Kamala Harris is off to a strong start to her presidential campaign, but the weeks leading up to the November 5 election will be highly contested and Harris faces real obstacles.
He must articulate his own positions to differentiate his candidacy from some of the less popular policies and outcomes seen during the Biden-Harris administration. And as he fills in the details, his plans will fall apart, reducing his chances of swaying voters in the key states that will decide the 2024 election.
In important policy areas, Harris has undergone a near-complete transformation, moving from an unabashed progressive to a cautious centrist. Some voters will question the authenticity of her revised views, but for others, inconsistency will not be the problem. It is the policies themselves, attractive at first but ineffective, difficult to implement, or more progressive than most Americans accept. So it is the policy that could prove the Achilles heel in Harris’s efforts to prevent Trump from winning a second term.
In her first extensive media interview since becoming the Democrats' 2024 standard-bearer, Harris argued that voters should feel comfortable with her change of course because her “values“They haven't changed. Maybe they have, but voters will wonder what might make her act on her values once elected.
On domestic energy exploration, Harris went from saying in 2019 that opposite fracking and offshore oil drilling, noting that No After all, they will try to ban fracking. As for health care, that same year, the then presidential candidate in the primaries was an ardent defender follower Medicare for All, an overhaul to institute a government-run system that would significantly alter existing coverage arrangements. But a campaign spokesman recently said that no longer favors This plan.
Similarly, on immigration policy, an issue that voters addressed earlier this year in a Wall Street Journal article, survey identified as her top issue for 2024, Harris has taken an aggressive tone and shifted positions on Trump's border wall, hugging the recent bipartisan border security bill that includes $650 million in wall funding, while backing away from his previous support for decriminalizing illegal border crossings.
In other areas, what will haunt her are simply the weaknesses of the ideas she has put forward, particularly some of her economic policy proposals.
Their housing plans, for example, include a idea On the face of it, this sounds appealing: offering $25,000 in down payment assistance to first-time homebuyers, as well as an additional $10,000 tax credit for homebuyers. Such a plan would increase demand for new homes, but without significant additional supply, it would likely also increase home prices for those it’s intended to help and, potentially, for others looking for new homes as well. (It’s worth noting that Harris has also proposed incentives for developers who build starter homes, as well as making it possible to build new affordable housing on federal land. But in supply-constrained states like California, these proposals alone may not create enough inventory to drive down prices.)
Harris has acknowledged that food prices remain too high for too many Americans, but her solution — a federal ban on price gouging — has been criticized even by some progressives. economists Obama's plan would do nothing to change the factors driving up food prices — supply chain problems, geopolitical conflicts and high energy costs, to name a few — and it's not clear that a president could do much, if anything, to address these root causes.
Moreover, lawmakers from her own party have said Harris’s idea to raise prices would not pass Congress even if Democrats win majorities in both chambers, and would also be difficult to implement. It is also a target of criticism for opposition conservatives, who can easily compare it to price controls seen in some economies around the world.
Finally, Harris' proposal to raise taxes by $5 trillion.
She is called to lifting the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28%, after Congress enacted the lower rate and Trump signed it into law in 2017. But this would only serve to restore incentives for companies to locate elsewhere. avoid paying the highest rates.
Perhaps the most controversial is the Harris case. plan Create a new estate tax, which would force some high-net-worth families to pay taxes each year on the value of their assets, even if they don’t sell them. Taxing so-called unrealized capital gains is problematic for many reasons, including administrative difficulties in collecting the tax and problems in trying to accurately value assets that fluctuate over time or are not publicly traded.
For most voters in most states, the policy proposals of either presidential candidate won’t matter. They’ve already made up their minds. But for the few undecided voters left in key states, what Harris has proposed and how she defends and explains her future policies may well be decisive. To secure their support, she will have to hope that these Americans will forgive the inconsistencies in her record and the shortcomings of what she has proposed so far.
Lanhee J. Chen is the David and Diane Steffy Fellow in American Public Policy Studies at the Hoover Institution. He was a candidate for California State Comptroller in 2022 and served as policy director for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign.
