When Vice President Kamala Harris capped off the Democratic National Convention with a speech some commenters lauded as “the speech that Democrats craved,” she paved a middle road as much for independents and Republicans disaffected with Donald Trump as for Democrats.
Yet after the glamour of the stage-managed convention, focus has shifted to what Harris’ “big tent” approach means in terms of policy. Voters are expecting the presidential nominee to soon stake out clearer positions on some of America’s most pressing issues, including inflation, immigration and healthcare access and affordability.
The vice president’s previous reluctance to clarify her priorities is important, partly because her policy positions have shifted since she announced her candidacy for the 2020 Democratic primary election.
Medicare
At the DNC, speakers emphasised the Biden administration’s efforts to lower the price of insulin, but this change only applies to those currently eligible for Medicare. (In 2023, more than 25 million Americans did not have health insurance.)
In 2019, Harris announced her support of Medicare for All, a proposed extension of the government healthcare program that currently only insures people aged 65 or older. However, Harris’ team recently stated that she no longer supports the plan, instead touting Biden-era accomplishments such as expanding access to private insurance plans that serve Obamacare patients and negotiating Medicare drug prices.
Gun violence
Four years ago, Harris’s 2020 DNC speech took aim at “structural racism”, noting how the pandemic disproportionately affected marginalised communities and making reference to the Black Lives Matter protests that had spread throughout the US in the months following by police officer Derek Chauvin.
The 2024 DNC featured the testimonies of victims and survivors of gun violence, including former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords who survived an assassination attempt in 2011. But there was little mention of police killings, even though the number of Americans killed by law enforcement officers has increased since 2019.
If current trends continue, 2024 will be an even deadlier year.
Abortion rights
One policy area the Harris campaign has emphasised a clear position on is reproductive rights.
In her DNC speech, Harris vowed to sign a federal law protecting access to “reproductive freedom”, including abortion care. Abortion access has been greatly restricted across the US since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade in 2022.
Fourteen states have near-total bans on abortion; another four states restrict abortion access after six weeks of pregnancy. These laws affect more than 25 million women of reproductive age. More than half of Black women of reproductive age live in states that limit abortion access.
The issue will be a pressing one in November, and not just for the presidential race. Voters in 10 states will have the opportunity to weigh in directly on initiatives and referendums affecting abortion access. In swing states, including Florida, Arizona and Nevada, voters will decide whether to protect or extend the right to terminate a pregnancy.
Across the US, “abortion storytellers” are travelling from city to city, meeting with voters to talk about their own decisions to terminate pregnancies — often in cases where a woman or her fetus faced a devastating diagnosis — bringing public faces to a long-stigmatised issue.
The Harris campaign made these voices central at the DNC, and they linked the broader theme of reproductive freedom to include access to assisted reproductive technology, including IVF treatments. Prominent politicians, such as Illinois Senator Tammy Duckworth, spoke of their struggles with infertility and the decision to pursue IVF to build their families.
Cost of living
The Harris campaign has also staked a clear policy position on the cost of living crisis.
In the days following the DNC, Harris’s campaign released an advertisement promising government grants to first-time home buyers and tens of billions of dollars to fund incentives for local governments to allow the development of multi-family housing.
Harris also called for a “middle-class tax cut”.
It’s unclear the extent to which these policies, if enacted, would ease the pinch of inflation felt by households in the short term, as many families struggle to make ends meet.
Immigration reform
Efforts by both Republicans and Democrats have failed to produce comprehensive immigration reform over the past four decades.
As recently as May, Republicans torpedoed a bipartisan bill focused on border security, even though the law would have increased the budget of immigration and customs enforcement and given the border patrol enhanced authority.
Harris promised to revive Biden’s recently defeated bipartisan border security bill, which she claimed would both “create an earned pathway to citizenship and secure our border”.
The last major legislative achievement on this issue was the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, signed into law by then president Ronald Reagan, which offered amnesty to millions of undocumented immigrants while also increasing enforcement efforts.
Efforts since then have mostly failed and resulted in piecemeal changes.
As the Democratic nominee for president, Harris has made lofty promises to restore joy and optimism to a polarised American people. Whether voters are persuaded by her claims — and whether they will drive turnout, especially among the Democratic base — is the major test she faces in November.
Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.
