When she ran for president the first time, Kamala Harris darted to the left as she fought for attention from the Democratic Party’s liberal wing.
After she dropped out, social and racial justice protests swept across the country in the summer of 2020, and Ms. Harris joined other Democrats in supporting progressive ideas during what appeared to be a national realignment on criminal justice.
One presidential cycle later, with Vice President Harris less than a week into another race for the White House, video clips of her old statements and interviews are being weaponized as Republicans aim to define her as a left-wing radical who is out of step with swing voters.
Former President Donald J. Trump is calling out her past positions and statements at his rallies, and on Monday his campaign began reserving time for television advertisements that are likely to resurface videos of Ms. Harris.
“The archive is deep,” said Brad Todd, a Republican strategist and ad maker who is working with David McCormick, the G.O.P. Senate candidate in Pennsylvania, among other campaigns. “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.”
The first television ads to attack Ms. Harris for her past statements came not from Mr. Trump’s campaign but from Mr. McCormick, who is challenging Senator Bob Casey.
The 60-second ad, which Mr. McCormick’s campaign began airing Monday, resurfaces a laundry list of statements Ms. Harris made in 2019 and 2020.
She said then that she opposed fracking; would “think about” abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency; called the idea of adding more police officers “wrongheaded thinking”; entertained the idea of allowing felons to vote; said she supported a “mandatory buyback program” for some guns; and called for the elimination of private health insurance.
Fracking is a particularly tough issue for Ms. Harris. Banning it was a plank in her energy platform in the 2020 primary race. But fracking remains a key element of the economy in Pennsylvania, perhaps the most important battleground state this year.
“She pledged to ban fracking — no fracking, oh, that’s going to do well in Pennsylvania, isn’t it?” Mr. Trump said at a rally on Saturday in Minnesota. “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.”
The Harris campaign announced on Friday that the vice president no longer wanted to ban fracking, a significant shift from where she stood four years ago but one that is consistent with the policies of President Biden’s administration.
The Harris campaign will rebut most of Republicans’ attacks by arguing that they are exaggerating or lying about her record, said a campaign official briefed on the plans who was not authorized to discuss them publicly. Her campaign plans to lean into her record as a local prosecutor and state attorney general to burnish her image as a candidate with deep ties to law enforcement.
In addition to changing her position on fracking, campaign officials said she now backed the Biden administration’s budget requests for increased funding for border enforcement; no longer supported a single-payer health insurance program; and echoed Mr. Biden’s call for banning assault weapons but not a requirement to sell them to the federal government.
“Kamala Harris spent 20 years as a tough-as-nails prosecutor who sent violent criminals to prison,” said Brian Fallon, a Harris campaign spokesman. “Her years spent in law enforcement and her record in the Biden-Harris administration defy Trump’s attempts to define her through lies.”
On Monday, as Mr. Biden prepared a speech in Texas calling for term limits and ethics guidelines for Supreme Court justices, the Trump campaign resurfaced statements Ms. Harris made in 2019 saying she was “open to this conversation” about expanding the Supreme Court. Ms. Harris, in a statement released by her campaign, endorsed Mr. Biden’s proposal, which does not call for adding additional justices to the court.
Officials with Ms. Harris’s campaign also said they hoped to utilize the liberal cultural fervor around her candidacy to make the election a referendum on the future versus a past Democrats argue Mr. Trump represents.
Mr. Trump and his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, have themselves been on multiple sides of many issues, not least of which is Mr. Vance’s past stance as a prominent critic of Mr. Trump.
There is ample video of Mr. Trump making remarks unhelpful to his 2024 campaign. In 2016, he said women who sought abortions should face punishment, and as president he tried to bar immigrants from several predominantly Muslim countries and enacted a policy of separating immigrant children from their families at the southern border. He also was caught on tape bragging about groping women.
Matt Bennett, a co-founder of Third Way, a moderate Democratic think tank, said he was not worried that Ms. Harris had once espoused left-wing ideas. She has evolved, he said, into a Biden-style Democrat with more centrist views.
“There’s a tremendous difference in changing one’s policy ideas and changing one’s principles,” Mr. Bennett said. “She has not changed her principles. She still thinks climate change is an existential threat — she just doesn’t think the Green New Deal is the way to address it.”
Since she joined Mr. Biden’s ticket in 2020, Ms. Harris has seldom put forward policies that differ much from his. She is no longer pushing for a single-payer health care system, and on Friday her campaign said she would maintain Mr. Biden’s pledge not to raise income taxes on people making less than $400,000 per year.
But one issue on which Ms. Harris has already put some daylight between herself and Mr. Biden is abortion rights. Since the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade, the president has said he would sign legislation restoring a federal right to abortion if such a bill came to his desk.
In her early speeches as a presidential candidate, Ms. Harris has offered to go a bit further.
“When Congress passes a law to restore reproductive freedoms, as president of the United States, I will sign it into law,” she told an audience in Wisconsin last week, using a broader term that suggested such legislation could extend beyond abortion rights to things like protecting in vitro fertilization or contraception.
During her 2020 presidential campaign, Ms. Harris had an even bolder plan on abortion rights. Her proposal would have required states and local jurisdictions that tried to restrict abortion rights to obtain federal approval before a new law could take effect — similar to the way that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 limited changes to voting laws in some states with a history of racial discrimination.
“On this issue, I’m kind of done,” she said of abortion rights during a 2019 interview on MSNBC. “When elected, I’m going to put in place and require that states that have a history of passing legislation that is designed to prevent or limit a woman’s access to reproductive health care, that those laws have to come before my Department of Justice for a review and approval. And until we determine that they are constitutional, they will not take effect.”
By 2023, Ms. Harris’s position on abortion rights had evolved to echoing Mr. Biden’s call to enact legislation codifying a federal right to abortion.
“We need to restore the protections of Roe v. Wade,” Ms. Harris said during a 2023 interview on CBS. “We’re not trying to do anything that did not exist before June of last year.”
That remains her position, said Lauren Hitt, a campaign spokeswoman.
Ms. Harris’s first presidential campaign was undone in part by staff turmoil that resulted in public finger-pointing and scathing resignation letters even before she dropped out of the race. Former aides interviewed for this article, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their current employers, said Ms. Harris’s campaign had been undermined by a combination of unsteady leadership from its senior staff members and too much influence on the candidate from her family members.
But during that race, Ms. Harris also often appeared as if she were not sure what she believed. In a CNN town-hall event the day after what was widely viewed as a successful campaign rollout in Oakland, Calif., she appeared tentative while discussing health care policy, eventually saying she would eliminate private health insurance and institute a single-payer health care program.
She would go on to propose an array of policies popular with progressives. She sought to increase pay for public-school teachers by an average of $13,500 through a bump in the estate tax.
She also called for an assault weapons ban and said she would sign an executive order mandating background checks for customers of any dealer who sold more than five guns in a year. And she sought to close the gender pay gap by requiring large companies to certify that men and women were paid equally.
But for all her liberal policy proposals in the 2020 campaign, Ms. Harris was frequently viewed through her biography. She leaned into her record as a former prosecutor and California attorney general, but many voters were well aware of her status as a Black and South Asian woman who had marched with her immigrant mother in civil rights demonstrations in California.
“I don’t know that the policy stuff is what people were talking about — it was all biography,” said Sue Dvorsky, a former Iowa Democratic Party chairwoman who backed Ms. Harris in the 2020 campaign. “She’s always been complex policy-wise, but I think people look at her and expect a thing. She’s going to talk about law and order and being a prosecutor.”
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