The evolution of Kamala Harris’ stances on single-payer health care, fracking and the Supreme Court

When then-Sen. Kamala Harris was running for the 2020 Democratic nomination for president with one of the most liberal voting records in the Senate, hers was a long-shot candidacy.

But now, less than five years later, as the Democratic presidential nominee, Harris is moderating some of her more controversial policy positions. 

With barely 80 days to go until Election Day, Harris is likely to need independent voters to prevail in a competitive race against former President Donald Trump in the general election this fall. She’s spent 3.5 years in the executive branch examining and reconsidering some of her policy stances, and there have been some shifts. 

“The vice president’s positions have been shaped by three years of effective governance as part of the Biden-Harris administration,” a Harris campaign adviser said. Less than a month into her presidential candidacy, Harris and her advisers are still working on the major positions and policy initiatives she’ll unveil over the course of the campaign.

Trump, who has shifted his own policy stances through the years on issues like abortion, mail-in voting and more, is calling Harris a “chameleon.” 

A month into her sudden presidential campaign, Harris has so far offered little new in the way of policy. But she has shifted her stances on a handful of issues since she first ran for president. A campaign spokesperson described Harris’ approach as “pragmatic,” contrasting her with Trump’s “extreme ideas in his Project 2025 agenda.” 

“It is that approach that made it possible for the Biden-Harris administration to achieve bipartisan breakthroughs on everything from infrastructure to gun violence prevention,” Harris campaign spokesperson Mia Ehrenberg said. “As president, she will take that same pragmatic approach, focusing on common-sense solutions for the sake of progress.”

Single-payer health care and “Medicare for all”

During her 2019 campaign, Harris’ position on the future of private health insurance was sometimes confusing. Joe Biden’s campaign manager at the time, Kate Bedingfield, said of Harris that she had a “long and confusing pattern of equivocating about (her) stance on health care in America.”

During a primary debate in 2019, Harris raised her hand when moderators asked candidates if they would get rid of private health insurance. She quickly walked that back, saying that no, she would not work to eliminate private health insurance. 

Earlier that year, in April 2019, Harris co-sponsored Sen. Bernie Sanders’ “Medicare for All” bill, which would have ended private health insurance and replaced it with a single government-run insurer for everyone in America.

Harris released a health care plan in 2019 that would have put the U.S. on a path to government-backed health insurance over 10 years but would not totally eliminating private health insurance. 

“We will allow private insurers to offer Medicare plans as part of this system that adhere to strict Medicare requirements on costs and benefits,” Harris said at the time. “Medicare will set the rules of the road for these plans, including price and quality, and private insurance companies will play by those rules, not the other way around.”

Harris will not push for single-payer government health insurance as president, according to a campaign official. 

The vice president plans to work on bringing down health care prices by other means, including the administration’s current efforts to have Medicare negotiate with drug manufacturers to bring down the costs of some drugs, the campaign official said. At a recent event in Atlanta, Harris vowed to “take on Big Pharma to cap prescription drug costs for all Americans,” and Mr. Biden and Harris announced Thursday that Medicare reached agreements with drug manufacturers on lower prices for 10 drugs selected for the administration’s initial round of negotiation. The drugs are used to treat heart failure, blood clots, diabetes, arthritis, Crohn’s disease and other illnesses and conditions.

“Our plan will lower costs and save many middle class families thousands of dollars a year,” Harris said. 

Fracking

As a candidate in September 2019, Harris said during a CNN town hall there was “no question I’m in favor of banning fracking.” 

“And starting with what we can do on Day One around public lands, right?” she said at the time. “And then there has to be legislation, but yes — and this is something I’ve taken on in California. I have a history of working on this issue…. We have to just acknowledge that the residual impact of fracking is enormous in terms of the impact on the health and safety of communities.” 

Fracking is short for hydraulic fracturing, the extraction of oil and natural gas from rock formations with drilling and chemicals. 

At a Pennsylvania rally earlier this month, Trump said Harris is “against fracking, she’s against oil drilling” and would ban it.

But the Harris campaign is ambiguous about where she stands now, pointing to her support for clean energy and the growth in energy jobs under the Biden administration. 

“Vice President Harris was proud to cast the tie-breaking vote on the largest ever investment to address the climate crisis and under the Biden-Harris administration, America is more energy secure than ever before with the highest domestic energy production on record,” a campaign spokesperson said. “…Vice President Harris is focused on a future where all Americans have clean air, clean water, and affordable, reliable energy while Trump’s lies are an obvious attempt to distract from his own plans to enrich oil and gas executives at the expense of the middle class.”

The Biden administration has worked to make it more expensive for oil and gas companies to frack on public lands but hasn’t banned fracking on public lands. 

The size of the Supreme Court

When she was running for president, Harris said she was open to pursuing expanding the Supreme Court. During a forum in New Hampshire in May 2019, Harris was asked how she felt about adding more justices to the nine-member court. She said she was “interested in having that conversation.” 

The Harris campaign isn’t elaborating much on where Harris stands now, except that a campaign official said she supports the proposed Supreme Court reforms Mr. Biden announced last month. 

Those reforms entailed imposing term limits for justices, requiring them to comply with binding ethics rules and ratifying a constitutional amendment that would limit presidential immunity. Mr. Biden’s proposed reforms did not include expanding the size of the court. All of those changes would require immense support from Congress.