Will a Harris presidency look different from a Biden presidency?
Now that President Joe Biden has stood down and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, her candidacy must be endorsed by the Democratic National Committee. If she wins the 2024 presidential race, how will her presidency differ from that of Biden?
To answer this question, we must look at the record and what Harris has said to date.
The economy
Dogged by worldwide inflation, President Biden has still achieved impressive economic results during his term. Whether they are a result of strong post-pandemic demand or the many bipartisan bills Biden has introduced, the numbers on job growth are remarkable.
The Economist produced a series of charts that demonstrate this. They show manufacturing and construction booming, higher wages, infrastructure rebuilds and a diverse energy platform.
Harris is unlikely to change a winning formula. However, expect continued legislative attacks on bad corporate conduct and more access for small businesses.
Immigration
Immigration at the southern border has increased exponentially as people flee corruption and climate change in Latin America. Most immigrants are from Central America; the leading three countries are Mexico, El Salvador and Guatemala, but refugees from South America (mainly Venezuela) and Asia are increasing.
Corruption and recession also drive migration. The recession in China has badly hurt Chinese middle-class workers. Some of them pay traffickers to guide them to the U.S. border.
After a bipartisan bill to manage immigration at the border was rejected by the U.S. House of Representatives, President Biden enacted an executive order on immigration, based on the bill.
Expect Kamala Harris, who in July 2024 said “our immigration system is broken and needs to be fixed,” to sustain that order and seek to reshape the bipartisan bill.
Crime and guns
Despite all the sky-screaming headlines from far-right media, violent crime rates are much lower than they were in the 1990s. According to the FBI, crime decreased in 2023, including murder (down 13.2 percent) and violent crime (down 5.7 percent).
Biden’s main answer to crime is to get people working. As John Roman of the National Prevention Science Coalition to Improve Lives concluded, “the reason crime has declined so much in 2023 is because local governments have mainly returned to normal.”
Expect Kamala Harris to continue the same policies, but with an emphasis on issues such as racial profiling and gun violence. Because of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees the right to keep and bear arms, she likely will lean on executive orders to enact change, as her predecessor has done. An assault weapons ban could be in the cards as well, after Harris, herself a licensed handgun owner, expressed support for one in 2023.
Energy and the environment
In 2020, Joe Biden ran for president on the most ambitious climate action platform in U.S. history. Then, in 2022 he signed into law the Inflation Reduction Act, investing hundreds of billions of dollars into clean energy, electric vehicles and environmental justice.
Kamala Harris has comprehensively supported Biden in this, and in April 2019 she said that she wanted to go further and introduce a carbon tax on oil producers and ban shale fracking.
Abortion
Thousands of Republican women get abortions every year. In 2019, according to the CDC, 30 percent of those who got an abortion voted for Donald Trump. Yet, after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, which protected the right to abortion, 14 states invoked new limits on abortions — some to as little as six weeks (many women do not know they are pregnant at 6 weeks) and often ignoring provision for incest and rape.
Joe Biden has been cautious in his approach to the abortion issue, not wishing to directly challenge the Supreme Court ruling. In reality he has few options. An attempt to pass the Women’s Health Protection Act stalled in the Senate.
Biden's administration did issue a rule in April 2024 aimed at strengthening privacy protections for women seeking abortions, which bans the disclosure of protected health information related to reproductive health.
Expect Kamala Harris to be aggressive on the issue, and to mention it everywhere she campaigns in the U.S.
Senate and the House
After 50 years in the Senate, Biden is an experienced campaigner who’s managed to pass 251 bipartisan bills. Much of this has to do with his long-term relationships with congressional power players such as Mitch McConnell and Joe Manchin. Though Harris does not have the same political clout on Capitol Hill, she has built up allies in the last four years — assisted in no small part by her affable husband, Doug Emhoff.
International
President Biden by nature is risk averse in dealing with foreign nations. As articulated by Heritage Foundation expert James Jay Carafano, “the Biden administration prefers soft power (e.g., diplomacy and foreign aid) over hard power (e.g., use of military force and punitive economic sanctions), and [tries] to rely on international norms and international institutions to mitigate national behavior.”
In February 2024 Harris said, “Our sacred commitment to NATO remains ironclad”; expect her to continue the Biden legacy. She will inherit the capable Biden team of Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, Linda Thomas-Greenfield and Llyod Austin.
In a political international environment where younger leaders are being elected, Harris is the right fit. However, gender perspective always plays a part. For example, 68 percent of Canadian women have a positive view of Harris, while only 51 percent of Canadian men say the same. Significant differences between male and female views appear in Singapore, Australia, Italy, Malaysia, Sweden and the Netherlands.
Of course, a degree of misogyny also exists in America — women in leadership roles are often judged harder than men.
Patrick Drennan is a journalist based in New Zealand, with a degree in American history and economics.