We’re rapidly zooming toward Election Day, so what exactly is Vice-President Kamala Harris’s platform? According to a policy guide she released online in early September, her campaign is focusing on four key areas: building an “opportunity economy” and lowering costs for American families; safeguarding “our fundamental freedoms”; ensuring “safety and justice for all”; and keeping the country “safe, secure, and prosperous.” Some of her proposals to advance those goals include eliminating the filibuster to codify Roe v. Wade, expanding Medicare to cover long-term at-home care, and banning corporate price gouging. Below, a guide to everything we know about where Harris stands on the issues.
The economy
Harris’s first major policy speech focused on several economic proposals. She announced a goal to build 3 million new housing units in four years, proposing $40 billion in tax incentives for housebuilders to accomplish it. Harris also said she’d ask Congress to pass legislation giving buyers up to $25,000 toward a down payment on their first home.
In other campaign speeches, Harris has said she supports raising the minimum wage and that she’ll work to ban hidden fees and surprise late charges that banks “use to pad their profits.” She also vows to protect consumers by pushing a federal ban on corporate price gouging in the grocery and food industries.
Harris also rolled out another policy proposal focused on supporting small businesses, with the goal of having 25 million new business applications by the end of her first term. She is calling for expanding the eligible start-up expenses deduction from $5,000 to $50,000, ensuring that one-third of federal contract dollars goes to small businesses and boosting investment in community-development financial institutions (CDFIs), which typically support low-income, minority, and rural business owners who don’t have access to traditional lenders.
When it comes to taxes, she is proposing that lower-income adults who do not have children see an expansion of their earned-income tax credit (more on her proposals for those who do have children below). Additionally, Harris’s campaign has said she will not raise taxes on people making less than $400,000 per year. Harris also is proposing higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations, including increasing the tax on stock buybacks to 4 percent. She’s said she wants to raise the long-term capital-gains tax rate from 20 percent to 28 percent for individuals who earn $1 million or more. She also supports President Biden’s Billionaire Minimum Income Tax plan, which would impose a 25 percent minimum income tax on households with a net worth over $100 million.
Abortion and reproductive rights
Harris has been the Biden administration’s most vocal advocate on abortion rights. As vice-president, she’s regularly met with stakeholders across the country and became the highest-ranking government official ever to visit an abortion clinic. She has campaigned on defending “reproductive freedom” and said that she’d sign a bill to codify Roe v. Wade’s protections into law. During an interview in September, Harris said she supports ending the legislative filibuster, which would lower the threshold from 60 votes to just 51 votes, in order to pass such a measure. She also supports the repeal of the Hyde Amendment, which bans the use of federal funds for abortion care with very limited exceptions.
Harris has also said she’ll fight to protect the right to contraception and access to fertility care such as in vitro fertilization, both of which Republicans have targeted post-Roe, though she has yet to outline specifics on what that would look like.
Child care
As vice-president, Harris has been the Biden administration’s lead on a policy seeking to lower child-care costs for more than 100,000 low-income families. Now, she’s proposing a child tax-credit expansion, where low- and middle-income families can receive up to $6,000 during the first year of their new baby’s life. She also wants to bring back a credit from the Biden administration’s 2021 American Rescue Plan that gave families $3,600 per child under the age of 5 and $3,000 for children who are older.
Voting rights
During her DNC speech, Harris promised to work with Congress to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and the Freedom to Vote Act, an ambitious measure aimed at strengthening the protections of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Some of the bill’s provisions include expanding automatic and same-day voting registration, making Election Day a national holiday, ending partisan gerrymandering, and protecting against voter purges.
Health care
Harris has pledged to continue the Biden administration’s efforts to negotiate lower prescription-drug prices for Medicare patients. Some of her other proposals include limiting the price of insulin at $35 for every patient, not just seniors, as well as capping out-of-pocket expenses for prescription drugs at $2,000 per year. Harris has also said she will partner with states to cancel medical debt for millions of Americans, although it’s not yet clear who’d qualify. As vice-president, she led the charge to remove medical debt from credit reports, an effort that benefitted about 30 million people. She also pledged to lower health-care premiums by about $800 a year for millions of Americans by making the Biden administration’s tax credits a permanent fixture.
Harris has announced a plan to expand Medicare to cover long-term at-home care services. Currently, Medicare only covers this type of care in very narrow circumstances, such as after surgery. The vice-president’s proposal would help seniors and people with disabilities stay at home rather than relocating to a facility, which can cost thousands of dollars per month.
She also rolled out a plan focused on improving health-care access for rural America. Some of her proposals include recruiting 10,000 new health professionals to expand access to care in rural and tribal areas, working with Congress to permanently extend Medicare to cover telemedicine, doubling federal funding for telehealth equipment and technology, and pushing for grants that’d support volunteer EMS programs, with the goal of reducing the number of people who live more than 25 minutes away from an ambulance by half.
Labor
Harris supports raising the minimum wage and has said that she’ll help eliminate taxes on tips for service and hospitality workers. She has pledged to sign the PRO Act and the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act into law, which will strengthen unions in the private and public sectors. She’s also said she’d help establish paid family and medical leave at the federal level.
Agriculture
Harris rolled out a plan focused on strengthening the agriculture industry. Some of her proposals include expanding farmland protection programs, improving access to credit for beginning farmers and ranchers, working with Congress to pass the Agricultural Right to Repair Act, and to ensure the Federal Crop Insurance Program covers natural disasters and extreme climate events.
LGBTQ+ Rights
Harris has pledged to sign the Equality Act into law, which would codify anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ+ Americans across areas including housing, health care, employment, education, and more.
Gun safety
In campaign speeches, Harris has said she will work with Congress to pass several gun-safety measures, including universal background checks, red-flag laws, and a ban on assault weapons. She’s been a key leader in the Biden administration on this issue. In that role, she’s overseen the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, announced the launch of a national center to help implement red-flag laws, and helped roll out a policy to crack down on unlicensed gun dealers.
Immigration
In campaign ads, Harris has pledged that her immigration policies include “strong border security and an earned pathway to citizenship.” Her proposals include increasing the number of Border Patrol agents, investing in technology to crack down on fentanyl, and increasing funding to stop human trafficking. She has also said she would work with Congress to revive a bipartisan border-security bill that would allow the president to shut down the border after a certain number of migrants enter the country, allocate funds to hire new asylum officers, and expedite the process for ruling on asylum claims. Republicans killed the measure earlier this year at the urging of Donald Trump, who didn’t want President Biden to notch another bipartisan victory.
Criminal justice
Harris, a former prosecutor, has yet to release any criminal-justice proposals. Her record on the issue is complicated. As San Francisco’s district attorney, she vowed not to seek the death penalty; later, when she was elected as California’s attorney general, her office argued that the death penalty should stand and appealed a court ruling that would effectively end capital punishment in the state.
Harris has long backed initiatives that would offer alternatives to incarceration for people convicted of nonviolent crimes. As DA, she implemented a program called “Back on Track” that focused on curbing recidivism among first-time nonviolent offenders by helping them with job training and mental-health counseling. As a senator, she also supported a bipartisan bill that would end cash bail and another that would reform policing following George Floyd’s killing. As vice-president, she and Biden have pushed Congress to pass a federal police-reform bill named in Floyd’s honor.
The Supreme Court
Harris has said she supports “common-sense Supreme Court reforms,” including creating term-limits for the justices and ensuring they comply with ethics rules that apply to other federal judges.
Opportunities for Black men
Harris rolled out a wide-ranging policy plan specifically directed at Black men, which covers issues including the economy, health care, and criminal justice. She is proposing providing 1 million fully forgivable loans of up to $20,000 to entrepreneurs who are Black or from other marginalized communities so that they can start a new business or grow an existing one. Additionally, Harris says she supports creating a regulatory framework for cryptocurrency and other digital assets, which will help protect Black men and other marginalized groups who participate in the market.
Harris is also calling for launching a National Health Equity Initiative that focuses on issues that disproportionately impact Black men, including sickle-cell disease, prostate cancer, and diabetes. In addition, she supports legalizing recreational marijuana and helping communities of color — which have been disproportionately over-policed for weed use — access the market as entrepreneurs and workers.
Foreign policy
Harris has yet to unveil concrete foreign-policy proposals. As the war in Gaza continues to be a key issue for voters, Harris has said that while she believes Israel has a right to defend itself, she has “serious concern about the scale of human suffering in Gaza, including the death of far too many innocent civilians.” And though she recently clashed with pro-Palestine protesters who interrupted a rally in Michigan, she also briefly met with leaders of the Uncommitted movement before the event to discuss their call for an arms embargo on Israel.
In her DNC speech, Harris explicitly called for a cease-fire and a hostage deal, adding that she’s working with President Biden to end the war. She also spoke more forcefully about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Here are her comments in full:
Let me be clear: I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself, and I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself. Because the people of Israel must never again face the horror that the terrorist organization Hamas caused on October 7, including unspeakable sexual violence and the massacre of young people at a music festival.
At the same time, what has happened in Gaza over the past ten months is devastating. So many innocent lives lost. Desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety, over and over again. The scale of suffering is heartbreaking.
President Biden and I are working to end this war such that Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity. Security. Freedom. And self-determination.