Throughout their lengthy careers, the two major party presidential candidates—Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump—have both shifted their views on major issues.
Harris has gone as far as recently saying that “my values have not changed,” while Trump has similarly downplayed changes in his opinions on political topics over his nearly five decades in the public eye.
“The advantage in switching positions is to move to the middle to attract moderate, undecided voters,” Robert Shapiro, a political science professor at Columbia University, told The Epoch Times.
While there’s a risk of looking awkward or alienating your base supporters, Shapiro says it’s probably a “good risk” at this stage with just under three weeks left before election day.
“I see both Harris and Trump attempting to use their changes in positions to blunt any attack that could be made against them from the other side,” Aaron Dusso, a political science professor at Indiana University–Indianapolis, told The Epoch Times.
Using four policies for each candidate, Harris has shifted on fracking, immigration, Medicare for All, and gun control, while Trump has similarly changed his views on abortion, marijuana, Social Security, and the state and local tax deduction (SALT).
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While running for president in 2019, Harris said, “There’s no question, I’m in favor of banning fracking.”
Not only did she change her view after joining the Biden administration, at the Sept. 10 presidential debate, she said, “What I have seen is that we can grow, and we can increase a thriving clean-energy economy without banning fracking.
Harris also supported the decriminalization of illegal border crossings in 2019, but no longer, going as far as proposing new asylum restrictions during a recent stop in Arizona.
She has also pivoted on Medicare for All after co-sponsoring Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) Medicare for All Act of 2017, which sought to replace private insurance with a “national health insurance program” administered by the federal government.”
By 2019, however, she released her own version of the initiative, which kept private insurance, and as of this year, she said her agenda includes strengthening the Affordable Care Act.
That year, Harris also supported a mandatory buy-back program for so-called assault weapons, which would have required owners to sell certain guns to the federal government—a policy she no longer supports.
“Tim Walz and I are both gun owners. We’re not taking anybody’s guns away,” Harris said during the ABC debate with Trump after he alleged she “has a plan to confiscate everybody’s gun.”
She instead supports a federal ban on “assault weapons,” universal background checks, and red flag laws.
Trump told NBC in 1999, right before considering a third-party run for president, that he was “very pro-choice” before casting himself as pro-life in 2016.
He endorsed a federal ban on abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy while president, but now says he would not sign a federal ban and has criticized Florida’s six-week abortion ban.
Trump’s Justice Department rescinded an Obama-era policy that essentially directed federal prosecutors to not pursue marijuana criminal offenses in states where the plant is legal under state law.
In 2019, he also signaled that he had a “constitutional responsibility to faithfully execute the laws of the United States” when it came to the country’s federal prohibition on marijuana.
This year, Trump endorsed a Florida ballot measure to legalize recreational marijuana and supports efforts to reclassify the substance federally as a Schedule III drug.
Regarding Social Security, Trump said in 1999 that he liked the idea of privatizing the federal program, likening it to a “Ponzi scheme.”
He said in 2020 that cuts to those entitlements would eventually be on the table, but he has promised this year that he would make no cuts to them or Medicare and no changes to the retirement age.
Trump capped the state and local tax deduction (SALT) at $10,000 per tax return during his administration, which will expire at the end of next year.
The deduction cap isn’t particularly popular in high-tax blue states, many of which contain congressional districts that could decide which party controls the House in 2025.
“I will turn [New York] around, get SALT back, lower your taxes, and so much more,” Trump wrote in a Sept. 17 Truth Social post.
—Jacob Burg
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