
When record numbers of migrants were coming through the border in 2022, Harris said that “the border is secure,” during an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” Harris was criticized by border state Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, shortly thereafter, who told CNN that “the border is not secure.”
During a recent campaign stop in Arizona, Harris said that she supports more border security measures, describing immigration as one of the “biggest issues facing our nation.”
“Fixing the border is tough, so is Kamala Harris,” a narrator said in a recent campaign ad for Harris.
“Kamala Harris has spent decades fighting violent crime. As a border state prosecutor, she took on drug cartels and jailed gang members for smuggling weapons and drugs across the border,” a narrator says. “As vice president, she backed the toughest border control bill in decades. And as president, she will hire thousands more border agents and crack down on fentanyl and human trafficking.”
As a prosecutor, Harris supported cash bail and called for higher bail amounts on gun-related charges.
“The bail system at issue here does not categorically deny bail to any group of individuals,” she wrote in a lawsuit.
But after becoming a senator, Harris joined GOP Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., in 2017 to introduce legislation to push for changes or replacement of the cash bail system.
“Excessive bail disproportionately harms people from low-income communities and communities of color,” Harris and Paul wrote in an op-ed in the New York Times.. “Bail is supposed to ensure that the accused appear at trial and don’t commit other offenses in the meantime.”
In 2010, then-Attorney Gen. Harris opposed Proposition 19 – a measure to legalize recreational marijuana and allow it to be sold and taxed in California.
While running for California attorney general in 2014, Harris was asked her opinion on her opponent’s stance on legalizing recreational marijuana.
“Uh, I … he is entitled to his opinion,” Harris laughed, but did not provide her position on the issue.
At the 2015 California Democratic Convention, Harris said she advocated to “end the federal ban on medical marijuana.”
Harris became much more vocal about the issue during her 2020 presidential bid, telling “The Breakfast Club” hosts DJ Envy, Angela Yee and Charlamagne tha God that she “inhaled” a joint “a long time ago.”
“I think it gives a lot of people joy. And we need more joy in the world,” Harris added.
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