Election Day is less than a week away. Only four days remain until, whether we like it or not, the United States will have a new president. Thanks to mail-in ballots, drop boxes, and early voting locations, more than 50 million people have already voted; millions more have made up their minds on what candidate they prefer, and are unlikely to be swayed at this late hour. But for others, the question of how to think about voting for president isn’t so simple. For people on the political left who are considering voting for Kamala Harris, there are two major questions: Is the vice president’s policy agenda sufficiently progressive to earn their support? And if not, is the prospect of another Trump term so threatening that her shortcomings can be overlooked? 

While we can’t make political endorsements as a nonprofit magazine (donations are tax-deductible, by the way), what we can do is offer a detailed analysis of all Harris’s policy positions, as listed on her official website. There are actually quite a lot of them: 54 separate policies by our count, laid out in 19 sections, plus a handful of scary-looking red tabs comparing Harris’s agenda to the Republican “Project 2025.” They’re a mixed bag, with some genuinely good ideas, some awful ones, and a lot that falls somewhere in between. Here’s our full breakdown.

The Good Stuff

First, credit where it’s due: some of the items on the vice president’s agenda would legitimately change people’s lives for the better. Many of these are ideas Harris has borrowed from the progressive and socialist wing of the Democratic Party—policies aimed at cutting down the extreme economic inequality in this country, expanding the welfare state, and getting people’s basic material needs met. Others are just standard-issue social liberalism, the kind of thing that should go without saying, but is actually badly needed as the Republican Party embraces its worst authoritarian instincts. For instance…

THE ECONOMY 

• 1: “Rolling back” the Trump tax cuts for the wealthy.  This is clearly necessary. For all that he pretends to be a pro-worker populist, Trump’s tax policy was skewed massively to benefit his rich buddies. Thanks to him, the top 1 percent of earners now get an average of $60,000 in tax breaks, while the bottom 60 percent get less than $500. (Read that last sentence in Bernie Sanders’s voice: puh-cent.)
   
  When you don’t tax the rich, there are consequences for everyone. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the Trump tax cuts will cost the government $1.9 trillion over ten years, and we’re now in Year Eight. That money should be going to useful things like Medicare, Social Security, and public schools, not Jeff Bezos’ next superyacht. 

• 2: Giving tax breaks to “working and middle-class Americans” instead. This is essentially the opposite of what Trump did. Harris says she’s “committed to ensuring no one earning less than $400,000 a year will pay more in taxes,” and she wants to expand the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). This was one of the main economic gains for working people under the Biden administration, which roughly tripled the tax credit people without children could get to $1,500 in 2021. A Columbia study concluded that this change had significant “antipoverty effects,” cutting the poverty rate for childless adults by 3.3 percent. So if Harris enacts something similar as president, the working class could benefit again.   
• 3: Expanding the child tax credit to $6,000. This is one of the best things a Harris administration could do to help economically struggling families. Like with the EITC, we saw what was accomplished when the Biden administration increased the child tax credit in 2021, from $2,000 a year to $3,000 (or $3,600 for each child under six) as part of the American Rescue Plan. Child poverty dropped by more than half, the fastest decrease in recorded history. And when that increase expired, the poverty rate shot right back up to where it was before. If an increase of just $1,000 had such a substantial effect, then an increase to $6,000 per year would likely be even greater. And because this is a policy that relates to taxation, it can be passed via a simple majority through the budget process, so it’s one of her more feasible goals.
  
  
• 4: Enacting a “billionaire minimum tax.” The details are a little thin here. In her economic policy booklet, Harris decries the fact that billionaires pay an income tax of “about 8 percent” on average, which implies she wants them to pay more than that. But she doesn’t say what the actual “minimum” rate should be. Still, experiments at the state level show that a tax like this could be a major success. When Massachusetts enacted a 4 percent “millionaire’s tax,” it yielded roughly $1.5 billion in extra revenue, and the state was able to fund free school lunches, road projects, free community college, and all kinds of other public services. In Harris’s case, she’s indicated she would use the proceeds from taxing billionaires to “strengthen Social Security and Medicare for the long haul,” which would be good. Basically, any policy that redistributes the ill-gotten wealth of American oligarchs is okay in our book—and if nothing else this would annoy Elon Musk, which is always worth doing.
• 5: Cracking down on grocery price gouging. We have an entire article in Current Affairs about why this would be a good idea, despite the scolding from many economists who still claim that price gouging is a myth in the face of overwhelming evidence otherwise. At the time of publication, Harris’s proposal was vague—promising to go after “excessive profits,” with no definition of what that meant. A more recent policy paper released by her campaign didn’t do much to clarify how the program will work, saying it will go after companies who “exploit crises” to raise prices. Harris gives a few examples of state laws that have cracked down on ridiculous price increases (like a store in Texas jacking up the price for cases of water to $99 during Hurricane Harvey), but there’s still little specificity on what exactly the administration will consider “price gouging” vs. acceptable levels of profit. This is a good policy in principle, but it needs more detail.
• 6: Punishing large companies that intentionally drive up home prices. Specifically, Harris says that her administration would “penalize firms that hoard available homes” in order to reap greater profits. This has been happening more and more in recent years, as Wall Street investment groups like Blackstone and FirstKey Homes buy up entire neighborhoods, making it impossible for ordinary people to win bidding wars against them. In her policy booklet, Harris points out that large corporate property-owners are more likely to file for eviction, and that they disproportionately target “communities of color” and low-income neighborhoods. Clearly, cracking down on that behavior is an urgent necessity. Harris’s solution is to pass the Stop Predatory Investing Act, introduced last year by Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH), which would strip tax benefits from any entity “owning 50 or more single-family properties.” Arguably, that doesn’t go far enough—there are other legislative proposals, like Senator Jeff Merkley’s “End Hedge Fund Control of American Homes Act,” that would ban certain kinds of corporate home ownership altogether. But this is at least a move in the right direction. 

LABOR

• 7: Signing the PRO Act and other pro-union legislation. This would unquestionably be good if it actually happened. The PRO Act contains several important provisions that would protect organized labor. Among other things, it would make it harder for employers to interfere in union elections and increase the punishments for union busting; it would prevent bosses from misclassifying their employees as independent contractors; and it would repeal so-called “right to work” laws in the 26 states that have them. However, we should be wary of anyone promising to pass the PRO Act without also supporting nuking the filibuster, as it has essentially zero chance of getting the required 60 votes to pass. Biden also said he supported the PRO Act, but that support was meaningless because there was no chance of it ever passing. Harris has said she’d support getting rid of the filibuster to codify abortion rights, but so far she hasn’t clarified whether she’d do so for something like the PRO Act as well.

• 8: Abolishing the sub-minimum wage for tipped workers and people with disabilities. We have an entire article at Current Affairs on why getting rid of the tipped minimum wage is a good idea, and Tommy Carden has written another focusing on the exploitation of disabled workers under the current system. The changes Harris is proposing are long, long overdue.
• 9: No tax on tips for service workers. As we wrote in an August edition of the Current Affairs News Briefing, this is potentially a good idea, but it should not be substituted for a general increase to the minimum wage. There is a reason that Donald Trump and the National Restaurant Association support this policy—it looks pro-worker without actually requiring businesses to pay their workers more, and could potentially defuse efforts to achieve more substantive gains like increases to the minimum wage. As Judd Legum pointed out for Popular Information, the amount that most tipped workers make is low enough that the benefits from this policy would be negligible. Meanwhile, it does nothing for low-wage hourly employees—like dishwashers and cooks—who don’t get tips in the first place.
• 10: Funding trade schools and apprenticeship programs. A useful rule of thumb is that, if the opinion writers at the Wall Street Journal think something is bad, it’s probably good. That’s the case here, as the WSJ complains that Harris’s proposal is a “giveaway to unions,” who typically organize or oversee the kind of apprenticeships that would be funded. But unions are, in fact, good things, and so is devoting federal money to training people for high-paying union jobs. 
• 11: Requiring “paid family and medical leave.” This is obviously a good thing and it’s totally unacceptable that it’s not guaranteed already. The U.S. is one of only 11 countries on the entire planet that does not already mandate paid sick leave, and while some states have mandated it, most have not. More than 30 million workers—most of them in the lowest income brackets—have no paid sick days at all. Paid family leave is even worse—the U.S. is one of only six countries without any national guarantee of maternity or paternity leave, and only 27 percent of civilian employees received it through their jobs as of last year.

HEALTHCARE

• 12. Restoring and protecting reproductive rights. This is Harris’s single strongest issue, and the Associated Press reports that it’s the most important issue for women under 30 this election cycle. Ever since the unelected and transparently corrupt Supreme Court decided to strip the right to an abortion from millions of women with the Dobbs v. Jackson decision, there’s been an immense backlash across the country. Pro-abortion ballot measures have passed in every state where they’ve appeared, including Republican strongholds like Kansas and Ohio. Polls show that 63 percent of Americans—including 41 percent of Republicans!—think abortion should be legal in “all or most cases.” 
  
  Joe Biden was actually pretty bad on reproductive rights, saying in 2023 that as a “practicing Catholic” he was “not big on abortion.” It was a weakness for him, one of many. By contrast, Harris has taken a stronger stance, promising to pass a law guaranteeing the right to an abortion nationwide and saying at a recent rally that “my first priority is to put back in place those protections and to stop this pain.” That’s smart in terms of winning the election, and it’s also good policy.
  
  There’s just one problem: Harris has been campaigning with Liz Cheney, who—besides being an unrepentant warmonger—is also an opponent of reproductive freedom, with a 93 percent rating from the National Right to Life Committee. With that in mind, you have to wonder how strong Harris’s commitment to “stop this pain” really is, and how much is just convenient rhetoric for the moment. Principled defenders of a woman’s right to choose do not cozy up to Republicans who want to take it away. 
  
  
• 13. Cracking down on Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs) If abortion is the most talked-about healthcare issue of the election, this might be the least discussed—but it’s actually incredibly important. 
  
  What is a “Pharmacy Benefit Manager,” you might ask? Well, for a full explanation you should really read this excellent article at Unfucking the Republic. But in essence, PBMs are middlemen in the United States’ ridiculous for-profit healthcare system. They negotiate the price of prescription drugs between insurance companies and the pharmacies who actually provide the medication, serving as a kind of go-between. But they also skim money off the top for themselves, charging insurers a higher price for a particular drug than what they pay to pharmacies and pocketing the difference. It’s called “spread pricing,” and it often means that pharmacies end up selling medications at a loss and eventually go out of business. Alabama, for instance, has already lost 300 of its 800 independent pharmacies to the PBMs and their sketchy business model, with more bankruptcies expected to follow. Over time, this can create “pharmacy deserts” where it’s impossible to buy prescription medicine at all, similar to “food deserts.”
  
  Again, Harris is a little sketchy on details. She says only that she’ll get tough on “abusive practices by pharmaceutical middlemen who squeeze small pharmacies’ profits and raise costs for consumers.” Ideally this would mean a national ban on “spread pricing,” similar to the bans already enacted in some states—but anything that curtails the PBMs would be a welcome step. 
• 14. Extending Medicaid postpartum coverage from 2 months to 12. The fact that many new mothers—4 in 10 according to the Kaiser Family Foundation—receive temporary funding through the Medicaid system is an under-discussed aspect of the program. Following the 2021 American Rescue Plan, most states expanded Medicaid to allow mothers to receive funding for a full year after giving birth, but some have still not adopted the policy. It would be good to make it a federal standard.

DEMOCRACY and CIVIL RIGHTS

• 15. No immunity for crimes committed by former presidents. Do we really need to explain this one? Presidents should not be allowed to commit crimes. This policy was clearly created in response to the Supreme Court’s ludicrous decision to give Donald Trump immunity for “official acts,” but the same standard should apply to all presidents, as they’re a notoriously criminal lot.
• 16. Passing the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. This was one of two voting rights bills killed by Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema in early 2022. Its most important provision updates the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to require pre-clearance when states enact voting legislation that has historically been used for discriminatory purposes—like voter-I.D. requirements, polling place closures, and voter role purges. Pre-clearance is an aspect of the original VRA, but was gutted by the Supreme Court in 2013’s Shelby County v. Holder decision. Numerous voter suppression laws have been able to pass unabated as a result.
• 17. Passing the Freedom to Vote Act. This is an even more ambitious voting rights bill than the John Lewis Act, and it also ran into the Manchin-Sinema buzz saw. This bill would require all 50 states to allow no-excuse mail-in voting and two weeks of early voting. It would enact automatic voter registration around the country and require states to notify people when they are purged from voter rolls. But it would also introduce massive changes to the way elections are administered. It would eliminate partisan gerrymandering by creating uniform rules for redrawing districts. And perhaps most significantly, it would crack down on corporate dark money, requiring anyone who spends $10,000 to influence an election to disclose its donors. While it could probably go further (for instance, requiring public financing of elections as other nations do to curb the influence of the wealthy), these are all very good reforms.

• 18. Passing the Equality Act to protect LGBTQ rights. This legislation has been around for a while in various forms, and it almost passed in both 2019 and 2021, only to be blocked at the last minute by Republicans in the Senate. Essentially, it would add gender and sexuality to the types of identity protected by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, making things like workplace and housing discrimination illegal in all 50 states. That’s really the bare minimum anyone could possibly expect.
• 19. Increasing funding for Offices of Civil Rights across the federal government by $2 billion. Of course, any of these anti-discrimination laws are only as good as their ability to be enforced, so expanding funding for these agencies is important.

GUNS

Unless you've somehow avoided seeing any news since 1999, you know the United States is suffering from an epidemic of mass shootings. There have been more than 385 of them this year, with an estimated 11,600 deaths from gun violence of all kinds. There are a variety of reasons for this, from mental health to a capitalist society that makes people paranoid, angry, and alienated from each other. But a big part of the problem is just how easy it is to buy a gun capable of mowing down your fellow citizens by the dozen. Harris has a few good ideas for alleviating this crisis, including: 

• 20. Universal background checks and “red flag” laws. This is just a no-brainer. Before you buy a deadly weapon, someone should look up your name and see if you’ve been arrested for domestic abuse or making terroristic threats, or if you have a mental condition that makes you lash out unpredictably. If any of those “red flags” apply, they shouldn’t sell you the gun. It’s absurd that this isn’t already standard practice, and 89 percent of gun owners support universal background checks.  
• 21. Banning assault rifles and high-capacity magazines. Here, Harris has clarified that she doesn’t support mandatory buybacks of existing guns, only preventing any more assault weapons from being sold. This would essentially be the same as the ban that was in place from 1994 to 2004, and it would prevent at least some mass shootings, roughly 77 percent of which are carried out with guns purchased legally. At the risk of pointing out the obvious, less mass murder would be nice.   
  
  

VETERANS

• 22. Funding mental health and suicide prevention programs. The Harris website provides little detail about what this would entail. The Democratic Party platform goes into more detail, mentioning “expanding mental health screenings, increasing access to legal and financial support, and hiring more mental health professionals at the VA.” One would hope this would mean an increase in funding to the VA, which has run into a budget shortfall as the result of its spending on private healthcare. But given that this privatization of veterans’ care expanded under Biden rather than reduced, it’s hard to be optimistic.
• 23. Eliminating veterans’ homelessness. Obviously, this would be a good thing to do, though Harris provides no clear explanation for how she intends to do it. It’s possible it’s meant to be accomplished using the other housing policies she lists. But if that’s the case, why only veterans? Why not try to end all homelessness?
• 24. Helping veterans get jobs. Again, it’s a little odd to focus on veterans specifically, since presumably the task of any president is to ensure everyone has a job that supports them. Also, Harris previously supported a federal jobs guarantee for all Americans, but has since backed off. Still, this is basically a good idea. 

You may notice that none of Harris’s ideas about immigration, climate, or foreign policy appear in the “good” tier. There is a reason for this, which we’ll get into a little later. 

Compromises, Half-Measures, and Vagueness

A second group of policies exist somewhere in the middle ground. Some attempt to address an important problem in American life, but either take the wrong approach or fall short of doing enough to make a meaningful impact. Others started out as good ideas, but somewhere along the way they’ve been compromised or watered down. And others are just incredibly vague, to the point they’re more “general nice thoughts” than “policies” as such. (The word “policy” tends to imply that you’ll say specifically what should be done, and when, and how.) 

THE ECONOMY

• 25. Raising the minimum wage to $15. For a long time, Harris was evasive about her wage policy, saying that she wanted to raise the federal minimum, but not by how much. (In fact, the dollar amount still isn’t stated on her website.) But during a recent NBC interview, she specified “at least $15 an hour” as her target. This would have been a great policy back in 2012, when the Fight for $15 movement first got started. But after more than a decade of inflation and rent increases, $15 an hour isn’t really a living wage any more. According to economists at MIT, the number you need is now slightly over $25, and most serious labor activists are making demands of at least $20. 
  
  To be clear, Harris’s position is better than Donald Trump’s. He dodged a question about raising the minimum wage during his recent McDonald’s appearance, and likely wouldn’t do it. It’s also better than the criminally low $7.25 an hour that we currently have. Still, this is a very literal case of “too little, too late.” 
  
  
• 26. A capital gains tax of 28 percent. This would be an increase from the current rate of 20 percent (or 23.8, for some particularly high incomes) and it would provide some much-needed revenue. However, it’s a major step back from President Biden’s plan, which would have taxed capital gains at almost 40 percent. As Kevin T. Dugan writes for New York Magazine, 28 percent is the same rate Ronald Reagan set in 1986, and the decision “signals that easing income inequality, at least as it is reinforced through the tax code, will not be one of [Harris’s] priorities.” In other words, it’s a sellout.
• 27. Quadrupling taxes on stock buybacks. We’d prefer to see the practice banned outright, since there’s no legitimate reason to allow buybacks. In fact, they were illegal until 1982, and several Democratic lawmakers introduced a bill to criminalize them again last year. They’re essentially a form of price manipulation, in which companies “buy back” their own shares in order to reduce the number available on the open market, driving up the price of each individual share by making them scarcer. That’s a massive waste of money that should be going into workers’ paychecks.
• 28. Supporting “American innovation” in new tech fields, including semiconductor manufacturing, AI, and clean energy. This is basically fine on its own, but Harris frames it in terms of global “leadership” in a competition against China, which is a little dicier. (More on that later.) 

• 29. Making sure parents can “afford high-quality child care and preschool for their children.” Educating your child should be a fundamental human right, not a product you “afford.” Reducing costs or providing some form of credit to cover them is better than nothing sure, but that doesn’t mean it’s good enough.
• 30. Working to end the “unreasonable burden of student debt.” This is a good idea in principle. Nobody should have any student debt, because again, education is a human right and not a consumer product. There’s also evidence that student debt is holding the entire U.S. economy back, since people who have too much of it can’t buy homes or start families. But in practice, the Biden-Harris administration’s attempts to deal with student debt have been weak stuff. They started by promising to cancel an arbitrary $10,000 from people’s balances, rather than the full amount; then, when Republicans made the predictable appeal to the Supreme Court and got the plan struck down, they didn’t seem to have much of a Plan B. Biden also promised to cancel all debt from Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and then just didn’t do it. Unless Harris unveils a bold new plan in the next few days, expect more of the same impotent flailing.

HOUSING

• 31. Building 3 million “affordable” homes and rental units. This certainly sounds good, since the more housing people there is for low-income people, the better. But Harris’s proposal is pretty vague, and the few details it gives aren’t promising. On her policy website, she claims to have a “comprehensive plan to build three million more rental units,” which seems to imply that the government might do the building directly. But in a campaign email from August, she says that her plan is merely “calling for” the construction of the units, and that there would be a “tax incentive for building starter homes,” along with an “innovation fund” to support designing and building affordable housing. Actually building 3 million homes and providing them to people at cheap prices—or better yet, free—would be a good policy. Just offering a giveaway to private developers in the hopes that they might build affordable homes is not.
• 32. Cutting “red tape” to build more housing faster. This embraces the libertarian idea that too much regulation is the problem driving the housing crisis, rather than the greed of landlords and other property-owners who keep raising their rents and prices. It’s not very clear what Harris means by “red tape.” It could mean things like loosening restrictions on prefabricated or “manufactured” houses, which the Biden-Harris administration has been talking about recently. That would be harmless enough. But Harris also mentions wanting to “streamline” environmental regulations and “increase the number of projects that qualify for the simplest form of environmental review,” which could lead to more pollution. “Red tape” could also include safety codes. In the past, disasters like the Surfside Tower collapse in Florida or the Grenfell Tower fire in London have shown what happens when too much “red tape” is removed and builders are allowed to cut corners, so the emphasis on deregulation here is worrying.
• 33. Banning “new forms” of price fixing by landlords. This is a better policy than the last one, because it accurately identifies landlords and their rent-seeking behavior as the problem. In her economic policy booklet, Harris clarifies that she’s targeting price-fixing algorithms like RealPage, which corporate landlords have reportedly used to hike rents across the country, leading to a Department of Justice antitrust lawsuit. That kind of software should, indeed, be illegal—but why stop there? We should also ban all the old forms of price-fixing and collusion among landlords that don’t involve algorithms, and set sensible limits on the amount rent can be increased anywhere in the country. To use an international example, Mexico City just passed a law limiting rent increases to the rate of inflation. That would be worth doing north of the border, too—but don’t expect it from Harris. 

HEALTHCARE

• 34. Making healthcare “affordable” by “strengthening the Affordable Care Act.” This is no substitute for Medicare for All, which Harris used to support. Interestingly, Harris’s website says she wants to make healthcare “a right, not a privilege.” But if you have to pay out of pocket for healthcare, it is by definition not a right. 
  
  At any rate, the Harris campaign doesn’t get into specifics about how precisely they will “strengthen” the ACA. However, Biden’s first term can give us some hints: In 2021, they expanded the health insurance premium tax credit, which saved money for millions of families who buy insurance through ACA exchanges. (This expansion is set to expire in 2025.) The administration also proposed a rule requiring insurers to provide free coverage for the purchase of over the counter contraceptives.
• 35. Providing “tax credit enhancements for Affordable Care Act marketplace plans” to lower people’s healthcare premiums by “an average of $800” yearly. This is technically something, and there’s an existing tax credit with an average of $700 that’s been helpful for some people. But considering how ludicrously expensive American healthcare is overall—a single MRI can cost as much as $2,850, and ambulance rides are around $2125 on average—$800 really isn’t much in the broader scheme of things. Because this benefit comes in the form of a tax credit, it would also require filling out paperwork to apply, which is a needless barrier. And there doesn’t seem to be a plan to prevent premiums from increasing in the first place, which is the root of the whole problem. 
• 36. Capping the price of insulin at $35. Again, the real solution would be a single-payer healthcare system where drugs like insulin are free at the point of service. That said, U.S. companies charge about $99 on average for insulin (ten times as much as in comparable nations), so a $35 cap would be a dramatic improvement over the status quo. Still, Americans would be paying way more for the same drug than those in other nations. Besides, if the price of insulin can be capped, why not do so for other life-saving drugs?
• 37. Expanding the government’s ability to negotiate drug costs. The Biden administration has already had success doing this for ten commonly prescribed medications, so this would really just be more of the same. Anything that brings down the absurd cost of drugs is worth doing, but as we say, these should not be for-profit products in the first place.
• 38. Expanding “affordable, high-quality home care services for seniors and people with disabilities.” This sounds good in theory, but there’s very little detail about the plan, and that sneaky word “affordable” is in there again, reminding everyone that the “services” would still come at a cost.
• 39. “Ensuring that care workers are paid a living wage.” Again, sounds good, but we’d like a little more detail—how would this be enforced, exactly? What does the Harris campaign consider a “living” wage? (Is it $15, as the minimum-wage policy suggests?) And why is this a separate policy from just making sure everyone gets paid well for their work? 

DEMOCRACY and CIVIL RIGHTS

• 40. Reforming the Supreme Court. It's never been more obvious that America’s highest court is a totally rogue and illegitimate institution. Harris proposes a few modest guardrails for it: first, an enforceable ethics code similar to what other federal judges have to follow, which would hopefully curtail justices’ open acceptance of bribes from billionaire influence peddlers. She also proposes term limits for the justices, which would eliminate the randomness that comes with lifetime appointments. We should not have a system where the reproductive rights of hundreds of millions of people hinge on the death of a single 87-year-old woman (who could have retired, allowing President Obama to choose her replacement). However, Harris could go a lot further. Congress could legally pack the Supreme Court to counteract its illegitimately attained conservative majority (Harris used to support this!). While we’re at it, why not support abolishing judicial review altogether, or have elected judges? The idea that nine robed elders get to wield veto power over the public will is totally antithetical to democracy.
• 41. An “earned pathway to citizenship” for undocumented immigrants. This is a lot better than the Trump plan to deport 15 to 20 million people. But just about anything would be. Harris has provided little clarity as to what it would mean to “earn” citizenship. However, the language is vaguely reminiscent of the Obama proposal for DREAMers to become eligible for citizenship “by going to college or serving honorably in the Armed Forces for at least two years,” which felt like a stealthy way to prioritize wealthier immigrants while also juicing military recruitment. This is not necessary. Simply living here should entitle you to some say in how the country is run, and to benefit from the government programs your tax money funds. (Citizenship is, generally, a strange and hierarchical concept—see Laura Robson’s 2021 article “Citizenship is a Scam.”)

The Garbage

Finally, some of Harris’s political positions just plain stink. 

BAD DOMESTIC POLICY

• 42. “Tackling the climate crisis” while maintaining or increasing fossil fuel use. Here, Harris is trying to have it both ways. She promises to build a “thriving clean energy economy,” but also to secure American “energy security and independence with record energy production.” At her campaign events, she’s been clear on what she means by that, boasting about “the largest increase in domestic oil production in history” under the Biden administration. She has also indicated that she won’t try to ban fracking if elected, despite the fact that it’s one of the dirtiest forms of fossil fuel extraction. Essentially, she’s trying to make some token gestures toward the environment without addressing the most fundamental issue here: to stave off catastrophe, we need to stop burning carbon as soon as possible, not make more of it. As natural disasters keep getting worse as a direct result of climate change, and as scientists’ warnings get increasingly desperate, Harris’s stance is completely incoherent. It’s like saying you don’t want to get lung cancer, but you’re going to keep chain-smoking as many cigarettes as possible. 

Harris’s economic agenda also has a variety of policies designed to promote “entrepreneurship” and “small business,” including:

• 43. Giving more federal contracts to small businesses (and specifically minority-owned ones)
• 44. Directing venture capital to “talent in rural areas”
• 45. Increasing tax deductions for startups to $50,000
• 46. Encouraging 25 million new business applications during Harris’s first term in office

These are all pretty technocratic and boring, and they all have the same misconception at their core. The idea is that small business owners are “the engines of our economy,” as Harris puts it, and should be given monetary benefits to encourage them to create startups and other business ventures. It’s yet another version of bootstrap ideology—the idea that American capitalism is full of opportunity, and anyone can be successful if they just try hard enough—mixed with trickle-down economics, the idea that everyone eventually benefits when business owners do. But those things aren’t true at all, as decades of “Reaganomics” should have taught us. Only 6.7 percent of Americans own a business of any size, so “business-friendly” policies are by definition only going to benefit a tiny minority. The vast majority of people are workers, not “entrepreneurs,” and they’re the true “engines of the economy.” So it doesn’t particularly matter whether a business is “large” or “small”; what matters for ordinary people is the wage it pays, and how much control the workers have over their workplace. Harris’s whole framework here is just fundamentally wrong-headed. 

• 47. The “Opportunity Agenda for Black Men.” Where to start?This was a late addition to Harris’s platform, made after polls showed that she wasn’t doing as well as expected with this particular demographic. Like most things cobbled together out of desperation at the last minute, it’s not very good. But don’t take our word for it. At Hammer and Hope, writer Braxton Brewington—who’s a Black man himself—sums up why he finds the program insulting: 

Harris pledges to invest in “mentorship and leadership development” programs like Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper, reinforcing a long and troubling history of singling out Black men for their supposed cultural shortcomings. Noticeably, no proposals for other demographics — Harris’s agenda for women or rural Americans, for example — calls for federal investment in their social skills. This paternalistic and condescending logic misleadingly implies that if Black boys and men simply had mentors, role models, and connections to established leaders in their communities, they could succeed — and avoid getting shot by police or spending a night in jail. They could integrate into the American upper class by being more upstanding, somehow assuaging what’s held them back: their Blackness. 

Along with the general tone of condescension, the “Opportunity Agenda” repeats most of Harris’s rhetoric about “entrepreneurship,” which is unhelpful for all the reasons we’ve just considered. (As Brewington succinctly puts it, people “need results, not opportunities.”) It also emphasizes cryptocurrency, despite the fact that Black investors lost disproportionately more the last time Bitcoin crashed. The plan isn’t entirely bad; Harris’s proposal to launch a “National Health Equity Initiative” for research on sickle-cell disease and other maladies that disproportionately affect Black people would be worthwhile. It’s just mostly bad. 

• 48. More funding for the cops! ENDLESS COPS! In the pages of her Black Man Bitcoin Agenda, Harris promises to pass “common sense police reforms,” including banning choke holds and no-knock warrants via the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. That would be good, assuming it actually happens; Joe Biden promised the same thing, and failed to deliver. But on her main policy page, Harris sings a different tune, touting her tough-on-crime credentials as a California prosecutor, bragging about how the Biden administration spent “$15 billion [on] supporting local law enforcement and community safety programs across 1,000 cities, towns, and counties,” and pledging to “continue to invest in funding law enforcement, including the hiring and training of officers.” The Democratic Party platform this year explicitly says that “we need to fund the police, not defund the police.” But that’s completely wrong.
  
  In the first place, almost no police departments were ever actually defunded after George Floyd’s murder. In fact, police budgets increased in 91 of 109 cities examined in a 2022 study. Police killings have also increased, with 1,109 so far in 2024. That number is on track to exceed 2023 (which had 1,353 police killings,) which exceeded 2022 (1,266 killings), which exceeded 2021 (1,186 killings), and so on. Police violence literally gets worse every single year, even though crime is down. Clearly, the approach of putting more and more cops on the streets is not working, exactly as abolitionists have always warned. We should be reducing the number of cops instead, which would also free up funds for community resources that actually help people and keep them safe. 

•  49. Passing the “bipartisan border bill” to stop fentanyl from coming across the border. We’ve written before about why the Democratic Party’s rightward turn on immigration is a disaster, and this is just the latest example. Harris and her team have completely surrendered to Donald Trump’s framing of the immigration issue, accepting the idea that the U.S.-Mexico border needs to be strictly policed. They’re also telling a lie, saying that we need “more detection technology” and “1,500 [additional] border security agents” to “intercept fentanyl and other drugs.” In reality, undocumented immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers are generally not the ones smuggling fentanyl at all; as a recent NPR report showed, most of it comes via courier through legal ports of entry. In addition, it’s well-documented that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than U.S. citizens. Harris is slandering people as drug-smugglers when they aren’t, and using the lie as an excuse to further police and brutalize them. It’s a complete disgrace. 
•  50. Removing medical debt from credit reports (but not getting rid of the debt itself). Obviously, medical debt is a huge burden for millions of Americans—by one estimate, roughly 79 million people are currently struggling with it in one way or another. But while removing it from people’s credit reports might be some help, it doesn’t do anything to address the debt itself, only the knock-on effects. Senator Bernie Sanders introduced an actual good plan in Congress this year, proposing to eliminate all medical debt through a grant program from the Department of Health and Human Services. By contrast, Harris’s plan doesn’t come close to being enough. (And remember, we can’t say it enough: with Medicare for All, there’d be no medical debt because care would be free at the point of service!)
•  51. Providing a $25,000 subsidy for new homebuyers. This one sounds good in theory, but as Matt Bruenig explained earlier this year for Jacobin: 

This is a bad idea. It is unfair to people who, even with the subsidy, cannot afford to buy a home and those who prefer to rent. Because it is a demand subsidy without any corresponding price controls, some of the money will also just get captured as higher home prices, negating the affordability goals of the policy.

WORSE FOREIGN POLICY

• 52. Remaining allies with Israel and continuing to give it military aid. Harris resorts to the usual pablum about ensuring that “Israel has the ability to defend itself.” In practice, this has meant virtually unrestricted, unconditional military aid even as Benjamin Netanyahu flagrantly crosses every red line the Biden administration sets. Harris has not made any suggestion that she will break from Biden’s policy of backing Israel to the hilt, even as its government moves forward with what is clearly a project to ethnically cleanse and resettle the Gaza Strip by inflicting mass death and starvation. 
• 53. Achieving a “ceasefire” to “end the suffering in Gaza.” These promises are completely meaningless if Harris is fully committed to the previous one. The Israeli government has made it abundantly clear that it does not want a ceasefire, and as long as weapons continue to flow, they have no incentive to agree to one. And it should go without saying, that if you want to “end the suffering in Gaza,” you should not provide the weapons that are causing the suffering in Gaza. Even stopping the flow of weapons would not truly “end the suffering,” since so many Palestinians are already starving, orphaned, disabled, or dealing with infectious disease thanks to Israel’s reign of terror. At this point, the only acceptable policy is a full weapons embargo, trials at the International Criminal Court for Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet, and for the U.S. to stop blocking UN recognition of a Palestinian state. 
• 54. “Standing up to dictators” (but only certain ones). Harris says she is “ready to be Commander in Chief on day one,” and she brags about her “national security experience.” If elected, she says she would “stand up for American interests in the face of Chinese threats,” “help Ukraine defend itself against Vladimir Putin’s brutal aggression,” and take “whatever action is necessary” against “Iran and Iran-backed terrorist groups.” But there are some curious omissions from the list of official “bad” nations. Saudi Arabia, for instance—which has a hereditary monarchy, executed nearly 200 people this year, has modern-day slavery, murders journalists, and exports Wahhabist extremism across the Middle East—is nowhere to be found on Harris’s list, and would presumably continue to be a valued U.S. ally. That shows you how (un)serious she and the Democratic Party are about human rights, and how their foreign policy is really just amoral power-seeking. 

What’s Left Out

With any politician, it’s just as important to pay attention to what doesn’t get said as what does. In Harris’s case, there are a lot of glaring omissions in her platform and her speeches from the campaign trail—issues that are hugely important, but which she barely addresses or doesn’t touch at all. 

• There’s nothing in Harris’s platform about prison reform, even though conditions in U.S. prisons—from healthcare, to extreme heat, to violent abuse from the guards—are often atrocious. The issue just isn’t mentioned, and given Harris’s track record of promoting mass incarceration in California, that isn’t likely to change. 
• Similarly, any opposition to the death penalty has been “quietly dropped” from the Democratic Party platform, even as state governments execute prisoners like Marcellus Williams who are likely innocent and pioneer gruesome new methods of killing. This is a complete moral failure.
• Harris has condemned the recent trend of book bans in schools and libraries, calling the right-wing activists behind them “extremists” who “attack the freedom to learn.” True enough—but she doesn’t actually have a policy to stop the bans from happening. The correct move would be a national version of California’s law prohibiting this kind of censorship, and maybe that’s coming if Harris gets into office, but protecting people’s First Amendment right to read whatever books they like clearly isn’t a priority for her. 
• There’s also nothing in Harris’s platform about animal rights or the nightmare of factory farming. These are not only huge ethical issues, but practical ones too, as scientists warn that factory farms are a vector for the spread of pandemics that could threaten the whole country. Kind of an important thing to just ignore!
• Speaking of pandemics, Harris doesn’t have a policy on COVID, even though she caught it herself in 2022. She seems intent on continuing Joe Biden’s strategy of pretending the virus isn’t a threat any more, even though that obviously isn’t true.
• There’s also nothing about cracking down on child labor, which has been making a disturbing comeback across the country as state governments roll back laws against it.
• Harris doesn’t have a policy about homelessness, other than ending it for veterans specifically. This is important, because the Supreme Court (yes, them again) recently made the disastrous Grants Pass ruling that empowered local governments to ban sleeping outside if they feel like it, leading to a wave of violent police “sweeps” against the homeless in places like Harris’s home city of San Francisco. Does Harris support these “sweeps”? Would she do anything to prevent homeless people dying in extreme heat incidents? We don’t know, and as far as we can tell, no reporter has bothered to ask her. 
• Finally, her policy platform has nothing to say about nuclear weapons, which might actually kill us all if we don’t reduce the amount of them in the world—especially as the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East continue to escalate. So, you know, that’s probably bad. 

Closing Thoughts

In the course of this rundown, you might have noticed a pattern: most of the “good” policies are fairly small and limited in impact, while the “bad” policies are huge. With one hand, the Harris campaign offers a tax credit or a regulatory change that might benefit certain kinds of people, if they’re in the right circumstances. With the other hand, it promises to support the genocide in Gaza, persecute immigrants only somewhat less than Trump, flood the streets with cops, and pump oil while the climate burns. For many progressives and socialists, the only real argument in favor of the platform is that Trump’s would be worse in all kinds of ways. In that sense, it’s very much a “lesser evil” election. 

There’s also a strong possibility that, if Harris actually gets elected, some or all of her nice-sounding proposals will be conveniently forgotten. That tends to happen with U.S. presidents—most recently with Joe Biden himself, who according to Politifact has followed through on a whopping 28 percent of his campaign promises. If Harris becomes president and fails to deliver any real change, it will only worsen the frustration and suffering that feeds into far-right demagoguery like Trump’s in the first place. You may find it useful to vote for Harris in order to stave off Trump on Tuesday; you may also find that her worst policies cross moral red lines that make a vote in her favor impossible. There’s a case for either position. But no matter which way you fill out your ballot, it’s clear that the American people need and deserve much, much better than what Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party are currently selling them.