Where Kamala Harris and Donald Trump Stand on Abortion

Ms. Harris wants to enshrine the protections of Roe v. Wade in federal law now that the Supreme Court has overturned it.

“When I am president of the United States, I will sign a law restoring and protecting reproductive freedom in every state,” she wrote in July. To do that, she would need not just Democratic majorities in Congress but also 50 senators willing to get rid of the filibuster, which requires 60 votes to pass most legislation. She confirmed in September that she supported eliminating the filibuster to pass an abortion rights bill.

Ms. Harris said last year that she and President Biden envisioned a law mirroring Roe. As modified by Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Roe broadly protected the right to abortion until a fetus could survive outside the womb but allowed bans after that point so long as they had exceptions for medical emergencies. “We’re not trying to do anything that did not exist before June of last year,” she told CBS News.

As a senator, she was a sponsor of a bill called the Women’s Health Protection Act that would have gone somewhat further than Roe by prohibiting some state-level restrictions, such as requiring doctors to perform specific tests or to have hospital admitting privileges in order to provide abortions. She reiterated her support for it in 2022.

She also argued, while running for president in 2019, that states with a history of restricting abortion rights in violation of Roe should be subject to “pre-clearance” for new abortion laws, meaning those laws would have to be federally approved before they could take effect. Her campaign did not respond to a request to confirm whether she would still support this if Congress codified Roe. (Without such codification, the proposal is moot.)

In the absence of congressional majorities capable of codifying Roe, Mr. Biden’s cabinet took administrative actions to try to limit the effects of state abortion bans, and Ms. Harris has indicated support for those actions.

The Department of Health and Human Services told hospitals in 2022 that a law pertaining to emergency rooms, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, obligates doctors to perform an abortion if they believe it is needed to stabilize a patient. (That guidance is subject to legal challenges on which the Supreme Court has so far declined to rule.) In April, the same department announced a rule to shield many abortion patients’ medical records from investigators and prosecutors.

Ms. Harris opposes a federal abortion ban and has said she would veto it if Congress passed one.

Ms. Harris supports access to in vitro fertilization — a fertility treatment that can be threatened by anti-abortion measures that treat embryos as people with legal rights, since it usually involves creating numerous embryos and destroying or indefinitely freezing unused ones.

The matter gained urgency after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled in February that frozen embryos were children, upending I.V.F. in the state. Ms. Harris condemned the ruling. (The Alabama Legislature subsequently passed a law that gave I.V.F. clinics immunity but did not address embryos’ legal status.)

“Individuals, couples who want to start a family are now being deprived of access to what can help them start a family,” she said at an event in Michigan in February.

Ms. Harris supports access to mifepristone, an abortion drug that conservative litigants and Republican legislators have sought to restrict since the overturning of Roe. Nearly two-thirds of all abortions in the United States are medically induced with a regimen that includes mifepristone.

The Biden-Harris administration has defended mifepristone. Its solicitor general successfully urged the Supreme Court to reject a lawsuit that had sought to sharply limit access to the drug. The court unanimously upheld access in June, ruling that the plaintiffs in the suit did not have standing; anti-abortion activists have signaled that they may try again with different plaintiffs.

In an effort to blunt the effects of state abortion bans, the Department of Health and Human Services advised pharmacists that they might violate civil rights laws if they refused to dispense drugs like mifepristone, misoprostol and methotrexate that can be used for abortions but also other medical purposes; Ms. Harris has indicated that she supports this guidance.

The Justice Department also issued a legal opinion that the Postal Service could deliver abortion drugs to states with bans without violating the Comstock Act, an 1873 law that prohibits mailing materials used in abortions. Abortion opponents have expressed interest in enforcing a strict interpretation of that law, which Ms. Harris’s campaign has condemned.

Ms. Harris supported Mr. Biden’s cancellation of the global and domestic “gag rules,” which abortion opponents had used to cut off funding for groups that provide abortion services or referrals. When they were in effect under Mr. Trump, the rules blocked such groups from receiving foreign aid or domestic funding from Title X, a federal grant program that supports family planning for low-income Americans.

Versions of the global rule blocking certain foreign aid, called the Mexico City policy, have been enacted by every Republican president and rescinded by every Democratic one since the 1980s. Mr. Trump enacted the domestic rule for the first time since the Reagan administration.

Ms. Harris also opposes the Hyde Amendment, which bans Medicaid funding for most abortions. Her campaign did not confirm whether its inclusion in budgets would be a deal breaker for her; Mr. Biden also opposes the amendment but has signed budgets that include it rather than force a standoff with congressional Republicans over funding the government.

Ms. Harris has broadly supported the Biden administration’s environmental policies, but her campaign did not respond to a request to confirm her positions on individual regulations that the administration has put in place and that Mr. Trump says he would undo.

Those regulations include new Environmental Protection Agency rules that are designed to encourage electric and hybrid vehicles to account for a majority of newly sold cars by 2032. They are not a mandate, but the E.P.A. used its authority under the Clean Air Act to set limits on emissions that automakers could meet by making more electric vehicles. Ms. Harris’s campaign said in August that she did not support an electric vehicle mandate.

Another Biden rule says coal plants must eliminate about 90 percent of their emissions by 2039 or shut down. A third requires oil and gas producers to fix leaks of methane, a potent greenhouse gas; the administration also announced a fee on methane emissions.

Ms. Harris has not confirmed any additional environmental regulations she would enact. During her first presidential campaign in 2019, she called for a tax on carbon emissions, but she has not said whether she still supports that.

Ms. Harris cast the tiebreaking vote to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, which provided the largest-ever federal investment in climate change mitigation — largely through tax credits that helped manufacturers increase production of electric vehicles as well as wind, solar and other renewable power projects. It also provided rebates to help consumers buy clean-energy products.

She also supported the bipartisan infrastructure bill Mr. Biden signed (which included $7.5 billion for electric-vehicle charging equipment) and the CHIPS and Science Act (which provided $39 billion in incentives to manufacture semiconductors used in electric vehicles, among other applications).

Her campaign has indicated that continuing to implement these laws and distribute their funding would be a priority for her administration, but it has not specified additional steps she would take to encourage renewable energy development.

It also has not confirmed whether she still supports the Green New Deal, a nonbinding resolution of which she was a sponsor as a senator. It calls for the United States to reach 100 percent clean energy within a decade and describes clean air and water as basic human rights.

During her first presidential campaign in 2019, Ms. Harris endorsed a ban on hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a process used to extract oil and natural gas from bedrock. She also challenged federal approvals of offshore fracking when she was attorney general of California. However, she says she no longer supports a fracking ban.

“My values have not changed — I believe it is very important that we take seriously what we must do to guard against what is a clear crisis in terms of the climate,” she told CNN in August. Pointing to the Inflation Reduction Act, she said she had concluded since 2019 that “we can increase a thriving clean energy economy without banning fracking.”

In the debate in September, she said she supported investing in “diverse sources of energy so we reduce our reliance on foreign oil” and noted approvingly that U.S. oil production reached record levels under the Biden administration.

Her campaign did not respond when asked whether her approach to oil and gas permitting would differ from Mr. Biden’s. His record has been inconsistent: He allowed several projects that environmental groups opposed, but he also banned drilling in large parts of Alaska and paused permitting for new liquefied natural gas export facilities.

Ms. Harris has embraced a framework known as environmental justice, which emphasizes that climate change and pollution disproportionately affect low-income people and people of color and argues that environmental programs should focus on those communities.

In 2019, Ms. Harris, then a senator, and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York introduced legislation that would have evaluated environmental rules and laws by how they affected low-income communities. In 2020, Ms. Harris introduced a more sweeping version of that bill. She also sponsored the National Climate Bank Act, which would have created a national bank to, among other things, help low-income Americans “benefit from and afford projects and investments that reduce emissions.” (None of these bills passed.)

The Inflation Reduction Act, which Ms. Harris supports, and the bipartisan infrastructure law include billions of dollars in funding to reduce the effects of drought, help low-income Americans weatherize their homes and strengthen electric grids on Native American reservations. The Federal Emergency Management Agency also received funding from the infrastructure law for a program focused on preparing communities for extreme weather.

Ms. Harris has also expressed support for the Labor Department’s proposed rules to protect workers during heat waves, including requirements that employers develop safety plans and provide breaks and access to water and shade.

Ms. Harris would keep the United States in the Paris climate agreement, which committed almost every country to try to limit global warming to no more than two degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels and which Mr. Biden rejoined after Mr. Trump had withdrawn.

The Biden administration has pledged to cut U.S. emissions at least 50 percent below 2005 levels by 2030 and to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. Under the Paris agreement, nations are expected to announce targets for 2035 next year. Ms. Harris’s campaign did not say what targets she supported.

The actions Mr. Biden has taken, many but not all of which Ms. Harris has confirmed she supports, will get the country most of the way to the 2030 goal: The Inflation Reduction Act and his regulations on vehicles, power plants and oil wells are expected to lower emissions about 40 percent.

Ms. Harris has pledged to “continue to invest in funding law enforcement, including the hiring and training of officers and people to support them,” and has praised the billions of dollars President Biden has approved for that purpose.

This differs from her position in 2020, after a police officer murdered George Floyd, when Ms. Harris said in multiple interviews that the United States needed to “reimagine” public safety and that more police officers would not create safer communities. She said then that she did not support abolishing police departments, but that more money should be devoted to services like education, health care and housing to address root causes of crime.

“We should be looking at our budgets and asking, ‘Are we getting the best return on investment as taxpayers,’ much less what is morally right,” she said on MSNBC in June 2020, arguing that police officers were not the right people to deal with problems stemming from homelessness, substance abuse or mental illness. “It is outdated, and it is actually wrong and backward to think that more police officers will create more safety.”

That, in turn, was a shift from a stance she took in her 2009 book. “A more visible and strategic police presence is a deterrent to crime,” she wrote.

In 2020, she helped lead a push for the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which would have required use of force by police officers to be “necessary,” not just “reasonable”; limited no-knock warrants and chokeholds; lowered the bar for convicting officers of misconduct; limited qualified immunity, which shields officers from civil rights lawsuits; and increased reporting requirements for policing data. Her campaign didn’t confirm whether she still supported it.

And she supported a 2022 executive order in which Mr. Biden took some similar steps, including limiting transfers of military equipment to the police, restricting chokeholds and creating a national registry of officers fired for misconduct.

Ms. Harris wants to enact universal background checks; bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines; and red-flag laws, which allow the removal of firearms from people whom a court deems to pose a threat to themselves or others.

She supported bipartisan legislation that Mr. Biden signed in 2022 to expand background checks for gun buyers under 21, provide funding for state red-flag laws and mental health programs, tighten laws against gun trafficking, and narrow a loophole that had exempted unmarried partners from a law that bars domestic abusers from buying guns.

When Ms. Harris first ran for president in 2019, she called for mandatory buybacks of assault weapons, meaning anybody who purchased one before her proposed ban took effect would have had to sell it to the government. However, her campaign says she no longer supports such buybacks.

She also called in 2019 for licensing and registration requirements for gun owners; for raising the minimum age and establishing a waiting period for purchases; and for opening gun manufacturers and sellers to civil liability, which federal law largely shields them from. She said she would use executive action to expand background checks, ban imports of assault weapons and “revoke the licenses of gun manufacturers and dealers that break the law.”

Her campaign did not confirm whether she still supported those measures. More so than in her first run, she has emphasized recently that she is a gun owner and supports the availability of firearms for self-defense.

When Ms. Harris ran for president in 2019, she described herself as a “progressive prosecutor” and proposed sweeping criminal justice reforms in a lengthy, detailed plan. Her campaign did not confirm whether she still supported the same proposals.

That plan called for eliminating cash bail, mandatory minimum sentences, private prisons and solitary confinement; ending sentencing disparities between crack and powder cocaine; legalizing marijuana; and creating incentives for states to shorten some probation sentences, to end jail time for technical parole violations and to direct most juvenile offenders into “restorative justice” programs.

It proposed financial incentives for prosecutors who reduced incarceration and recidivism, rather than those who obtained more convictions and longer sentences; more funding for public defenders; and a requirement that federal prisons provide education, vocational training, mental health care, addiction treatment and an informational course on re-entry support services.

It also called for restoring voting rights to felons once they completed their sentences; removing bans on access to public housing, student loans and other services for formerly incarcerated people; and limiting when employers can ask about applicants’ criminal records.

Some of these policies were shifts from what she backed a few years earlier. For example, she supported increasing cash bail for some crimes when she was the San Francisco district attorney and opposed a statewide police body-camera requirement when she was attorney general of California. As district attorney, she also promoted a law that allowed the prosecution of parents whose children frequently missed school, a policy she later said she regretted.

Ms. Harris has long opposed the death penalty, dating back to her campaign for district attorney of San Francisco in 2003. She pledged never to seek the death penalty as district attorney, and she didn’t, even against a man charged with killing a police officer.

She took a less definitive position in her campaign for attorney general of California in 2010, saying she would “enforce the death penalty as the law dictates.” As attorney general, she defended the state’s capital punishment program in court; she described doing so as a professional obligation and not as a change in her personal position.

As a presidential candidate in 2019, she reiterated her opposition to capital punishment, criticizing it as “immoral, discriminatory, ineffective, and proven to be unequally applied” and calling for the abolition of the federal death penalty. She defended her record in a debate that year, saying: “My entire career, I have been opposed, personally opposed, to the death penalty, and that has never changed. And I dare anybody who is in a position to make that decision to face the people I have faced and to say, ‘I will not seek the death penalty.’”

The Biden administration has not executed anyone, but it is seeking to do so in one case and has not sought to abolish the federal death penalty. Ms. Harris’s campaign did not confirm whether she still wanted to abolish it.

Ms. Harris has called for decriminalizing marijuana. “Nobody should have to go to jail for smoking weed,” she wrote on April 20. “We must continue to change our nation’s approach to marijuana while reforming the justice system so it finally lives up to its name.”

She supports the Biden administration’s steps to remove marijuana from the Schedule I regulation category, which designates it alongside drugs like heroin as having no accepted medical purpose. She also supported Mr. Biden’s sweeping pardons for marijuana use and possession. (Those pardons did not apply to charges of selling or driving under the influence.)

Earlier in her career, Ms. Harris opposed legalizing marijuana for recreational use, and as district attorney of San Francisco she prosecuted many people for marijuana-related crimes. She changed her stance when she became a senator and was a co-sponsor of a bill that would have legalized marijuana.

Ms. Harris has committed to accepting the results of the 2024 election and denounced Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the last one.

In accepting the presidential nomination at the Democratic National Convention in August, she said she would “hold sacred America’s fundamental principles, from the rule of law, to free and fair elections, to the peaceful transfer of power.” Earlier this year, she met with voting rights activists and described a strategy that included creating a task force on threats to election workers.

As the current vice president, whether she wins or loses in November, Ms. Harris will preside over the certification of the results on Jan. 6, 2025. Her campaign told Politico in July that she would not use her position to intervene in the counting.

That is in line with reforms Mr. Biden signed to the Electoral Count Act in an effort to prevent a repeat of Mr. Trump’s attempt to exploit the Jan. 6 proceedings to overturn his loss. The legislation established that the vice president’s role is ceremonial and increased the number of lawmakers required to object to counting a state’s electoral votes.

Ms. Harris supports two pieces of legislation — which Mr. Biden also supported, but was unable to pass because of Republican filibusters — to counter voting restrictions that have been passed in many Republican-led states. She helped push for both bills when they were first introduced, having been assigned to lead the Biden administration’s efforts to secure voting rights legislation after she requested that job.

The first is the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would restore sections of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that the Supreme Court has struck down or weakened. The second is the Freedom to Vote Act, which would set a floor for voting access in federal elections, meaning states could enact more inclusive procedures but not less inclusive ones.

Among other things, the Freedom to Vote Act would expand automatic voter registration programs, let all voters register online and on Election Day, require at least 15 days of early voting and restore voting rights to felons upon their release from prison.

It would also restrict partisan gerrymandering, allow voters to sue if election officials refused to certify results and establish a nationwide voter identification requirement. The ID requirement would accept a wider range of documents (like utility bills) than many existing state laws allow.

Ms. Harris has condemned Mr. Trump’s statements that he might intervene in Justice Department prosecution decisions, describing the department’s independence as essential. And she has said the Biden administration has always respected that independence.

“There is a clear and nonnegotiable division in terms of the separation between our administration and what the Department of Justice does, in terms of its investigations, in terms of its prosecutions,” she told CNN this year in an exchange about the department’s investigations of Mr. Trump. “And that line has never been crossed.”

Her campaign did not respond when asked whether she agreed with the Justice Department’s assessment that presidents can order “limited” military actions without congressional approval. (Both Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump have done that.)

When Ms. Harris was asked a similar question during her 2019 presidential campaign, she said: “I won’t hesitate to do what it takes to protect our country in the face of an imminent threat in the future. But after almost two decades of war, it is long past time for Congress to rewrite the Authorization for Use of Military Force that governs our current military conflicts.”

She answered several other questions about executive power in a New York Times survey during her 2019 campaign.

Inflation skyrocketed early in the Biden-Harris administration, peaking at 9.1 percent in 2022. Since then, inflation has slowed while the job market and consumer spending have remained mostly strong, pointing to a potential “soft landing” in which inflation returns to normal without a recession. But the remnants of inflation have been stubborn.

Part of the cause was the Covid-19 pandemic, which raised prices around the world as supply-chain problems escalated. U.S. government stimulus money intended to stop the economy from crashing and support pandemic response programs — Mr. Trump approved more than $3 trillion in 2020 and Mr. Biden $1.9 trillion in 2021 — also fueled demand. Republicans have blamed Mr. Biden’s spending, and some economists have criticized the size and timing of his relief plan, but they have also credited it with preventing a recession.

Ms. Harris’s main proposal for reducing inflation is to ban corporate price gouging on groceries. Her campaign says she would authorize the Federal Trade Commission to impose “harsh penalties” on corporations that violated the ban, fund investigations of gouging in meat supply chains and scrutinize mergers of large grocery companies.

The Federal Reserve, which operates independently of the White House, plays a large role in responding to inflation by adjusting interest rates. When the Fed raises rates, it becomes more expensive to take out a mortgage or a business loan, creating a chain reaction that cools the economy. Ms. Harris said in August that she would “never interfere” in Fed decisions.

Ms. Harris has indicated that she supports Mr. Biden’s approach to federal spending and has praised two of the biggest pieces of legislation he signed: the Inflation Reduction Act, which included hundreds of billions of dollars in clean-energy tax credits and health insurance subsidies, and a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure deal. These measures were aimed at driving job creation, which several studies and government employment statistics indicate they did.

Ms. Harris has endorsed most of the tax proposals that Mr. Biden made in the spring, which would total nearly $5 trillion in increases for corporations and wealthy Americans but extend Trump-era cuts for people making less than $400,000 a year.

She wants to increase the top marginal income tax rate for individuals to 39.6 percent from 37 percent. She wants to raise the corporate tax rate to 28 percent from 21 percent, partly reversing a reduction that Mr. Trump signed.

She is also proposing increasing the corporate minimum tax to 21 percent from 15 percent. That minimum, established by the Inflation Reduction Act, is distinct from the regular corporate rate; it applies to companies that report more than $1 billion in income but had used deductions to pay little or no federal taxes.

Other proposals include a minimum tax of 25 percent for people with assets of more than $100 million, higher taxes on foreign profits and wider eligibility for the earned-income tax credit.

She wants to restore an expansion of the child tax credit — to a maximum of $3,600 per child — that reduced child poverty before it expired, and bring the credit to $6,000 for parents of newborns. She has adopted a Trump proposal to eliminate taxes on tips. And she is proposing a $50,000 tax deduction for small-business start-ups.

She has broken from Mr. Biden on one point: She would raise the capital gains tax by significantly less than he had proposed, bringing it to 28 percent for Americans who make more than $1 million a year instead of Mr. Biden’s proposed 39.6 percent. (It is currently 20 percent.)

A study from a nonpartisan group, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, estimated that Ms. Harris’s tax and spending plans would add about half as much to the national debt as Mr. Trump’s plans would, but potentially still trillions of dollars.

Ms. Harris has rejected the across-the-board tariffs that Mr. Trump has proposed, saying at the Democratic National Convention that they would be tantamount to a “national sales tax.”

But her campaign has indicated that she would support some tariffs, without providing details. A campaign spokesman said in August that Ms. Harris would “employ targeted and strategic tariffs to support American workers, strengthen our economy and hold our adversaries accountable.”

The Biden administration has not rolled back Mr. Trump’s tariffs on Chinese products, and in April Mr. Biden announced that he would expand them, tripling some tariffs on Chinese steel and aluminum. In May, he went further, increasing tariffs on electric vehicles, solar cells, semiconductors and advanced batteries, and officially endorsing the Trump-era tariffs that he had criticized in 2020. Ms. Harris’s campaign did not say whether she would change or end any of these tariffs.

The Biden administration has pushed for regulations that have a direct pocketbook effect: For instance, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is trying to cap credit card late fees, and the Transportation Department set a rule requiring automatic refunds when flights are canceled. Ms. Harris has endorsed a similar approach, saying at a rally in July that she would “ban hidden fees and surprise late charges” by banks and other companies.

She has called for raising the federal minimum wage and has indicated that she supports the Labor Department’s move to require employers to pay overtime starting next year to people earning up to $58,656 annually, up from the current threshold of $35,568.

She has also indicated that she supports stringent antitrust efforts, and her campaign says she would “direct her administration to crack down on anti-competitive practices.” Among other things, her proposal to ban price gouging calls for challenging mergers of supermarket companies, as the Biden administration is doing with Kroger and Albertsons.

Ms. Harris has pledged not to cut Social Security or Medicare benefits.

Projections fluctuate based on economic conditions, but estimates from this spring indicate that Social Security and its associated disability insurance program will run out of money to cover full benefits in 2035, and part of Medicare will do the same in 2036. To keep them solvent, Ms. Harris wants to raise taxes on people making more than $400,000 a year.

She has proposed increasing two Medicare surtaxes to 5 percent from 3.8 percent for people making over $400,000. She has been less specific about her plans for Social Security, and her campaign did not respond to a question about them, but she has indicated that she supports increases to Social Security taxes for wealthy Americans as well.

She supports the Inflation Reduction Act provision that let Medicare negotiate drug prices directly with pharmaceutical companies for the first time, which could lower prices for consumers and save the program money. (The law also requires drug companies to make payments to Medicare if they increase their prices faster than inflation.) Her economic plan says she would “allow Medicare to accelerate the speed of negotiations.”

As a senator, Ms. Harris was a sponsor of the Social Security Expansion Act, which would have increased benefits. Her campaign did not confirm whether she still supports that.

Ms. Harris’s housing plan calls for building three million affordable housing units within four years. She proposes creating a tax incentive to build homes that are affordable to first-time buyers, expanding an incentive to build affordable rental homes, and setting up a $40 billion “innovation fund” for developers and builders who come up with viable plans to add affordable housing.

She wants to give up to $25,000 in down-payment assistance to first-time home buyers, and she has endorsed a bill called the Stop Predatory Investing Act that would create tax penalties for investors who buy large numbers of rental units.

Ms. Harris supports an active global role for the United States, including a commitment to international alliances.

“Our leadership keeps our homeland safe, supports American jobs, secures supply chains and opens new markets for American goods,” she told world leaders at the Munich Security Conference in February, saying she saw U.S. engagement as a strategic good for Americans, not as an act of “charity” toward other countries.

She added that she rejected calls “to isolate ourselves from the world, to flout common understandings among nations, to embrace dictators and adopt their repressive tactics, and abandon commitments to our allies in favor of unilateral action.”

She has spoken positively about the recent expansion of NATO to include Finland and Sweden. Her campaign did not respond to a question about whether she would support admitting Ukraine to the alliance after the war there ends. When she was asked about it in a “60 Minutes” interview in October, she said it was an issue “that we will deal with if and when it arrives at that point.”

Ms. Harris supports continuing U.S. aid to Ukraine, arguing that conceding Ukrainian territory to Russia would destabilize the region and encourage President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to invade other countries, such as Poland.

“It is in the strategic interest of the United States to continue our support,” she said at a security conference in Germany this year. President Biden has overseen more than $100 billion in military and economic aid to Ukraine. Ms. Harris’s campaign did not say how the amount of aid she supported would compare.

At the presidential debate in September, Ms. Harris said, “I believe the reason that Donald Trump says that this war would be over within 24 hours is because he would just give it up.” She argued that the implications of the war were broad, saying it was essential for the United States to defend “one of the most important international rules and norms, which is the importance of sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

She said later that month that calls for Ukraine to give up territory or to agree not to join military alliances were proposals not for peace but “for surrender, which is dangerous and unacceptable.”

She has emphasized, including in the debate and at the Democratic National Convention, that she met with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine a few days before Russia invaded in 2022 to share U.S. intelligence about the impending invasion, and that she helped mobilize a coalition of countries to support Ukraine.

Ms. Harris’s campaign website says she would “make sure that America, not China, wins the competition for the 21st century.” But she has not provided many concrete policy details.

She has said she would prioritize the continued distribution of funding from legislation that President Biden has signed — including the Inflation Reduction Act, a bipartisan infrastructure deal and the CHIPS and Science Act — that could increase domestic manufacturing of goods that the United States now relies on China for. Her campaign has also indicated, without specifics, that she is open to some tariffs, though not the across-the-board ones Mr. Trump has called for.

In contrast to Mr. Trump, she has not called for a full decoupling of the American and Chinese economies. “It’s not about pulling out, but it is about ensuring that we are protecting American interests, and that we are a leader in terms of the rules of the road, as opposed to following others’ rules,” she told CBS News last year, adding: “There’s tension when you are in a competition of any sort, but that does not mean that we are seeking conflict.”

She has defended legislation that Mr. Biden signed in April, which says that TikTok’s Chinese owner must sell it or the app will be banned in the United States. She has said that the administration does not want a ban, only a change in ownership.

In 2022, she condemned China’s incursions into the South China Sea and said she and Mr. Biden would “support Taiwan’s self-defense” and “deepen our unofficial ties.” But she has not confirmed whether she supports military aid to Taiwan, nor whether she would defend Taiwan militarily if China attacked it.

In 2019, she called for federal funding for “law enforcement efforts to cut off the supply of fentanyl from China”; her campaign did not say whether she still supports that, or what specifically it would involve if so. She also emphasized the Chinese government’s human rights abuses. As a senator, she cosponsored (and Mr. Trump signed) the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act, which authorized sanctions, and the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, which required annual assessments of the U.S.-Hong Kong trade relationship.

Ms. Harris said in July that she was committed to supporting Israel against Iran and Iran-backed militia groups like Hezbollah.

During her Senate campaign in 2016, she said she backed the Iran nuclear deal reached by former President Barack Obama and foreign leaders, under which Iran agreed to limit its nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of sanctions. She called it “the best available option for blocking Iran from developing nuclear weapons capability and to avoid potentially disastrous military conflict in the Middle East.”

Ms. Harris has defended Mr. Biden’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan in 2021 — which resulted in the Taliban almost immediately retaking the country from the Afghan government that the United States had supported — and said she was the last person in the room when he made it.

“Four presidents said they would, and Joe Biden did,” she said at the presidential debate in September. “As a result, America’s taxpayers are not paying the $300 million a day we were paying for that endless war. And as of today, there is not one member of the United States military who is in active duty in a combat zone in any war zone around the world.”

Ms. Harris has called for “expanding and strengthening” the Affordable Care Act and also supports its current provisions, including protections for coverage of pre-existing medical conditions.

She wants to make permanent the larger subsidies that President Biden signed to help Americans buy insurance in A.C.A. marketplaces, which helped increase A.C.A. enrollment to record levels and lower the uninsured rate to 7.7 percent in 2023 from 9.7 percent in 2020. Under current law, those subsidies are scheduled to expire at the end of 2025. Her campaign did not give other examples of how she would aim to expand the A.C.A.

In October, she called for Medicare coverage for long-term at-home care. Her plan would cover the cost of services like home health aides for the first time, allowing more seniors and other people with disabilities to stay in their homes rather than nursing facilities.

She has also promoted the Biden administration’s incentives for states to offer Medicaid coverage for 12 months after childbirth, instead of the minimum requirement of two months, to reduce maternal mortality rates. Only three states offered that when or shortly after Mr. Biden took office in 2021, but now almost all do.

And she supports a Biden administration rule requiring insurers to assess their provider networks, out-of-network reimbursement rates and other processes to determine whether they provide equivalent access to mental health care and other health care, and to make changes if not.

When Ms. Harris first ran for president in 2019, she supported a “Medicare for all” system that would have extended government health coverage to all Americans, while allowing private insurers to offer plans within the Medicare system under strict standards. She no longer supports Medicare for all, though she still voices the principle that health care should be “a right, not a privilege.”

Ms. Harris supports direct negotiations between Medicare and pharmaceutical companies on prescription drug costs. Those negotiations were enabled for the first time by the Inflation Reduction Act, on which she cast the tiebreaking vote. Her economic plan says she would “allow Medicare to accelerate the speed of negotiations” to bring more drugs into that program.

She has also called for expanding two price caps for Medicare recipients — $35 a month for insulin and $2,000 a year for all out-of-pocket prescription expenses — to cover all Americans.

She supports a Biden administration rule to remove medical debt from credit reports, as well as the administration’s cancellation of about $7 billion in such debt through a 2021 pandemic relief bill. Her campaign says she wants to cancel more medical debt if she is elected.

Ms. Harris has made government interventions to reduce maternal mortality a significant focus. Among other steps, she has promoted incentives from the Biden administration to expand postpartum coverage through Medicaid, as well as funding to train health care providers to avoid implicit biases that result in higher mortality rates for Black women.

In 2022 and again this July, she was the public face of the introduction of the Biden administration’s maternal health policies, which included setting federal health and safety standards for hospital obstetrics services and creating a mental health hotline for mothers.

She and Mr. Biden vowed to control the Covid-19 pandemic more effectively than Mr. Trump did. But the virus killed more Americans in 2021 than in 2020, a result of factors including more transmissible variants, fewer precautions among the public and the reluctance of a substantial minority of Americans to accept vaccines.

Initially, the administration mandated that people wear masks on public transportation; oversaw a vaccine rollout, including through FEMA sites, that got more than two-thirds of Americans vaccinated; and established “test to treat” sites where people could receive a Covid test and an antiviral prescription at the same time. It also expanded a Trump-era program that measures levels of the coronavirus and other pathogens in sewage, and created a White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy.

Over time, the administration loosened mitigation policies, in some cases by court order and in other cases by choice.

Mr. Biden’s proposed budget for 2025 includes billions of dollars in new funding to prepare for and respond to pandemics, and to promote vaccinations among adults. Ms. Harris’s campaign did not confirm whether her budget requests in those categories would be the same.

Ms. Harris supports increasing federal funding to states for addiction treatment programs, as the Biden administration has done.

She has also endorsed the Food and Drug Administration’s decision to make naloxone, which can reverse opioid overdoses, available over the counter; new federal rules allowing methadone and buprenorphine, two common treatments for opioid use disorder, to be prescribed by telemedicine; and the removal of a restriction on which medical providers could prescribe buprenorphine.

Overdose deaths have begun to decline over the past two years after a long period of increases, but they still take the lives of tens of thousands of people annually.

Ms. Harris says she would push Congress to pass a bipartisan border-security bill that Mr. Trump torpedoed this year, which — in addition to cracking down on illegal border crossings — would provide more funding for technology to detect and intercept illicit drugs. She also said in September that she would “double” the Justice Department’s resources for fighting transnational drug cartels that bring fentanyl into the United States.

Ms. Harris has taken a relatively tough stance on immigration recently, emphasizing her support for a bipartisan proposal that would have hired thousands of new border security agents and asylum officers and closed the border if crossings reached an average of more than 5,000 migrants a day over a week.

The deal died in Congress after Mr. Trump came out against it, but Ms. Harris has pledged to work to get it passed if elected president. She has also indicated that she would maintain a policy that Mr. Biden enacted this year through executive action, barring asylum applications from most people who cross the border illegally.

She approached the issue differently during her first presidential campaign in 2019, when she argued that it should not be a crime to enter the United States without authorization and called for re-examining the role of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. (Decriminalizing border crossings was a popular position among candidates in the Democratic presidential primary that year.) Her tone changed after she became vice president, and this August, she told CNN: “We have laws that have to be followed and enforced that address and deal with people who cross our border illegally. And there should be consequence.”

She supports DACA, the Obama-era program formally called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals under which people brought to the United States illegally as children are protected from being deported. Because judges have ruled against the program, including one ruling last year, Ms. Harris urged Congress in June to pass legislation that would permanently protect DACA beneficiaries, commonly known as Dreamers.

In 2019, she called for using executive action to extend DACA-like protections to other groups as well, including undocumented immigrants whose children are citizens or legal permanent residents. Her campaign did not say whether she still supported that.

One of her mandates as vice president has been to address the root causes of migration from Latin America, such as poverty and violence. She has mainly sought to do this through a program called the Partnership for Central America, which has secured more than $5 billion in pledges from private companies to support Central American communities.

The program has focused on El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Border encounters with migrants from those countries have fallen sharply, though migration from other countries soared over much of the same period.

Ms. Harris has endorsed an executive order that Mr. Biden issued in June, closing the border to asylum seekers when the seven-day average for illegal entries hits 2,500 a day. The most restrictive border policy enacted by any modern Democratic president, it is similar to a 2018 Trump policy that was blocked by a federal judge, and it faces a similar legal challenge.

She also wants to revive a bipartisan border-security deal from earlier this year that would have made it harder to claim asylum while also including a right to counsel for certain applicants, including unaccompanied children 13 and under.

Ms. Harris has said in various forums that she supports “an earned pathway to citizenship” for undocumented immigrants. Her campaign did not respond to a request for details on the criteria she envisioned.

The bipartisan border-security deal from earlier this year that she has endorsed would have added 250,000 family- and employment-based visas over five years and ensured green-card eligibility for the children of immigrants who are in the country on H-1B visas for highly skilled workers. It also would have enacted measures to reduce illegal border crossings.

Ms. Harris opposed Mr. Trump’s travel bans, which barred travelers from several majority-Muslim countries from entering the United States and which Mr. Biden revoked on his first day in office. In 2020, she called an expansion of the initial ban “un-American” and “clearly driven by hate, not security.”

Ms. Harris supports a cease-fire in which Hamas would release all hostages who were seized in its Oct. 7 attack on Israel and the Israeli military would withdraw from Gaza. She first called for a cease-fire in early March, describing the situation in Gaza as a “humanitarian catastrophe.”

However, her national security adviser said in August that she would not support an arms embargo to end the American weapons shipments on which Israel has relied. In an interview with CNN later that month, she did not endorse any changes to Mr. Biden’s policy on providing weapons, and her campaign did not respond when asked whether she would support any restrictions short of a full embargo.

Compared with Mr. Biden, she has centered Palestinians more in her public comments and taken a sharper tone in criticizing Israel, emphasizing the toll of Israel’s bombardment and invasion of Gaza. While not publicly diverging on policy, she has privately pushed Mr. Biden to weigh the plight of Palestinian civilians more heavily in his decisions and statements.

“Israel has a right to defend itself, and how it does so matters,” she said in July after meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. She added: “The images of dead children and desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety, sometimes displaced for the second, third or fourth time — we cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering, and I will not be silent.”

In an interview in March, she urged Israel not to invade Rafah, the city in southern Gaza to which more than a million people had fled. “I have studied the maps,” she said. “There’s nowhere for those folks to go, and we’re looking at about 1.5 million people in Rafah who are there because they were told to go there, most of them.”

Ms. Harris’s campaign did not respond to questions about whether she would maintain Mr. Biden’s deferral of deportations for Palestinians who are in the United States illegally, or whether she would allow more Gazan refugees to come.

Ms. Harris has endorsed a two-state solution in which Israelis and Palestinians would live side-by-side in their own sovereign countries.

“I know right now it is hard to conceive of that prospect,” she said in July. “But a two-state solution is the only path that ensures Israel remains a secure, Jewish and democratic state and one that ensures Palestinians can finally realize the freedom, security and prosperity that they rightly deserve.”

When she met with Mr. Netanyahu that month, she expressed “concern about actions that undermine stability and security in the West Bank, such as extremist settler violence and settlement expansion,” according to a White House summary. Her office also said in December that “under no circumstances” would the United States accept “the forced relocation of Palestinians from Gaza or the West Bank.”

In the past, she has been more reluctant to describe Israel’s actions as barriers to a two-state solution. In 2016, she declined to endorse hypothetical legislation that would deem Israel’s West Bank settlements illegal, saying, “The terms of any agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians cannot be imposed by others.” In 2017, she was a sponsor of a Senate resolution that condemned the United Nations Security Council for deeming the settlements illegal and accused the United Nations of “a longstanding biased approach” to Israel.

Her campaign did not respond to a question about her current views on the legality of Israeli settlements.

Ms. Harris said in July that she was committed to supporting Israel against Iran and Iran-backed militia groups like Hezbollah. She also defended an Israeli attack in Lebanon in September that killed Hezbollah’s leader, while saying, “Diplomacy remains the best path forward to protect civilians and achieve lasting stability in the region.”

During her Senate campaign in 2016, she said she backed the Iran nuclear deal reached by former President Barack Obama and foreign leaders, under which Iran agreed to limit its nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of sanctions. The Israeli government opposed the deal, but Ms. Harris said that, “with a deep commitment to the safety of Israel,” she believed it was “the best available option for blocking Iran from developing nuclear weapons capability and to avoid potentially disastrous military conflict in the Middle East.”

Ms. Harris has expressed more sympathy toward pro-Palestinian demonstrators than has Mr. Biden, who argued during campus demonstrations this spring that a wide range of actions — not only vandalism and intimidation, but also nonviolent disruptions that forced “the cancellation of classes and graduations” — did not qualify as peaceful.

“They are showing exactly what the human emotion should be, as a response to Gaza,” Ms. Harris said in an interview with The Nation published in July. “There are things some of the protesters are saying that I absolutely reject, so I don’t mean to wholesale endorse their points. But we have to navigate it. I understand the emotion behind it.”

She has not changed any public policy position in response to the protests, though her campaign said she would “continue to engage.” When protesters interrupted her during a rally, she said their presence was a good example of democracy but responded sharply when they continued. “If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that,” she said. “Otherwise, I am speaking.”

She has denounced a minority of protesters who have burned flags and defaced statues, saying, “Pro-Hamas graffiti and rhetoric is abhorrent, and we must not tolerate it in our nation.”

Ms. Harris has praised a national strategy for combating antisemitism that the Biden administration announced last year. That strategy, the first released by the U.S. government, recommended making it easier to report hate crimes, holding anti-bias workshops geared toward workplaces and hiring, and strengthening Holocaust education.

In a statement for Holocaust Remembrance Day in May, she said she understood that, for Jewish people, the months since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack had “evoked the memories, along with fear and anguish, of the Holocaust.” She added: “We will fight antisemitism with the full force of the U.S. government, including through the first-ever national strategy to counter antisemitism. We will continue to stand with the people of Israel and its right to defend itself from those that threaten its existence.”

As a senator, she cosponsored resolutions denouncing attacks on synagogues. Her husband, Doug Emhoff, is Jewish and has been a public face of the Biden administration’s efforts to combat antisemitism, a role he said in August that Ms. Harris had encouraged him to take on.

Ms. Harris has expressed disagreement with Mr. Netanyahu over his conduct of the war in Gaza, but she has not endorsed actions that would concretely affect his government.

Like a number of other Democrats, she skipped Mr. Netanyahu’s speech to Congress in July, but she met with him privately while he was in Washington.

Afterward, she said that she had told Mr. Netanyahu she would “always ensure that Israel is able to defend itself,” but that she had also “expressed with the prime minister my serious concern about the scale of human suffering in Gaza, including the death of far too many innocent civilians,” and urged him to accept a cease-fire deal.