(AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris is backtracking on another major issue — maybe.
According to Axios’s Alex Thompson, the Harris campaign sent out “a lengthy ‘fact-check’ email last week that covered several issues.” In that missive, a campaign spokesperson explained that Harris “does not support an electric vehicle mandate.”
That represents a change considering Harris’s co-sponsorship of a 2019 bill that would have required manufacturers to produce only electric and hydrogen-powered vehicles by 2040. Harris doubled down on that position during her 2020 campaign for president, pledging to “go further and implement an ‘accelerated model’ of the Zero-Emission Vehicles Act, according to her archived website,” per Thompson. That “accelerated model” would have moved the timeline up to 2035.
Axios asked the Harris campaign to clarify whether Harris’s supposed opposition to an electric vehicle mandate meant that she would sign or veto the bill she co-sponsored in 2019 last week. The Harris campaign did not respond
Harris has changed her position on a wide variety of issues since supplanting President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee earlier this summer, including immigration enforcement, fracking, and a massive overhaul of the health care system that would do away with all private insurance in favor of a Medicare-for-All, but has refrained from going into detail on what compelled those shifts.
Asked by CNN’s Dana Bash if voters should “feel comfortable and confident that what you’re saying now is going to be your policy moving forward” last week, Harris argued that “the most important and most significant aspect of my policy perspective and decisions is, my values have not changed.”
Former President and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s campaign, meanwhile, has hammered Harris for flip-flopping.
“I think it’s important for us not to buy this. If you look at the way that Kamala Harris has governed, she’s actually governed as a far-left person,” GOP vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance said last week. “She’s just trying to pretend that she’s not far left now because, of course, she wants to win the American people’s votes over the next couple of months. But if she does, she’s going to do the same thing that she’s been doing for the last