Kamala Harris’s career includes stints as attorney general of California, as a senator and now as vice-president.
During this time, her political position has been fluid and she has not been tethered to an ideological wing of the party in the way that Joe Biden defined himself as a centrist.
Here is where Ms Harris stands on the most important issues ahead of the 2024 election.
Abortion
Abortion is one of the areas where the Democrats – and Ms Harris – are strongest. The vice-president has been the party’s leading voice on reproductive rights.
She has always been more comfortable talking about the topic than Mr Biden, who early in his career described Roe v Wade as going “too far”.
Ms Harris launched a nationwide “fight for reproductive freedoms” tour earlier this year as the party attempted to capitalise on the hot button topic ahead of the November election.
She is also understood to be the first US vice-president to have visited an abortion clinic, touring a Minnesota branch of Planned Parenthood in March.
During her unsuccessful campaign to be the Democrats’ presidential nominee in 2020, she proposed going further than Roe v Wade. She called for states known to have violated abortion rights to require federal approval for any new abortion laws.
As well as voting in favour of abortion rights in the Senate, as California attorney general Ms Harris helped launch an investigation into anti-abortion activists who secretly filmed at Planned Parenthood branches.
Tax
Ms Harris’s previous policy proposals suggest she might be more progressive on tax than Mr Biden.
During her presidential campaign, she vowed to undo the 2017 tax cuts pushed through by Donald Trump during his administration, which she saw as a gift to the wealthy.
“Frankly, this economy is not working for working people,” Ms Harris said during a 2019 Democratic primary debate.
“For too long the rules have been written in the favour of the people who have the most and not in favour of the people who work the most.”
Mr Biden, however, vowed to lock the tax cuts in place for households earning under $400,000 (£310,000).
As a senator, Ms Harris also proposed giving tax credits to lower-income workers – up to $3,000 for individuals and $6,000 for married couples.
Other proposed policies included increasing estate taxes on the rich to pay for an average $13,500 rise in teachers’ salaries.
Ms Harris also wanted to increase the corporate tax rate from 21 per cent to 35 per cent, higher than the 28 per cent Mr Biden had proposed.
Ms Harris has been a supporter of the Biden administration’s economic policies, such as the 2021 American Rescue Plan and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.
Immigration
Ms Harris has been attacked relentlessly by Trump and other critics for her track record on immigration.
One of her tasks as vice-president has been to address the root causes of migration to the US from Latin America, prompting Republicans to brand her the “border tsar”.
Ms Harris received flak from progressive Democrats in 2021 for warning migrants not to come to the country.
“Do not come. Do not come. The US will continue to enforce our laws and secure our borders,” Ms Harris said at a press conference alongside Alejandro Giammattei, Guatemalan president at the time.
“If you come to our border, you will be turned back,” she said.
Ms Harris was heavily criticised for not visiting the border itself at the start of her tenure.
When she finally did, in June 2021 she appeared to soften her approach, saying: “This issue cannot be reduced to a political issue. We’re talking about children, we’re talking about families, we are talking about suffering.”
Ms Harris backed the bipartisan border security deal that was blocked by Republican lawmakers.
“We are very clear, and I think most Americans are clear, that we have a broken immigration system and we need to fix it,” Ms Harris said in March.
While she was San Francisco district attorney, Ms Harris was in favour of a policy to turn over young migrants to Immigration and Customs Enforcement if they had been arrested.
Israel
Ms Harris appears to be more willing to criticise Israel for its response to Hamas’s October 7 attack than Mr Biden.
The former senator has privately said that the Biden administration should take a stronger stance with Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, according to Politico.
She was also one of the first leaders of the administration to call for an immediate temporary ceasefire in March, describing the conflict as a “human catastrophe”.
National Security Council officials reportedly had to tone down parts of Ms Harris’s speech.
The remarks she delivered included stating “people in Gaza are starving” and calling on Israel to “do more” to ensure the delivery of aid.
Her first draft was harsher on Israel, sources previously told NBC News, although a spokesman for Ms Harris denied these reports.
Officials who quit the Biden administration to protest against the White House response to the war in Gaza have said they are “cautiously optimistic” that Ms Harris would be willing to consider policy changes to protect Palestinians.
Josh Paul, a former State Department official involved with transferring arms to American allies, told Politico Ms Harris seemed less “fixed and intransigent” than Mr Biden on the issue.
Such an approach could help regain Democrat voters put off by Mr Biden’s response to the war in Gaza.
Ms Harris is a supporter of the two-state solution. Asked whether it was “achievable” at the Munich Security Conference this year, Ms Harris said: “The short answer is yes.”
Ukraine
Ms Harris is staunchly in favour of helping Ukraine defend itself against Russia.
She has met Volodymyr Zelensky six times and has appeared on the world stage in Mr Biden’s place at key gatherings on the war.
At the Summit for Peace in Ukraine in June she pledged her “unwavering commitment” and in each of her three addresses to the Munich Security Conference she said the US was committed to helping Kyiv defend itself.
She has said the US will support Ukraine for “as long as it takes” and warned that a failure to supply weapons and resources to Ukraine would be a “gift” to Vladimir Putin.
This year she appeared to take a swipe at Trump and Republicans as she attacked people in the US who want to “isolate” the country, “embrace dictators” and “abandon commitments to our allies”.
“Let me be clear: That worldview is dangerous, destabilising, and indeed short-sighted,” she said.
Ms Harris attacked Trump during the election campaign for his claim that he would pull the US out of Nato.
“Donald Trump has embraced Putin,” she said at a North Carolina campaign event earlier this year.
She added: “It’s not just happening today. It’s been happening, as he, Trump, threatened to abandon Nato and encouraged Putin to invade our allies.”
Climate
Ms Harris has a progressive track record when it comes to climate issues.
“It is clear the clock is not just ticking, it is banging,” she said in a speech last year in reference to climate change.
Her 2020 presidential campaign climate pledges were more ambitious than Mr Biden’s – including a carbon tax, a ban on fracking and $10 trillion in private and public climate spending.
As a California senator, she proposed legislation to tie environmental rules to the impact on low-income communities and to create an office of climate and environmental justice accountability.
When standing in for Mr Biden at the Cop28 summit, Ms Harris said: “This is a pivotal moment. Our action collectively – or, worse, our inaction – will impact billions of people for decades to come.”
Jason Miller, a Trump campaign adviser, claimed one of Ms Harris’s weaknesses was she wanted to ban plastic straws.
In 2019, the then senator told a CNN climate change forum that plastic straws should be banned but called for innovation noting that it is “really difficult” to drink out of a paper version.
“If you don’t gulp it down immediately, it starts to bend, and then the little thing catches it,” Ms Harris said. “So, we gotta kind of perfect that one a little bit more.”
Guns
Ms Harris has been a vocal campaigner for tougher gun laws as vice-president.
She oversaw the White House office of gun violence prevention and, earlier this year, visited the site of the 2018 Parkland school shooting.
Before she joined the Biden campaign in 2020, she had called for a ban on assault weapons and universal background checks.
In 2022, she backed bipartisan gun safety laws to bring in tougher background checks on young gun owners, and red flag laws to make it easier to confiscate weapons.
“Our nation is being torn apart by the tragedy of it all and torn apart by the fear and trauma that results from gun violence,” she said in a September 2023 speech.
“President Biden and I believe in the second amendment, but we also know common-sense solutions are at hand,” she added.
Ms Harris said in 2019 she owned a gun “for personal safety”.
She said as a career prosecutor and when she was “dealing with dangerous criminals while serving as district attorney in San Francisco I felt compelled to have a handgun. After leaving that job I disposed of the weapon.”
During her presidential campaign it was reported that Ms Harris still owns a handgun for personal safety reasons. It is stowed away in a secure location at her California home, a White House source told Reuters.
During an interview with Oprah Winfrey in September, Ms Harris joked that any intruders to her home are “getting shot”.
