According to the New York Times, when Harris first ran for the White House in 2019, she pushed to the left as she struggled to attract the attention of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party.
With the vice president less than a week into the race for the White House, Republicans are releasing videos of her old statements and interviews to portray her as a left-wing extremist outside the swing voter pool.
In fact, former Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump attacks her previous positions and statements at his election rallies.
On Monday, his campaign began dedicating time to television ads that will likely repeat a long list of statements Harris made in 2019 and 2020.
Among those statements, Harris said at the time that she opposed fracking, would consider abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, called the idea of adding more police officers “wrong thinking,” welcomed the idea of allowing felons to vote, said she supported a “mandatory buyback program” for some guns, and called for the abolition of private health insurance.
Banning hydraulic fracturing for fuel extraction was a plank of her energy platform in the 2020 primary race.
But fracking remains a staple of Pennsylvania’s economy, and the state may be the most important electoral battleground this year.
“She pledged to ban fracking,” Trump said at a rally Saturday, referring to Harris’s old comments on the subject. “Oh, that would work well in Pennsylvania, wouldn’t it?” Trump added to the state’s residents: “Remember, she said she didn’t want fracking, and that’s on the record. The beautiful thing about modern technology is that when you say something, you’re in trouble if it’s bad.”
A day before Trump’s speech, the Harris campaign announced that the vice president no longer wanted to ban fracking, a major shift from her position four years ago but consistent with the policies of President Joe Biden’s administration.
In addition to changing her position on fracking, campaign officials said she now supports the Biden administration’s budget requests to increase funding for border enforcement, no longer supports a single-payer health insurance program, and reiterated Biden’s call to ban assault weapons but not require them to be sold to the federal government.
In contrast, many old videos of Trump from his 2016 campaign are being replayed, including statements in which he said women who seek abortions should face punishment, as well as footage of him bragging about groping women. As president, he has tried to ban immigrants from several Muslim-majority countries, and enacted a policy of separating migrant children from their families at the southern border.
Senator J.D. Vance, Trump’s choice to run as his running mate, has been a vocal critic of the former president’s positions.
The newspaper quotes Matt Bennett, an expert at the Third Way Foundation, as saying that he is not concerned that Harris once adopted leftist ideas. “She has evolved, like Biden, with more centrist views.”
“There is a huge difference between changing one’s policy ideas and changing one’s principles,” he said. “She hasn’t changed her principles, and she still believes that climate change is an existential threat.”
Since joining Biden in 2020, Harris has rarely put forward policies that diverge significantly from his, no longer pushing for a single-payer health care system, and her campaign said Friday she would keep Biden’s pledge not to raise income taxes on people making less than $400,000 a year.
Source: “New York Times”
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2024-07-31 09:15:11
