Vice President Kamala Harris on Thursday came face-to-face with the contradictory policy stances she’s backed between her unsuccessful 2020 campaign and the one she hopes to win in November.
The issues she addressed in a joint interview on CNN with her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz, ranged from fracking to immigration. By facing them head-on, Harris sought to leave her past behind while taking the steam out of Republicans’ frequent accusations that she has flip-flopped her opinions to match what is politically popular.
In 2019, Harris committed to working on a federal ban on fracking if she was elected the following year. She also suggested that the U.S. needed to “start from scratch” as other Democrats argued for the abolishment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
She has since walked back these positions, helping to expand fracking leases and supporting border control policies, which, in some cases, do not offer paths to citizenship or would expand the border wall.
“I think the most important and most significant aspect of my policy perspective and decisions is my values have not changed,” Harris told CNN’s Dana Bash in her first in-depth interview since becoming the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee.
Harris did little to make news in the interview — Donald Trump even deemed it “BORING!!!” It had been hyped for days by the media and others waiting to see how the new Democratic ticket would handle sustained, on-camera questions from journalists.
She resisted putting distance between herself and President Joe Biden, who was relatively unpopular when he left the race last month, while also casting herself as a change agent looking to “turn the page” from the last decade and Trump. And at times, she swerved away from questions that could make for a louder moment, like when she brushed off a question about the former president questioning her racial identity.
Walz took a similar stance in the joint interview. In the few questions directed at him, as he sat at Harris’ side, he defaulted to talking about his background as a teacher. Pressed on discrepancies in how he or his campaigns have talked about his military record or his family’s use of fertility treatments, he said he is passionate about those issues and blamed grammatical errors for hazy distinctions in his record.
Harris’ reluctance to do an in-depth interview until now had been a sore spot in her nearly six-week-long campaign. Republican Party leaders and media pundits have spent the past month highlighting the fact that Harris hasn’t taken tough and detailed questions about her positions and her vision for the country amid her campaign’s early rise, which skeptics and the Trump campaign label a “honeymoon phase.”
Many viewers, including Trump, watched with eager eyes for a momentum-shifting gaffe from Harris.
“Why are we doing it live and she’s doing it taped?” Trump criticized Harris on Thursday from his town hall in Wisconsin, just before the full interview aired. “She didn’t look like a leader to me, to be honest.”
But one person familiar with Harris’ media preparation downplayed the significance of the interview ahead of time. “Everybody needs to relax; it’s just an interview,” the source said earlier in the week, adding that the campaign viewed it as “just another opportunity for her to introduce herself and Gov. Walz to the American people.”
“There are a number of ways to reach voters, and doing a network interview is not even in the top 10 most effective ways,” said the person.
Still, it was the first time many voters had a chance to see Harris square changes in her policy positions over the last five years or explain how her own administration would differ from Biden’s.
Pressed on why action to address the overflow of migrants crossing the southern border has been delayed by the current administration, Harris pointed to Trump’s move to kill the border bill proposed in the Senate earlier this year. It’s a message that Democrats have repeatedly used on the campaign trail, including at the DNC.
On her wavering positions on immigration policy, Harris said she still holds the same values since serving two terms as attorney general of California “prosecuting transnational criminal organizations violating American laws regarding the illegal passage of guns, drugs and human beings across our border.”
Defending the Biden administration’s climate policy and her own past support for more drastic measures, Harris argued she has “always believed the climate crisis is real” and that it is an urgent matter, requiring us to “apply metrics that include holding ourselves to deadlines around time.” That includes setting standards for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, Harris said.
But she said she did not support a ban on fracking, with a brief explanation of why she had changed her position from her presidential run in 2019.
“What I have seen is that we can grow and we can increase a thriving clean energy economy without banning fracking,” she said.
She tried to make that policy position, subject to repeated skepticism, explicit. “I would not ban fracking. As VP, I did not ban fracking. As president, I would not ban fracking.”
In line with proposing a more moderate vision for the country, Harris said she’d be willing to appoint a Republican to her cabinet if elected in November.
“I have spent my career inviting diversity of opinion,” Harris said. “I think it’s important to have people at the table when some of the most important decisions are being made that have different views, different experiences.”
The Harris campaign has been upfront about their mission to attract Republican voters turned off by Trump and the GOP ticket. Several Republicans took the stage at the DNC last week, including former Rep. Adam Kinzinger and former Trump national security official Olivia Troye, to decry their own party’s candidates.
Harris told Bash she had no regrets in being a staunch defender of Biden’s second term before announcing his departure from the race. And when the time did come for his big decision, Harris felt assured in having his support.
“He was very clear that he was going to support me,” Harris said. “My first thought was not about me. It was about him. I think history is going to show a number of things about Joe Biden’s presidency. History is going to show that in many ways it was transformative.”
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Calen Razor is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow. Jasmine Wright is a reporter at NOTUS.