Vice President Kamala Harris avoided directly addressing her numerous policy changes when ABC News anchor Linsey Davis provided her the opportunity to respond during her Tuesday debate against former President Donald Trump.
Harris and Trump competed in their first and only scheduled presidential debate on ABC News on Tuesday night. Davis asked Harris about the many policy positions she has changed since launching her 2024 presidential campaign, but the vice president used her two minutes to discuss her “values” instead of explaining her shifting stances.
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“Vice President Harris, in your last run for president, you said you wanted to ban fracking. Now you don’t. You wanted mandatory government buyback programs for assault weapons. Now your campaign says you don’t,” Davis said. “You supported decriminalizing border crossings, now you’re taking a harder line. I know you say that your values have not changed. So then, why have so many of your policy positions changed?”
Harris emphasized her “values have not changed” and asserted she would address “at least every point” Davis recounted, but told the moderator she would focus on fracking because of the debate taking place in Pennsylvania.
“I made that very clear in 2020. I will not ban fracking. I have not banned fracking as vice president of the United States. And in fact, I was the tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which opened new leases for fracking,” she said. “My position is that we have got to invest in diverse sources of energy, so we reduce our reliance on foreign oil. We have had the largest increase in domestic oil production in history because of an approach that recognizes that we can not over-rely on foreign oil.”
The vice president then discussed her “middle class” background to explain her “values.”
“‘The values I bring to the importance of home ownership’, knowing not everybody got handed four hundred million dollars on a silver platter and then filed bankruptcy six times is a value that I bring to my work, to say we are going to work with the private sector and home builders to increase three million homes, increase by three million homes by the end of my first term,” Harris said.
“My work that is related to having a friend when I was in high school, who was sexually assaulted by her stepfather. And my focus then on protecting women and children from violent crime is based on a value that is deeply grounded in the importance of standing up for those who are most vulnerable,” she continued. “My work, that is about protecting Social Security and Medicare, is based on long standing work that I have done protecting seniors from scams.
CNN senior data reporter Harry Enten said on Tuesday that there is more room for movement for Harris than Trump after the debate, citing polling numbers that showed Americans still want to learn more about the vice president. The data reporter suggested undecided voters could watch the debate to develop their views of the vice president while they have already drawn their conclusions regarding the former president.
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