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       Where Kamala Harris and
				Donald Trump Stand on
				 Abortion   By Maggie Astor  Maggie Astor reviewed hundreds of interviews, statements, policy papers, bills and agency actions, and contacted both candidates’ campaigns. Updated Nov. 5, 2024       “The most important election of our lifetimes” is a political cliché, but the 2024 presidential election is certainly one of them. Across a wide array of issues affecting Americans’ daily lives and the shape of the country’s political system, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald J. Trump have sharply different records and plans.Here is what Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump have done and want to do on some of the most pressing issues, starting with abortion, climate, crime, democracy, the economy, education, foreign policy, health care, immigration, Israel and Gaza and L.G.B.T.Q. rights.   Abortion Climate Crime Democracy Economy Education Foreign Policy Health Care Immigration Israel and Gaza L.G.B.T.Q. Rights  Abortion      Kamala Harris  Ms. Harris supports a federal right to abortion and wants to prevent states from banning the procedure before fetal viability. She has regularly spoken out in favor of abortion rights, including making the first official visit to an abortion clinic by a president or a vice president.     Donald Trump  Mr. Trump’s Supreme Court appointees enabled the overturning of Roe v. Wade, ending federal protections for abortion. He has said that he would not sign a federal abortion ban but that states should be allowed to enact any restrictions they choose.    Roe v. Wade     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.  She told NBC News in October that she did not support “concessions” within an abortion-rights bill to win Republican support. “I don’t think we should be making concessions when we’re talking about a fundamental freedom to make decisions about your own body,” she said.  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.      Mr. Trump has said that he believes abortion rights are a state issue. If elected again, he would allow states to restrict abortion as they see fit, including potential monitoring of pregnancies or criminal charges for abortion patients, he told Time magazine.  “It’s irrelevant whether I’m comfortable or not,” he said. “It’s totally irrelevant, because the states are going to make those decisions.”  Mr. Trump appointed Justices Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. Their votes were critical to overturning Roe v. Wade.  He has boasted about that fact on a number of occasions, saying he accomplished what no Republican president before him could and calling himself “proudly the person responsible” for the overturning of Roe. He has repeatedly, falsely, claimed that “all legal scholars” supported overturning it.  “After 50 years of failure, with nobody coming even close, I was able to kill Roe v. Wade, much to the ‘shock’ of everyone, and for the first time put the pro life movement in a strong negotiating position,” he wrote on social media last year, adding, “Without me there would be no 6 weeks, 10 weeks, 15 weeks, or whatever is finally agreed to.”   Federal Ban     Ms. Harris opposes a federal abortion ban and has said she would veto it if Congress passed one.      Mr. Trump said in April that he would not sign a federal abortion ban. But in his debate with Ms. Harris in September, he did not commit to vetoing a ban if Congress passed one, and he rejected a statement from his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, that he had committed to doing so. Then he reversed again in October, saying “everyone knows” he would veto a ban.  He has long made contradictory statements on the matter, suggesting as recently as March that he might support some version of a federal ban. (In his first term, he endorsed a ban after 20 weeks of pregnancy.) In a Time magazine interview published in April, he deflected when asked whether he would veto a bill that defined life as beginning at fertilization.  Mr. Vance also sought in the vice-presidential debate in October to distinguish between a federal abortion ban and a “minimum national standard,” meaning a ban after a certain number of weeks. Asked whether Mr. Trump drew that distinction, a campaign spokeswoman said, “President Trump has been very clear: He will not support a federal ban on abortion.”  The campaign did not give a yes-or-no answer when asked if he would support enforcing the Comstock Act, an 1873 law that prohibits mailing materials used in abortions, and that some Trump allies want him to use to restrict abortion nationally without a formal ban. “President Trump has long been consistent in supporting the rights of states to make decisions on abortion,” a spokeswoman said.  In August, when asked the same question about enforcing the Comstock Act, he told CBS News, “We will be discussing specifics of it, but generally speaking, no, I wouldn’t.”  He has framed his caution around abortion as a political matter because “you have to win elections.”   In Vitro Fertilization     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.      After the Alabama Supreme Court ruling, Mr. Trump said he supported access to I.V.F. because “we want to make it easier for mothers and fathers to have babies, not harder.” However, he has not endorsed currently proposed legislation that would protect it.  In August, he suggested that he would support a federal mandate that insurance companies cover I.V.F. He did not give any details on how this proposal would work.   Medication Abortion     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 are trying 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.      Mr. Trump appointed the federal judge, Matthew Kacsmaryk, whose ruling last year voided the F.D.A.’s approval of mifepristone. An appeals court panel that was composed mainly of Trump appointees allowed it to stay on the market but upheld other parts of Judge Kacsmaryk’s ruling that made the drug harder to obtain.  In June, the Supreme Court unanimously rejected the challenge to mifepristone, ruling that the plaintiffs did not have standing to bring the suit; anti-abortion activists are trying again with different plaintiffs.  Mr. Trump said during the presidential debate in June that he agreed with the Supreme Court’s ruling, which he described as having “approved the abortion pill.” But because it was based on standing, the ruling did not address the merits of the case.  His campaign did not respond to requests to confirm whether he would support rescinding F.D.A. approval for abortion pills.   Money and Abortion     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.      When he took office in 2017, Mr. Trump reinstated the so-called Mexico City policy, which blocked certain forms of foreign aid to organizations that provide abortions or abortion referrals.  Republican presidents have routinely done that, but Mr. Trump went further: He extended the policy to block the organizations from receiving not only family-planning funding but also broader health aid, including money for clean water, nutrition programs and H.I.V., malaria and tuberculosis prevention.  He placed similar restrictions on Title X funding for domestic organizations for the first time since the Reagan administration.  Mr. Trump supported an unsuccessful Senate effort to make permanent the Hyde Amendment, which bans Medicaid funding for most abortions.     Climate      Kamala Harris  Ms. Harris supports the Biden administration’s general approach to climate policies, including subsidies for renewable energy. She has promoted environmental justice programs, which focus on the impact of climate change on marginalized communities.     Donald Trump  Mr. Trump denies established climate science, disparages renewable energy and champions unlimited production of fossil fuels. His administration rolled back more than 100 environmental protection regulations, and he plans a similar agenda if elected again.    Regulations     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.      As president, Mr. Trump rolled back more than 100 environmental regulations, including many aimed at reducing planet-warming emissions and protecting clean air and water.  He has pledged to rescind “every one” of the Biden administration’s electricity regulations and to end its rules promoting electric vehicles. In April, he promised oil executives and lobbyists directly that he would reverse regulations that hurt their businesses.  Among the rules he ended or replaced in his term were some enacted by President Barack Obama that had limited emissions from power plants and from cars and trucks. He did away with a requirement that state and regional officials track tailpipe emissions on federal highways; with methane emission standards; with reporting requirements for oil and gas companies; and with regulations meant to reduce emissions of hydrofluorocarbons.  He also directed agencies to stop calculating the “social cost” of carbon, which they had done under the Obama administration to estimate the long-term economic benefits of reducing emissions. He revoked California’s authority to set its own, stricter standards for vehicle emissions, and he said in October that if elected again, he would not allow any state to ban gas-powered vehicles.   Renewable Energy     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.      Mr. Trump wants to roll back the Inflation Reduction Act’s renewable energy and electric-vehicle incentives. Eliminating them would require congressional action, but his administration would have significant power over how to implement the tax breaks created by the law, and it could make them harder to get.  At the Republican National Convention, referring to funding allocated for climate programs but not yet spent, he said, “We will redirect that money for important projects like roads, bridges, dams, and we will not allow it to be spent on the meaningless Green New Scam ideas.” (Presidents are obligated to spend money as Congress allocates it, but Mr. Trump has suggested he would try to claim the authority not to. His administration could also slow disbursements or narrow eligibility rules.)  He has repeatedly attacked and spread misinformation about renewable energy, including statements claiming falsely that wind turbines cause cancer and are “driving whales crazy” and that relying on solar power would leave older Americans without air-conditioning.  His administration favored oil and gas development over renewable-energy development in its regulatory and permitting decisions, and he said at a rally in May that, if elected again, he would end offshore wind projects by executive order on his first day back in office.  The one carbon-free option he has praised is nuclear energy. David Bernhardt, who served as secretary of the interior under Mr. Trump, said on a campaign call in August that Mr. Trump supports nuclear energy production.   Fossil Fuels     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.      Mr. Trump has called for unlimited oil and gas drilling, pledging to “end Biden’s delays in federal drilling permits and leases” and “remove all red tape that is leaving oil and natural gas projects stranded.” He has also called for building more coal plants and eliminating a Biden regulation that would force many existing plants to close.  In his first term, his administration approved the Keystone pipeline — which the Obama administration had blocked — and expedited the Dakota Access pipeline. (A federal judge later ruled that his administration had not sufficiently assessed the Dakota project’s environmental impact.) Soon after that, he issued an executive order to expand offshore drilling.  He weakened the National Environmental Policy Act to limit public review of federal infrastructure projects, including fossil-fuel developments like pipelines and power plants; reduced protections for wetlands and endangered species, enabling oil and gas development in locations and circumstances where it would previously have been barred; and allowed oil and gas development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.  He says if elected again, he would end the Biden administration’s pause on permits for new liquefied natural gas export facilities.   Adaptation     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.      Mr. Trump has not called for policies to help communities prepare for extreme-weather events such as droughts, wildfires and hurricanes that are becoming more frequent and intense because of climate change.  In both 2018 and 2020, he inaccurately blamed poor forest management, not climate change, for historically severe wildfires in California. “I said, ‘You’ve got to clean your floors, you got to clean your forests,’” he said in 2020. “Maybe we’re just going to have to make them pay for it because they don’t listen to us.”  In September, as wildfires raged again, he blamed California’s water management policies and threatened to withhold federal aid unless the state’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, agreed to divert water in the ways Mr. Trump called for. Two former officials said that when he was in office, he had opposed sending aid to California until aides showed him data on how many Republicans lived there.  His administration froze hiring at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, resulting in fewer inspections of workplaces for conditions including dangerous heat, and he reduced funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency. His campaign did not answer a question about his position on the Biden administration’s proposed rules establishing workplace safety standards for extreme heat.   Emission Reductions     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.      In withdrawing the United States from the Paris Agreement, under which almost every country had committed to try to limit warming to no more than two degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, Mr. Trump formally disavowed emission reductions as a goal.  As recently as September, he called climate change “one of the greatest scams of all time.” His campaign says he would withdraw from the Paris Agreement again if re-elected, and campaign officials have said he might go further by trying to prevent the United States from participating in future international climate negotiations.  While Mr. Biden undid many of Mr. Trump’s climate policies, their damage may not be fully reversible.  A report in 2022 from researchers at Yale and Columbia found that the United States’ environmental performance had plummeted as a result of the Trump administration’s actions. A separate analysis in 2020 projected 1.8 billion more metric tons of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere by 2035 than there would have been without his dismantling of regulations.     Crime      Kamala Harris  Ms. Harris supports more funding for the police, a change from her first presidential campaign, during which she said adding officers wouldn’t make communities safer. She supported significant criminal justice reforms in 2019, but has not confirmed whether she still does. Restrictions on guns are a major component of her proposals for reducing crime.     Donald Trump  Mr. Trump wants to deploy the military to Democratic-run cities — potentially by invoking the Insurrection Act — to combat what he describes as rampant crime, though F.B.I. statistics show that crime rates have dropped. He signed a criminal justice reform bill as president, but since then has called for harsher criminal penalties and less due process. He opposes gun restrictions.    Policing     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.      Mr. Trump has denounced calls to defund police departments. But he has also called for defunding the Justice Department and the F.B.I.; denounced officials investigating his actions, which have resulted in 34 felony convictions and three other indictments; and defended supporters who brutalized police officers at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.  As president, he sent federal agents to Chicago, Kansas City, Mo., and other cities in response to spikes in violence, and he says he would do the same if elected again. He has vowed to deploy the National Guard without waiting for requests from local officials, part of a broader plan to deploy the military on U.S. soil — potentially by invoking the Insurrection Act to get around a prohibition on using the military for domestic law enforcement.  He says he would “strengthen” qualified immunity, which shields police officers from lawsuits alleging civil rights violations, and further “indemnify” officers from punishment, but his campaign did not provide details on what that would involve.  He has also said that he would approve Justice Department grants only to police departments that adopt “stop and frisk” policies — which disproportionately affect Black and Latino men — and that cities should return to “broken windows” policing, which holds that cracking down on low-level crimes can prevent serious ones.  As president, he rescinded an Obama-era executive order that limited transfers of surplus military equipment to police departments. Mr. Biden signed an executive order with a similar provision. Mr. Trump has not said whether he would repeal that one, too, but he praised such transfers in a speech to the Fraternal Order of Police in September.  He has urged the police to treat suspects more harshly and at times called for abandoning due process. In September, he suggested that “one really violent day” of unchecked police force could solve property crime, declaring: “One rough hour — and I mean real rough. The word will get out and it will end immediately.”  Last year, he said, “Very simply, if you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store.” That echoed what former Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper recalled as Mr. Trump’s response in 2020 after a minority of Black Lives Matter protests resulted in looting or violence: “Can’t you just shoot them?”  After the police murder of Mr. Floyd that year, Mr. Trump signed an executive order that encouraged but did not require departments to take steps like limiting chokeholds and strengthening training.   Guns     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.      Mr. Trump vowed this year to “roll back every Biden attack on the Second Amendment,” and to oppose any new gun restrictions.  His administration enacted one significant restriction, a ban on bump stocks — attachments that enable semiautomatic rifles to fire faster — after a 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas. The Supreme Court overturned the bump stock ban this year, and Mr. Trump’s campaign said in response: “The court has spoken, and their decision should be respected. President Trump has been and always will be a fierce defender of Americans’ Second Amendment rights.”  After the Parkland, Fla., school shooting in 2018, Mr. Trump briefly suggested that he would support universal background checks and red-flag laws, which allow the removal of firearms from people whom a court deems to pose a threat to themselves or others. “Take the guns first, go through due process second,” he said. But he quickly abandoned those proposals in the face of opposition from the National Rifle Association.  “During my four years, nothing happened, and there was great pressure on me having to do with guns,” he said in February. “We did nothing. We didn’t yield.”   Criminal Justice     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.      Mr. Trump signed the bipartisan First Step Act, a turn away from “tough on crime” policies that had led to mass incarceration starting in the 1980s. Among other measures, it reduced some mandatory minimum sentences, expanded early-release programs and increased job training for former prisoners. He also supported restrictions on asking about criminal history in federal hiring.  His campaign said he had not changed his position on the First Step Act. However, his administration also took steps in the opposite direction.  For instance, in 2017, the Justice Department released guidelines directing federal prosecutors to pursue the most serious charges they believed they could “readily” prove, and requiring exceptions to be approved by a supervisor.  “By definition, the most serious offenses are those that carry the most substantial guidelines sentence, including mandatory minimum sentences,” a department memo said.  In 2020, Mr. Trump featured Alice Marie Johnson, a nonviolent drug offender whose sentence he had commuted, at the Republican National Convention. But he has since suggested that drug dealers should be executed. When the Fox News host Bret Baier noted that Ms. Johnson would have been executed under this policy, Mr. Trump said: “She wouldn’t be killed. It would start as of now.”   Death Penalty     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.      Mr. Trump supports the death penalty and has called for expanding it to drug dealers and human traffickers.  He has also called for reducing due process, urging Congress “to ensure that anyone caught trafficking children across our border receives the death penalty immediately” and praising China’s use of “quick” trials to sentence people to death for drug crimes.  As president, he ended a moratorium on federal executions, allowing the first federal execution in 17 years. His administration put to death in six months more than four times as many people as had been executed in nearly the previous 60 years.   Marijuana Laws     Ms. Harris has called for legalizing marijuana for both medical and recreational use. “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.      Mr. Trump’s administration took steps against allowing marijuana use, including reversing an Obama-era policy that had protected states that legalized marijuana from federal crackdowns.  However, he recently said that he supported reclassifying marijuana as a Schedule III drug, which could open the door for medical use. (It is currently Schedule I, the same category as heroin.) He also endorsed a constitutional amendment in Florida to legalize recreational marijuana, but his campaign declined to say whether he wanted to do that federally.       Democracy      Kamala Harris  Ms. Harris’s campaign has framed the election in part as a fight to preserve American democracy. She has condemned Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and she supports legislation to expand voting access and counter restrictions in Republican-led states.     Donald Trump  Mr. Trump is the only U.S. president who has refused to accept his loss. He tried to overturn the 2020 election and has sought to delegitimize the electoral system. He has used dehumanizing terms like “vermin” to describe his political opponents.    Transfer of Power     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.      Mr. Trump has refused to commit to accepting the 2024 election results, has not dismissed the possibility of political violence if he loses, and recently said he “shouldn’t have left” in 2021.  “I think we’re going to win,” he said in an April interview with Time. “And if we don’t win, you know, it depends. It always depends on the fairness of an election.”  He refused to accept his defeat in 2020, after which he and his allies attempted an extraordinary scheme to subvert voters’ will: They pressured legislators to declare him the winner of states he had lost; organized slates of fake Electoral College electors; pushed Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to certify the results; and agitated his supporters, who threatened election officials and stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.  Two of the four criminal indictments against him, one federal and one in Georgia, are related to those actions.  He has continued to promote the same lies since then. In 2022, he suggested the “termination” of the Constitution in order to overturn or rerun the election.  He has also embraced people charged in connection with the Jan. 6 attack, calling them “patriots” and “hostages,” and has indicated on several occasions that he would pardon them if elected again.  Mr. Trump has been pushing his supporters for a turnout this fall that is “too big to rig,” pre-emptively sowing doubt about the validity of the election, as he did in 2016 and 2020.   Voting Rights     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.      Mr. Trump has frequently attacked mail voting and spread unfounded conspiracy theories about the security of voting machines.  His words have fueled a decline in public confidence in the well-documented integrity of the electoral system that many Republican state legislators have used to justify new restrictions on voting. Mr. Trump has largely endorsed those restrictions and has often called for a national voter identification requirement.  He has sent mixed messages on early voting. Facing evidence that discouraging it could hurt Republican turnout, he told supporters on social media in April, “Absentee voting, early voting and Election Day voting are all good options.” But he has also repeatedly called for single-day elections — which would mean eliminating early voting — conducted exclusively with paper ballots.  Mr. Trump opposed the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act when Democrats tried to pass them in 2021. “They have a so-called voting rights bill, which is a voting rights for Democrats, because Republicans will never be elected again if that happens,” he told Fox Business.  As president, he established a commission to investigate voter fraud after falsely claiming that undocumented immigrants and votes cast in the names of dead people had caused him to lose the popular vote in 2016. The commission found no evidence of widespread fraud, and Mr. Trump disbanded it.   Executive Power     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.      Mr. Trump has indicated that he would end the norm of Justice Department independence, openly vowing to use the levers of government to punish his political opponents — as he tried to do when he was in office — and anyone whom he deems to have engaged in “unscrupulous behavior” in this year’s election. He has also floated the idea of pardoning himself, something no president has ever tried to do.  He also said he would consider firing a U.S. attorney who declined to prosecute someone whom Mr. Trump wanted prosecuted, telling Time magazine, “It would depend on the situation.” And he confirmed in October that, if elected again, he would fire Jack Smith, the special counsel leading two of the four criminal cases against him.  As president, Mr. Trump issued an executive order that sought to strip civil-service protections from many career federal employees, which would have let him fire them at will and purge federal agencies of people he disagreed with. In September, he vowed to fire civil servants who have carried out Biden administration policies. He and his allies have been planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power if he is re-elected.  At least twice, he authorized military force without congressional approval, something Mr. Biden has also done, in keeping with an assessment from the Justice Department.  Mr. Trump also used an emergency declaration to spend more money on border wall construction than Congress had appropriated, and then twice vetoed bills passed by Congress to end the emergency. Conversely, he wants the ability to refuse to spend money that Congress has appropriated, something lawmakers banned decades ago.  Fox News’s Sean Hannity asked him in December whether he would pledge not to abuse presidential power. Mr. Trump replied: “This guy, he says, ‘You’re not going to be a dictator, are you?’ I said, ‘No, no, no — other than Day 1.’ We’re closing the border, and we’re drilling, drilling, drilling. After that, I’m not a dictator.”     Economy      Kamala Harris  Ms. Harris supports the Biden administration’s spending on infrastructure and renewable energy. She wants to ban price gouging, create incentives to build housing, expand tax credits for middle- and low-income households, and offset the costs by increasing taxes on corporations and wealthy Americans.     Donald Trump  Mr. Trump enacted a large package of tax cuts as president and pursued protectionist trade policies, including a trade war with China. He wants to cut taxes further and enact more sweeping tariffs. He says he would not cut Social Security or Medicare benefits but has not provided a plan to keep the programs solvent.    Inflation     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.      Inflation was low — generally around 2 percent — during Mr. Trump’s term, as it had been for years before.  He has argued without evidence that the United States would not have had high inflation if he had remained in office for a second term, though most nations did. He has indicated that he would not have spent the stimulus money Mr. Biden did in 2021, which many economists say was a factor in inflation, but he has said little about how he would have handled the other factors, like global supply chain problems, that drove inflation worldwide.  Economists say the agenda he has described for his second term is not likely to reduce inflation, and it includes policies like sweeping tariffs and deportations that could make it worse.  Mr. Trump has also criticized high interest rates, the Federal Reserve’s primary tool to control inflation. He argued in August that the president should have a say in the decisions of the Fed, which normally operates independently of the White House.   Spending     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.      Mr. Trump, like Mr. Biden, significantly increased discretionary spending, but for different purposes. Before the pandemic, his increases went mainly to the military and veterans’ care: In 2018, for example, he signed a military budget of $700 billion, a double-digit percentage increase from the year before.  Spending increased more significantly during the pandemic, with stimulus and other relief bills totaling over $3 trillion by the time Mr. Trump left office. Those bills sent two rounds of direct payments to Americans, created the Paycheck Protection Program to keep companies afloat, expanded unemployment benefits and provided funding for hospitals, vaccines and local governments.  Mr. Trump has embraced Elon Musk’s calls to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget, but he has not explained what he would cut.   Taxes     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, bring the credit to $6,000 for parents of newborns and make it refundable, meaning poor families that don’t owe taxes could receive it. 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.      Mr. Trump cut corporate taxes as part of a $1.5 trillion package in 2017, the most sweeping tax overhaul in decades. It permanently reduced the corporate tax rate to 21 percent from 35 percent and temporarily reduced tax rates for individuals, including the wealthiest Americans. It also doubled the maximum child tax credit to $2,000 per child.  Mr. Trump wants Congress to make permanent the individual cuts, which are set to expire in 2025, and further lower the corporate rate to 15 percent — though he acknowledged in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek that this would be “hard” and suggested he might settle for 20 percent. His campaign did not answer a question about whether he would reduce or eliminate the corporate minimum tax, which was created by the Inflation Reduction Act and is distinct from the regular corporate rate.  He has proposed or flirted with an array of other cuts, often floating huge changes in an impromptu-seeming way, without explaining how they would work or how he would deal with the lost revenue. Those ideas include eliminating taxes on tips, overtime pay and Social Security benefits, lowering taxes for Americans living abroad, and even ending income taxes altogether in favor of a tariffs-only system that the United States abandoned more than a century ago.  His campaign said he would “consider” expanding the child tax credit, but did not commit or give details; his past policies on the credit extended it to high-income families but did not make it available to poor ones whose incomes are too low to owe taxes.  Though the 2017 tax package substantially cut taxes overall, in one respect it went in the other direction: It capped a deduction that let people save on their federal taxes based on how much they paid in state and local taxes. That cap mainly affected high earners in high-tax states like California and New York. Mr. Trump now says he wants to reverse the cap.  A study from a nonpartisan group, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, estimated that Mr. Trump’s tax and spending plans would add about twice as much to the national debt as Ms. Harris’s plans would.   Trade     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.      Mr. Trump jettisoned Republican free-trade orthodoxy and embraced protectionism, starting a trade war with China.  He set tariffs in 2018 on washing machines and solar-energy equipment, and later on steel and aluminum. The trade war with China began later that year when he imposed an escalating series of tariffs. China responded in kind. Other countries imposed their own retaliatory tariffs. American consumers, researchers found, bore the brunt of the costs.  Mr. Trump signed an initial trade deal with China in 2020, but the agreement preserved most of the tariffs.  He has suggested he would go further in a second term, imposing tariffs of 60 percent or more on Chinese products and 10 or 20 percent on other imports. In March, he said he supported a 100 percent tariff on cars made by Chinese companies in Mexico, and in May he one-upped himself to 200 percent.  Economists say tariffs of this scope would increase prices and could cause a recession.  In October, Mr. Trump suggested that, on the cars tariff, he was making up numbers as a threat to get countries to manufacture in the United States. “Until now I’ve said 200” percent, he told Fox News. “I’m using that just as a figure. I’ll say 100, 200, I’ll say 500, I don’t care.”  His other major trade policy was a renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, which critics said had encouraged outsourcing to Mexico. The new version, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, contains more protections for workers and provisions aimed primarily at encouraging auto manufacturing in the United States.   Regulations     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.      The Trump administration reduced financial regulations, including some that were enacted after the 2008 housing crisis.  One of its most significant steps was weakening the Volcker Rule, which had blocked banks from making risky bets with customers’ money if the customers had not requested the bets. The loosened rule lets banks invest in certain funds that make such bets.  Under a leader appointed by Mr. Trump, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau rescinded restrictions on payday loans. The Department of Housing and Urban Development also weakened a housing anti-discrimination rule so severely that banks took the unusual step of opposing a deregulatory move.  His administration weakened an Obama-era overtime rule, and while he said during his 2016 campaign that he would support raising the federal minimum wage, he did not pursue that once elected. In 2020, he said minimum wages should be left to the states.  He said in September that he would eliminate 10 regulations for every one he added.   Social Security and Medicare     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.      Mr. Trump says he would not cut Social Security or Medicare benefits. But he also wants to eliminate taxes on Social Security benefits, which would cause the program to run out of money sooner.  He has not explained how he would keep the programs solvent without reducing benefits or increasing taxes. Projections fluctuate based on economic conditions, but estimates from this spring indicate that, under current policies, Social Security will run out of money to cover full benefits by 2035, and part of Medicare will do so by 2036. The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget found in a report in October that Mr. Trump’s proposals could make the situation worse, draining funds in just six years.  When he was asked on Fox Business in August about his tax plan moving up that date, he said that might be a good thing because it would pressure Congress to “make a deal.”  In the past, he has gone back and forth on whether he would consider cutting benefits.  In 2020, he suggested that he would “at some point” be open to cuts, then backtracked. In March, he told CNBC, “There is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements, in terms of cutting and in terms of also the theft and the bad management of entitlements”; his campaign then said he had been talking about cutting “waste,” not benefits. As president, he proposed cutting the Social Security budget in part by more aggressively combating fraud.   Housing     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.      The Republican Party platform, which Mr. Trump and his campaign led the drafting of, calls for opening “limited portions of federal lands to allow for new home construction” and reducing inflation in order to lower mortgage rates. (The president has no direct control over interest rates.)  It also calls for “tax incentives and support for first-time buyers” and for cutting “unnecessary regulations that raise housing costs.” Mr. Trump’s campaign did not provide details on what these incentives would involve or what regulations he would cut.  In his first term, his budget requests urged Congress to reduce funding for federal housing programs, including eliminating the National Housing Trust Fund and the HOME Investment Partnerships program, which provide money to build, repair and operate housing for low-income Americans. Congress did not agree.  Mr. Trump has blamed immigrants for a lack of affordable housing, an assessment economists reject. He wants to make undocumented immigrants ineligible for mortgages.     Education      Kamala Harris  Ms. Harris wants to increase funding for public schools, through measures including programs focused on low-income students. She supports the Biden administration’s student-loan forgiveness efforts and opposes laws that restrict what schools can teach about race, gender and American history.     Donald Trump  Mr. Trump wants to abolish the Department of Education, give parents federal dollars to send their children to private schools or home-school them, and restrict what schools can teach about race, gender and American history. He opposes student-debt forgiveness and affirmative action.    K-12 Education Funding     Ms. Harris supports the Department of Education and has denounced Mr. Trump’s calls to abolish it. She wants to increase funding for public schools, as the Biden administration has done through, among other things, an expansion of Title I funding for low-income students.  She has not spoken recently about “school choice” programs, which would provide federal funding for parents to send their children to private schools or home-school them, and which Mr. Trump supports. But the Democratic Party platform opposes them: It rejects policies, including vouchers for private schooling, “that divert taxpayer-funded resources away from public education.”  During her 2019 presidential campaign, Ms. Harris supported universal prekindergarten — as the Democratic platform still does — and proposed more than $300 billion in federal funding to increase teachers’ salaries by an average of $13,500. Her campaign did not confirm whether she still supported the salary proposal.      Mr. Trump wants to eliminate the Department of Education, a proposal he also made during his 2016 campaign. In office, he sought repeatedly to cut the department’s budget, but Congress never obliged.  “We’re going to end education coming out of Washington, D.C.,” he said in a campaign video last year. “We’re going to close it up. All those buildings all over the place, and you have people that in many cases hate our children. We’re going to send it all back to the states.”  He says he would spend “less than half” what the federal government currently does on education. “We’ll have one person plus a secretary,” he said in October. “And all the person has to do is: Are you teaching English? Are you teaching arithmetic? What are you doing, reading, writing and arithmetic, and are you not teaching woke.”  He wants to provide federal funding for parents to send their children to private schools or home-school them — a proposal that is known by supporters as school choice, and that Mr. Trump calls the “civil rights issue of our time.”  He signed an executive order in 2020 that let states use anti-poverty funding for school vouchers during the pandemic, and last year he said he wanted to replicate Iowa’s program to give every student public funds for private-school tuition. As president, he signed legislation letting families use up to $10,000 a year in tax-exempt money from “529” college savings accounts for private-school tuition starting in elementary school, and he now wants to allow that money to be used for home-schooling expenses as well.  He has vowed to withhold funding from schools that require vaccinations or that he deems to have promoted “transgender ideology” or “critical race theory,” a reference to discussions of how racism affects American society. (His campaign has said the vaccination statement applies only to Covid vaccines, but Mr. Trump doesn’t specify that.) He also says he would offer “massive funding preferences and favorable treatment” for states and school districts that eliminate tenure, reduce the number of administrators and let parents elect principals.   Curriculums     Ms. Harris opposes laws restricting what schools can teach students about race, gender and American history, and curriculums that she has said present a sanitized version of history.  “They want to replace history with lies,” she said in a speech last year condemning new curriculum standards in Florida that suggested some enslaved people had benefited from slavery. “These extremist so-called leaders should model what we know to be the correct and right approach if we really are invested in the well-being of our children. Instead, they dare to push propaganda to our children.”  She has also condemned restrictions on what books students can read in classes or libraries — “we see extremists who pass book bans, book bans in this year of our Lord 2024,” she said in February — and laws like one in Florida that prevent teachers from discussing gender identity and sexual orientation.      Mr. Trump has called for restricting what schools can teach students about race, gender and American history, and for requiring “patriotic” curriculums.  He wants to ban “radical gender ideology” and “critical race theory,” terms Republicans use to refer to acceptance of transgender people and to discussions of the effects of racism on American society. He has suggested he would enforce these restrictions by withholding funding to schools that disobeyed, but he has not explained how he would reconcile that with his pledge to delegate education funding and decisions to states, and his campaign did not answer that question.  In a campaign video last year, he called for “bringing back prayer to our schools” and teaching students “to love their country, not to hate their country,” even as he has said he wants teachers who “understand that their job is not to indoctrinate children.” He said he would create a “credentialing body” to certify teachers who “embrace patriotic values” and “support our way of life.”  He also wants to make it easier to fire teachers. “If we have pink-haired communists teaching our kids, we have a major problem,” he said last year.   College Funding and Debt     Ms. Harris has endorsed the Biden administration’s student-loan forgiveness and repayment assistance programs and said she would continue them. Courts have blocked three such programs — the Supreme Court struck down a $400 billion plan last year, and judges halted others in July and October — but the administration has used existing mechanisms to forgive about $175 billion in student debt.  She has also praised the funding increases President Biden has signed for historically Black colleges and universities, and a $900 increase in the maximum amount of Pell Grants for college students from low-income families. She has not confirmed whether she supports the additional $750 increase that Mr. Biden sought for Pell Grants in his most recent budget request.  During her 2019 presidential campaign, she proposed a debt forgiveness program for “Pell Grant recipients who start a business that operates for three years in disadvantaged communities”; her campaign did not say whether she still supported that. Earlier, when she was the attorney general of California, she successfully sued a for-profit chain of colleges for false and predatory advertising, and as vice president, she supported debt cancellation for its students.  As a senator, she also supported making two-year community colleges free for everyone, and making public four-year colleges free for families earning less than $125,000 a year. Her campaign did not confirm her current position.  She supports the Biden administration’s apprenticeship policies, and her campaign says she would “do even more to scale up programs that create good career pathways for non-college graduates,” but it has not provided details on what that would involve. Mr. Biden directed more than $240 million in new funding to a federal apprenticeship program, while eliminating a Trump-era program that had let companies and industry groups develop apprenticeships. He said that program duplicated the existing one while offering fewer protections for workers.      Mr. Trump said last year that he would tax private universities’ endowments and use the money to fund a free online university that would “gather an entire universe of the highest quality educational content,” offer “study groups, mentors, industry partnerships and the latest breakthrough in computing” and ultimately grant bachelor’s degrees.  He did not provide details on how this would work, such as whether it would involve professors or just video and text lessons. His campaign also did not answer that question.  He opposes student-loan forgiveness, calling it unfair to people who paid off their debt. His administration weakened a measure, the “borrower defense” rule, that discharges federal student loans if their college is found to have deceived them or engaged in illegal activity, and he vetoed a bipartisan resolution seeking to reverse those changes. His administration also denied about 99 percent of applications under a debt forgiveness program for public servants.  The Republican Party platform, which Mr. Trump personally directed, calls for a focus on alternatives to traditional college degrees. He has called for increasing access to internships and career counseling, and his administration created a program for companies and industry groups to develop apprenticeships.   Affirmative Action     Ms. Harris has denounced the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling rejecting affirmative action.  “It is well established that all students benefit when classrooms and campuses reflect the incredible diversity of our nation,” she said in a statement at the time. “Colleges and universities provide opportunities for students to interact with Americans from all walks of life and learn from one another. By making our schools less diverse, this ruling will harm the educational experience for all students.”  The Justice and Education Departments under Mr. Biden said that, as they interpreted the ruling, universities could still prioritize nonwhite students for “outreach and recruitment” as long as everyone had “the same opportunity to apply and compete for admission.” Ms. Harris’s campaign did not confirm whether she agreed with that interpretation.      Mr. Trump says he would direct the Justice Department to pursue civil rights claims against any school or university “that engages in unlawful racial discrimination,” a reference to affirmative action, which the Supreme Court rejected last year.  He appointed three of the six justices who made that decision, and he praised it when it came down. His administration also pushed against affirmative action before the ruling: In 2018, the Education and Justice Departments rescinded Obama-era guidelines that had encouraged colleges to take race into account in admissions in order to make their campuses more diverse.  The Supreme Court excluded military academies from its ruling, meaning affirmative action programs are still legal there. But Mr. Trump has expressed broad opposition to the programs, and his administration would have the ability to choose not to defend them in court, though his campaign did not confirm whether it would.       Foreign Policy      Kamala Harris  Ms. Harris supports an active global role for the United States, including in NATO and other military alliances, and wants to continue to send military aid to Ukraine. She has not given many details on her policies toward China but has said she wants to protect the United States against China’s economic practices without cutting ties entirely.     Donald Trump  Mr. Trump has criticized alliances like NATO and suggested that he would encourage Russia to invade a member country if he didn’t think the country was paying enough for its defense. He has indicated that he is reluctant to send further military aid to Ukraine and has said he wants to “eliminate” the United States’ economic dependence on China.    Alliances     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.”      Mr. Trump often criticizes NATO and, as president, suggested withdrawing from it, describing it as a drain on American resources. He has not ruled out withdrawing from NATO in a second term, and his campaign did not confirm whether he would.  He could also weaken the alliance without leaving it. In a video on his campaign website, he calls for “fundamentally re-evaluating” the alliance’s “purpose” and “mission.” Asked what that meant, his campaign did not give a direct answer but pointed to a speech in August in which he said he would “insist” that NATO members spend 3 percent of their gross domestic product on their militaries instead of a current nonbinding target of 2 percent.  In February, he said he might even encourage President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to invade a NATO country if he thought it wasn’t paying enough. (Some countries have not met the NATO goal for spending on their militaries, but they do not owe money to the alliance.) He said that a European leader had once asked, “If we don’t pay and we’re attacked by Russia, will you protect us?” and that he had responded: “No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want.”  He has also suggested stepping back from other alliances. He disparaged a mutual defense treaty between the United States and Japan and wrote on social media this year, “We should never give money anymore without the hope of a payback, or without ‘strings’ attached.”   Ukraine     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.      Mr. Trump insists he could end the war in Ukraine before his inauguration, saying he would talk to President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and get them to agree to a deal.  He has refused to describe the deal he envisions — “I don’t want to tell you,” he said in September — but it would almost certainly involve Ukraine giving up territory to Russia, which Mr. Zelensky has made clear he does not intend to do.  Russia started the war by invading Ukraine, but Mr. Trump has framed it as a dispute between two good-faith parties that want a “fair deal,” saying, “I’m sure President Putin wants it to stop.” In the debate in September, he declined to say he wanted a Ukrainian victory, suggesting that a speedy end to the war was more important than who won.  “It’s in the U.S.’s best interest to get this war finished and just get it done,” he said.  Mr. Trump, who was impeached in 2019 for withholding U.S. aid to pressure Mr. Zelensky to help him politically, suggested to Fox News last year that he could have prevented the war by pre-emptively persuading Ukraine to cede land. “At worst, I could’ve made a deal to take over something,” he said. “There are certain areas that are Russian-speaking areas, frankly.”  He has not given definitive answers when asked whether he would sign additional military aid to Ukraine if Congress approved it. However, he has questioned the need for further aid, suggested that it should be structured as a loan and criticized the amount already given.  “This fight is far more important for Europe than it is for the U.S.,” he said last year, adding: “Start by telling Europe that they must pay at least equal to what the U.S. is paying to help Ukraine. They must also pay us, retroactively, the difference.”   China     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.      Mr. Trump has vowed to take an even harder line on China than he did in his first term, when he imposed tariffs on Chinese products, leading to an escalating trade war whose costs were mostly borne by Americans. (Mr. Biden has largely continued the tariffs.) He is calling for tariffs of 60 percent or more on Chinese products and 100 percent or more on cars made by Chinese companies in Mexico.  He has also said he would “phase out all Chinese imports of essential goods,” restrict American companies’ ability to invest in China and revoke China’s “most favored nation” trade status, greatly reducing economic cooperation. He claims his plan would “eliminate U.S. dependence on China,” a monumentally difficult goal.  He has changed some of his positions, most prominently on banning TikTok out of security concerns about its Chinese parent company. He opposed a bill that Mr. Biden signed in April to ban the app in the United States unless its owner sells it, though in 2020, Mr. Trump tried to ban it himself through a pair of executive actions that a court partly blocked.  He has not said whether he would take military action if China invaded Taiwan, and his campaign did not respond when asked if he would consider it in that situation or any other.  When asked a similar question on Fox News in January, he did not give a straight answer, instead criticizing Taiwan for taking “all of our chip business,” a reference to semiconductors. Speaking to Bloomberg Businessweek in June, he repeated that and suggested that Taiwan should pay the United States to defend it.  As president, he took an inconsistent approach to China’s incursions in the South China Sea. In 2017, his administration limited Navy patrols in disputed waters. But in 2020, he imposed penalties on 24 companies for helping the Chinese government build artificial islands in those waters.  He has repeatedly praised President Xi Jinping. “Central casting, brilliant guy,” he said last year. “You know, when I say he’s brilliant, everyone says, ‘Oh, well, that’s terrible, you call him’ — well, he runs 1.4 billion people with an iron fist. Smart, brilliant, everything perfect.”   Iran     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.”      Mr. Trump ended the Iran nuclear deal reached by President Barack Obama and foreign leaders, under which Iran had agreed to limit its nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of sanctions. His administration tightened sanctions and assassinated an Iranian commander, and Iran abandoned the restrictions on its nuclear program.  He said in September that he was open to talks on a different agreement, but gave no details.  After Iran launched a retaliatory strike on Israel in April, he told Time magazine that he would support Israel in the event of Iranian attacks.  In September, he said that if he were president and Iran threatened an American political candidate — as it recently threatened him, according to a briefing he received — he would tell Iran’s leaders, “If you do anything to harm this person, we are going to blow your largest cities and the country itself to smithereens.”   Afghanistan     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.”      Mr. Trump negotiated directly with the Taliban to try to reach a peace agreement in Afghanistan. Those talks, which did not include the American-backed government in Afghanistan, led to a deal in 2020 in which the U.S. agreed to withdraw its troops in exchange for conditions including the Taliban cutting ties with terrorist groups like Al Qaeda.  It was that deal that created the timetable that culminated with Mr. Biden’s withdrawal of troops in 2021. Mr. Trump has argued, without providing details, that he would have carried out the withdrawal in a more orderly fashion.     Health Care      Kamala Harris  Ms. Harris wants to make permanent the Biden administration’s expanded subsidies for insurance under the Affordable Care Act, broaden direct negotiations between Medicare and pharmaceutical companies on drug prices, and provide Medicare coverage for long-term at-home care.     Donald Trump  Mr. Trump, who tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act and then took a series of steps that weakened it, has said that he still wants to replace the A.C.A. but that he does not have a plan for how to do so. He closed a federal pandemic preparedness office and defied scientific guidance in responding to the Covid-19 pandemic.    Health Coverage     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.”      Mr. Trump tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and when that failed in Congress, he urged courts to strike down the law. (The Supreme Court declined.) As recently as last November, he said Republicans should “never give up” on repealing the A.C.A.  He tried to distance himself from that in April, saying he was “not running to terminate” the A.C.A. But in the presidential debate in September, he called it “lousy health care” and said he wanted to replace it, while acknowledging that he had no plan for how to do so. “I have concepts of a plan,” he said, adding: “I would only change it if we come up with something better and less expensive. And there are concepts and options we have to do that, and you’ll be hearing about it in the not-too-distant future.”  His campaign has provided no information since then and did not answer specific questions — including whether Mr. Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, was correct in suggesting that the former president would let insurers put young, healthy people in separate “risk pools” from older and sicker people, a pre-A.C.A. practice that could lower premiums for healthy people but make them unaffordable for sick people.  The campaign provided only a nonspecific statement that Mr. Trump would increase “transparency” and promote “choice and competition.” It has strongly suggested that he opposes extending Biden-era subsidies for people to buy insurance through the A.C.A.  Short of repeal, Mr. Trump took steps to weaken the A.C.A. when he was president: He signed legislation eliminating the individual mandate, cut funding for promoting the law and helping people enroll, ended subsidies to insurance companies that had helped lower premiums, and allowed insurers to offer plans that did not meet the law’s original standards.  His administration also let states cap Medicaid spending — reducing benefits for people who had gained coverage under the Affordable Care Act — and sought to allow work requirements for recipients, though a court blocked that in some places.  In an executive order in 2019, he directed the secretary of health and human services to find ways to give Medicare beneficiaries “more diverse and affordable” choices, including by promoting private Medicare Advantage plans, and to loosen regulations and reassess reimbursement rates.  The number of uninsured Americans under 65 increased in three of the four years of Mr. Trump’s presidency, after having declined every year since the Affordable Care Act was enacted in 2010.   Medical Costs     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.      Mr. Trump pledged in 2023 to reissue an executive order seeking to require pharmaceutical companies to offer Medicare the lowest prices they offer other developed countries. But he recently abandoned that proposal and deleted a video describing it from his website. His campaign told the health news website Stat in October, “There is no push to renew the most favored nations drug pricing policy.”  He first issued that order in September 2020, as negotiations with drug companies collapsed over his administration’s insistence that the companies — which had been poised to commit $150 billion to lowering consumer costs — pay for $100 gift cards for seniors before the election that year.  While he endorsed letting Medicare directly negotiate prices in 2016, he backed off that policy once he was in office.  His administration approved a plan to let states import some prescription drugs from Canada, where they are often cheaper. He also signed a ban on most surprise medical bills and established a program under which some, but not all, Medicare plans offered insulin for $35 a month.   Public Health     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.      Mr. Trump closed a pandemic preparedness office that President Barack Obama had created and said in April that he “probably would” close a similar office created by Mr. Biden, calling it a waste of resources when, in his view, the country could mobilize when a pandemic hit.  He responded haphazardly to the Covid-19 pandemic, delegating most mitigation efforts to state officials, downplaying the virus, disregarding scientists’ advice and promoting unproven and dangerous supposed treatments. The United States had a higher excess mortality rate in 2020 than almost any developed country, and a similar pattern continued under Mr. Biden.  The Trump administration was responsible for Operation Warp Speed, a federal effort that enabled the rapid development of Covid-19 vaccines that have saved millions of lives. But while Mr. Trump initially encouraged people to get vaccinated, he backed off as much of his base refused. That partisan opposition to vaccines has contributed to higher death rates in red states than in blue ones.  Mr. Trump now says he would withhold funding from schools that require vaccines. His campaign has said he means only Covid vaccines, though he does not specify that in his calls for the policy, which he usually phrases as, “I will not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate or a mask mandate.” Every state requires schoolchildren to be vaccinated against illnesses like measles and polio, and Mr. Trump has long promoted the debunked claim that childhood vaccines cause autism.  He has indicated he might appoint Robert F. Kennedy Jr., known for his skepticism about vaccines, to an influential public-health role. “I’m going to let him go wild on health,” he said in October, after Mr. Kennedy wrote on social media: “If you work for the FDA and are part of this corrupt system, I have two messages for you: 1. Preserve your records, and 2. Pack your bags.”  The head of the team planning Mr. Trump’s potential White House transition said approvingly that Mr. Kennedy would go digging for evidence that vaccines were unsafe so pharmaceutical companies would take them off the market. Mr. Kennedy has also promoted products such as raw milk, ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine that either are dangerous or have not been shown to be effective for the purposes he promotes them for. And Mr. Trump indicated to NBC in November that he was open to Mr. Kennedy’s calls to end fluoridation of drinking water, one of the most significant public-health advances of the 20th century.  Mr. Trump’s campaign said he would create a commission “of independent minds who are not bought and paid for by Big Pharma” to investigate increases in chronic illness.  His administration rolled back environmental regulations intended to reduce air and water pollution, and rejected a proposal to ban a pesticide linked to developmental disabilities.  In 2018, he signed the Preventing Maternal Deaths Act, which provided funding for state and tribal committees to collect and analyze data about deaths related to pregnancy.   Addiction and Opioids     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.      Mr. Trump designated opioid addiction as a public health emergency in 2017.  Among other actions, he enacted a “safer prescribing plan” with a goal of reducing opioid prescriptions by one-third and signed increases in funding for research on pain management and addiction. He also signed a bill in 2018 that expanded Medicare and Medicaid coverage for addiction treatment, directed the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to work to increase medical provider capacity for such treatment, and took a number of other steps to improve access to addiction care for rural Americans, minors and pregnant women.  Drug overdose deaths, which had been rising for years, declined slightly in 2018 but increased again in 2019 and 2020.  This year, Mr. Trump has approached opioid addiction and overdoses almost exclusively through the lens of border security, arguing for closing the southern border to stop the flow of fentanyl as well as people. (Most fentanyl is smuggled through legal ports of entry.)  He has suggested using military force against Mexican drug cartels, even if the Mexican government did not consent to operations on its soil. He has also called for the death penalty for drug dealers and suggested that their due process should be limited, praising China’s “quick” trials to sentence people to death for drug crimes.  His campaign did not say whether he planned to further increase access to the overdose reversal drug naloxone or to addiction treatments.     Immigration      Kamala Harris  Ms. Harris denounced many of the Trump administration’s immigration policies but has endorsed President Biden’s decisions to restore some of them, such as restrictions on asylum seekers, as illegal border crossings have reached record levels. She has tried to address root causes of migration by securing private funding for development projects in Latin America.     Donald Trump  Mr. Trump enacted sweeping anti-immigration policies when he was president, including separating migrant children from their parents. If elected again, he wants to round up millions of undocumented immigrants and detain them in camps before deporting them en masse.    Illegal Immigration     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.      If re-elected, Mr. Trump is planning a deportation operation that he has called the largest in American history.  He plans to round up undocumented immigrants and detain them in camps while they await deportation, rely on a form of expulsion that doesn’t involve due process hearings, and deputize local police officers and National Guard troops from Republican-led states to carry out immigration raids. During a rally in September, he said that expelling some migrants would be “a bloody story.”  He says he would use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport people without due process. That law, which allows summary detention or deportation of people from countries that are at war with the United States or that have engaged in “predatory incursions,” was last invoked to put Japanese Americans in internment camps during World War II.  He suggested in September that he would start by targeting specific cities whose migrant populations his campaign has demonized, including Springfield, Ohio — where most migrants are in the country legally — and Aurora, Colo.  Altogether, Mr. Trump said to Time magazine in April that he would aim to deport as many as 15 million to 20 million people — numbers that are equivalent to the population of New York State at the high end.  In the same interview, he said he might deploy the military against migrants both along the border and in nonborder states, claiming that a law that forbids the use of the military for domestic law enforcement would not apply because people who are in the U.S. illegally “aren’t civilians.” In October, he said he would hire 10,000 new border agents, increasing the force by more than 50 percent.  He also wants to revoke birthright citizenship for children born in the United States to undocumented immigrants, which overwhelming legal consensus holds to be guaranteed under the 14th Amendment.  All of this would be an escalation from his first term, during which he separated thousands of migrant children from their parents and held them in crowded, unsanitary facilities. During a CNN event last year, he did not rule out reinstating family separation.  Mr. Trump diverted money from the military budget to build a border wall without congressional approval. While a wall was his signature promise in 2016, his administration built fewer than 500 miles of barriers along the nearly 2,000-mile southern border during his first term.  He has repeatedly dehumanized migrants, including saying on multiple occasions that they are “poisoning the blood” of the country and calling some of them “animals” and “not people, in my opinion.”   Asylum     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.      The Trump administration forced asylum seekers to remain in Mexico while awaiting hearings, leading to the development of squalid refugee camps along the border. He has said he wants to reinstate that policy if elected again.  In 2018, he suspended asylum rights for people who entered the country illegally, a policy that was blocked by a federal judge.  His administration used the coronavirus pandemic to lay the legal groundwork for denying asylum seekers entry into the United States, something he had expressed interest in but had been unable to do beforehand. The emergency public health measure he invoked, Title 42, allowed the government to quickly expel migrants who crossed the border.  He wants to reinstate Title 42 if elected again, this time based on claims that migrants carry diseases like tuberculosis rather than the coronavirus.   Legal Immigration     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.      Mr. Trump tried, but Congress did not agree, to greatly reduce legal immigration by limiting U.S. citizens’ ability to bring in relatives and by increasing education and skill requirements.  In 2019, he began denying permanent residency to immigrants deemed likely to require public assistance, a rule that disproportionately affected people from Latin America, Africa and parts of Asia. He also significantly limited H-1B visas for skilled workers, but while privately courting business leaders in June, he talked up the importance of high-skilled immigration.  If elected again, he has called for revoking the legal status of people — including Afghan refugees — who have been allowed into the country for humanitarian reasons, as well as revoking the student visas of people whom he called “radical anti-American and antisemitic foreigners.”  In June, he called for automatically giving green cards to foreign students who graduated from a U.S. college. But his campaign quickly walked that back, saying that only the “most skilled graduates” would be included and that their political ideologies would be vetted.  He said at rallies in October that he would put in place “strong ideological screening” for visa applicants, barring anyone who was “communist, Marxist or fascist,” who sympathized with “radical Islamic terrorists and extremists,” who wanted “to abolish the state of Israel” or who did not “like our religion.” (The U.S. has no state religion, and the First Amendment doesn’t allow one.)  His campaign also said he would expand a program from his first term to strip citizenship from naturalized immigrants whom he determined to be “criminals, terrorists and immigration cheats.”   Travel Bans     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.”      One of Mr. Trump’s first actions upon taking office was to ban travelers from several majority-Muslim countries. He has said he would reinstate and expand that ban if elected again.       Israel and Gaza      Kamala Harris  Ms. Harris has said that Israel has a right to defend itself against Hamas and that the United States should continue to send it weapons, while calling for a cease-fire and putting somewhat greater emphasis than President Biden has on the humanitarian crisis that Israel’s bombardment and invasion have caused in Gaza. She supports a two-state solution.     Donald Trump  Mr. Trump has sought to position himself as a champion of Israel, and as president, he took actions that favored the country. He supports Israel in its war in Gaza and has condemned pro-Palestinian demonstrators in the United States, but he has also urged Israel to “finish up” the war because it is losing support. He said recently that he doubted a two-state solution was possible.    War in Gaza     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; in November she said, “The level of death of innocent Palestinians is unconscionable.” 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.”      After Hamas’s attack, Mr. Trump vowed to “fully support” Israel. He was also initially critical of Mr. Netanyahu and Israeli intelligence, calling them unprepared — though he quickly backtracked from those remarks and said he stood with Mr. Netanyahu, with whom he was closely allied as president.  In March, he urged Israel to “finish up” the war quickly because it was losing support — a message he repeated in July, saying Israel was “getting decimated with this publicity.” But he also expressed his continued support of the country’s invasion and bombardment of Gaza. In an interview with a conservative Israeli news outlet, he said that he “would act very much the same way” and that “you would have to be crazy not to.”  He suggested that Israel had hurt its cause, in terms of international public opinion, by releasing images of the damage in Gaza. “I think that Israel has done one thing very badly: public relations,” he told Time magazine in April.  He said in July that a speech in which Ms. Harris condemned civilian casualties in Gaza had been “disrespectful to Israel.”   Refugees     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.      Mr. Trump said last year that the United States should bar Gazan refugees from entering the country.   Two-State Solution     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.      As president, Mr. Trump proposed a peace plan that he called a blueprint for a two-state solution, but Palestinians did not see it that way.  The plan, which was never adopted, strongly favored Israeli priorities. It was developed without substantive Palestinian input and, while it would have given the Palestinians a limited degree of sovereignty and a pathway to possibly more, it would not have created a fully autonomous Palestinian state. It called for making Jerusalem the unified capital of Israel, relegating the Palestinian capital to the outskirts of the city and letting Israel keep its West Bank settlements and control of the Jordan Valley.  More recently, Mr. Trump told Time magazine: “There was a time when I thought two-state could work. Now I think two-state is going to be very, very tough.”  Mr. Trump moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv, a decision that threw a wrench into the possibility of peace talks and caused some Palestinian leaders to describe a two-state solution as dead.  He also ended decades of U.S. opposition to Israeli settlements, which significantly expanded during his administration, and he cut aid for Palestinians.   Israel and Other Countries     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.”      When he was president, Mr. Trump brokered the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and several Arab countries and have largely held.  Earlier in his term, he recognized Israeli authority over the Golan Heights, a disputed area between Israel and Syria. That change in longstanding U.S. policy set the country apart from Israel’s Arab neighbors and the United Nations and was seen as a political gift to Mr. Netanyahu.  He also ended the Iran nuclear deal reached by Mr. Obama and foreign leaders, under which Iran agreed to limit its nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of sanctions. His withdrawal and reinstatement of sanctions pleased Israel, which opposed the deal.  This April, after Iran launched a retaliatory strike on Israel, Mr. Trump told Time magazine that he would support Israel in the event of Iranian attacks. He has not commented specifically on Israel’s strikes on Lebanon, beyond claiming that none of the recent conflict in the Middle East would have happened if he had been president. But in October, he told reporters, referring to Mr. Biden’s lobbying of Mr. Netanyahu: “He’s trying to hold him back, and he probably should be doing the opposite.”   Pro-Palestinian Protests     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.”      Mr. Trump praised police crackdowns on pro-Palestinian demonstrations, calling the protesters “raging lunatics and Hamas sympathizers” and saying it had been “a beautiful thing to watch” the police break up a student occupation of a building at Columbia University.  “To every college president, I say remove the encampments immediately,” he said in early May. “Vanquish the radicals, and take back our campuses for all of the normal students.”  He has said that the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va. — where a woman was killed by a neo-Nazi and many others were injured — was “a little peanut” compared with the campus protests. And he mused about whether punishment for the Columbia protesters would be “anything comparable” to how those who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, were punished.   Antisemitism     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.      Mr. Trump has described criticism of Israel as antisemitism, and his administration took steps to designate campaigns to boycott Israel as such. He has said that if elected again, he would bar immigrants who “want to abolish the state of Israel” from entering the United States.  He issued an executive order in 2019 that effectively defined Judaism as a race or nationality, in addition to a religion, in order to apply protections under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.  But he has also made antisemitic remarks and associated with antisemites. In 2017, he said there were “fine people on both sides” of a white supremacist and neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Va.  And he has repeatedly described Jews who voted for Democrats as “disloyal” or self-hating, language that critics say invokes an antisemitic trope about Jews having a “dual loyalty,” with a greater devotion to Israel than to their own countries.  In 2022, he lamented that “our wonderful evangelicals” appreciated his support for Israel more than American Jews did. In 2023, he shared an image saying that “liberal Jews” had “voted to destroy America & Israel.” And this September, he said that if he lost, “the Jewish people would have a lot to do” with it.   Netanyahu     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.      As president, Mr. Trump strongly supported Mr. Netanyahu’s government and gave it a number of political gifts, including support for hard-line Israeli policies that previous U.S. administrations had rejected.  But ever since Mr. Trump lost the 2020 election, he has been less friendly toward Mr. Netanyahu, seemingly for a personal reason: Mr. Netanyahu congratulated Mr. Biden on his victory. After the Hamas-led attack on Israel, Mr. Trump criticized Mr. Netanyahu as having been unprepared. He quickly backtracked on those remarks.     L.G.B.T.Q. Rights      Kamala Harris  Ms. Harris supports legislation to ban discrimination against L.G.B.T.Q. people in education, health care, housing and other areas, and she has condemned state laws restricting gender transition care, sports participation and public bathroom use for transgender people. She has supported L.G.B.T.Q. rights for more than two decades and began officiating at same-sex weddings two decades ago.     Donald Trump  Mr. Trump wants to ban gender transition care for transgender youth, investigate hospitals and drug companies that are involved in such care, bar trans girls and women from girls’ and women’s sports and cut funding from schools that he says promote “radical gender ideology.” As president, he weakened L.G.B.T.Q. anti-discrimination protections and barred transgender people from the military.    Transgender Rights     Ms. Harris has publicly supported transgender rights for two decades and wrote in a message to trans people in March: “We see you. We stand with you. We won’t stop fighting for you.” However, she has not outlined many specific policies for trans people during this campaign.  During her 2019 presidential campaign, she released an L.G.B.T.Q. rights plan that called for reversing Mr. Trump’s ban on transgender people in the military (President Biden did so early in his term); requiring police departments to track and report anti-L.G.B.T.Q. crimes as a condition of receiving federal grants; and creating a program to support trans people that would include “employment assistance, creating educational pathways and ensuring greater access to housing and health care.”  She pledged to establish a White House office focused on L.G.B.T.Q. affairs, including hate crimes against transgender people, and to appoint transgender people to judgeships and leadership roles in her administration.  She also said that she would guarantee coverage for transition care, writing, “Health insurance companies that exclude or limit coverage for health care related to gender transition are engaged in discrimination, plain and simple.” However, the mechanism she proposed for doing so was a “Medicare for all” plan that she no longer supports. Her campaign did not respond when asked whether she wanted to guarantee coverage for transition care through a different mechanism, and whether she still supported the rest of her 2019 plan.  The Biden-Harris administration has defended the availability of most transition care for minors, including puberty blockers and hormone therapy, though it said in June that it opposed surgery. (Transition surgeries are very rare among minors, who usually receive the nonsurgical care that the administration supports.) The administration opposes state bans on transition care for minors, and the Justice Department is challenging Tennessee’s ban in a case now before the Supreme Court.  Ms. Harris has condemned “the onslaught of state bills targeting transgender Americans,” which includes restrictions on transition care, sports participation, bathroom use and school curriculums. Asked specifically about access to transition care in October, she told NBC: “That is a decision that doctors will make in terms of what is medically necessary. I’m not going to put myself in a position of a doctor.”  Her support for transgender rights dates to the mid-2000s. As district attorney of San Francisco, she spoke at a transgender march and convened law enforcement officials to strategize on how to combat the “trans panic” defense, which lawyers had used to seek lesser charges in the killing of a transgender teenager. Later, when she was attorney general of California, her office filed briefs opposing state laws that barred transgender people from using bathrooms matching their identity.      Mr. Trump has vowed to enact an array of anti-transgender policies.  Several would target gender transition care such as puberty blockers and hormone therapy. He wants to ban medically endorsed transition care for minors, as many Republican-led states have done; exclude providers from Medicare and Medicaid if they offer such care to minors; forbid federal agencies to “promote the concept of sex and gender transition at any age”; and order the Justice Department to investigate hospitals that provide transition surgeries and pharmaceutical companies that make hormone medications.  He has spread outlandishly false claims about transition care, including that schools are giving students sex-change operations.  He also says he would bar transgender girls and women from participating in girls’ and women’s sports, direct the Education Department to punish school officials who suggest a student “could be trapped in the wrong body,” and cut funding for schools that he claims promote “radical gender ideology.” (Conservatives have applied that term to some specific policies, such as the inclusion of gender identity in curriculums or the permitting of transgender women to use women’s facilities, but also broadly to any acknowledgment of transgender identities as valid.)  During the Republican primary season, Mr. Trump signed an advocacy group’s pledge declaring that “sex is binary” and that he would direct agencies “to uphold this fact in every policy and program,” including “shelters, prisons, housing, health care, defense, education and sports.”  As president, he barred transgender service members from the military, rescinded rules that had allowed transgender students to use bathrooms matching their identity and eliminated protections against discrimination by doctors and insurers. His administration also considered defining gender as immutably determined by genitalia at birth, which would have eliminated legal recognition of trans people, and he said last year that he wants Congress to pass a law stating that the United States recognizes only two immutable genders.  In 2016, during his first presidential campaign, he criticized a North Carolina bill that barred transgender people from using public restrooms matching their identity, and said he believed people should “use the bathroom they feel is appropriate.” But he has since embraced anti-transgender policies as the Republican base has done the same, seizing on them as a wedge issue.  “I talk about transgender, everyone goes crazy,” he said last year. “Who would have thought?”   Discrimination Laws     Ms. Harris supports the Equality Act, which would ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity in education, health care, housing, public accommodations and other areas.  She also supports Biden administration rules to prohibit medical providers and insurers that receive federal funding from discriminating against L.G.B.T.Q. patients, and to prohibit discrimination against L.G.B.T.Q. students under Title IX. (The Supreme Court temporarily blocked the Title IX changes in August while lawsuits proceed.)  As the district attorney of San Francisco, Ms. Harris created a unit to investigate hate crimes against L.G.B.T.Q. people. In 2006, she organized a conference of law enforcement officials to discuss how to counter the “gay panic” and “transgender panic” defenses, in which lawyers argue that clients accused of killing or assaulting gay and trans people deserve leniency because they were frightened by the victim’s sexual orientation or gender identity.  She supported a 2014 law that banned the “panic” defenses in California, when she was the state attorney general; helped introduce legislation that would have banned them federally as a senator in 2018; and called for a federal ban during her 2019 campaign for president. She also helped introduce the Do No Harm Act, which would block religious exceptions to anti-discrimination laws.  Her campaign did not confirm whether she still supported those two bills.  “This isn’t about bathrooms,” she wrote in 2017, when the Trump administration removed anti-discrimination protections in schools. “This is about whether or not transgender people have the right to exist in the United States.”      Mr. Trump says he would reverse the Biden administration’s Title IX rule prohibiting discrimination against L.G.B.T.Q. students. That is in line with his actions in his first term, when his administration ended Obama-era anti-discrimination protections by narrowing definitions of “sex discrimination” to exclude discrimination against transgender people.  His administration issued a rule allowing discrimination against transgender people in health care, and sought to establish a definition of gender under Title IX that would have forbidden recognition of transgender students’ identities.  It also argued that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not forbid workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. The Supreme Court rejected that argument in 2020, holding that the law’s ban on “sex discrimination” did encompass those things. But the Justice Department under Mr. Trump issued a memo interpreting the ruling narrowly, saying that employers might be entitled to religious exemptions and that the ruling was irrelevant to discrimination outside workplaces.  Mr. Trump in 2019 opposed the Equality Act, which would ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity in education, health care, housing, public accommodations and other areas. Asked whether he supported it now, a spokeswoman for his campaign said, “President Trump believes all Americans, regardless of race, gender or sexuality, should be treated equally under the law,” but declined to answer the question about the Equality Act.   Gay Marriage     Ms. Harris is a longtime supporter of gay marriage rights.  As district attorney of San Francisco, she officiated same-sex marriages as early as 2004, when almost no other city or state allowed them. As attorney general of California, she refused to defend Proposition 8, a state constitutional amendment that banned gay marriage and was later overturned by the courts.  She supported the Respect for Marriage Act, which President Biden signed in 2022 to guarantee federal recognition of same-sex marriages and to serve as a partial bulwark against the possibility of the Supreme Court overturning the Obergefell v. Hodges ruling. That decision, in 2015, guaranteed the right to marriage to same-sex couples. Ms. Harris wrote last year that it stood “for a simple principle: all Americans are equal, and their government should treat them that way.”      A spokeswoman for Mr. Trump’s campaign would not say whether he supported the Obergefell v. Hodges ruling or the Respect for Marriage Act.  Mr. Trump said in 2011 that he opposed gay marriage, and in 2016 he told Fox News that he disagreed with the Obergefell ruling.  “I would be very strong on putting certain judges on the bench that I think maybe could change things,” he said. Asked if he was saying he “might try to appoint justices to overrule the decision on same-sex marriage,” he replied, “I would strongly consider that, yes.”  He changed his tune after the 2016 election, saying: “It’s irrelevant because it was already settled. It’s law. It was settled in the Supreme Court.” (The court can overturn precedents, and two justices have publicly indicated that they want to revisit Obergefell.)  This year’s Republican Party platform, which Mr. Trump directed the drafting of, does not include previous platforms’ statement that marriage should be solely “between one man and one woman.” It does say, “Republicans will promote a Culture that values the Sanctity of Marriage,” a phrase long used by opponents of gay marriage.     


Produced by Nico Chilla and Rebecca Lieberman. Additional reporting by Lisa Friedman.Top photo of Donald Trump by Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times, and top photo of Kamala Harris by Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times.See more on: 2024 Elections: News, Polls and Analysis, Donald Trump, Kamala Harris, The Israel Hamas WarRead 153 CommentsShare full article153AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTSite IndexSite Information Navigation© 2025 The New York Times CompanyNYTCoContact UsAccessibilityWork with usAdvertiseT Brand StudioYour Ad ChoicesPrivacy PolicyTerms of ServiceTerms of SaleSite MapCanadaInternationalHelpSubscriptionsManage Privacy Preferences






















I'm so sick of the nytimes treating Trump like just a normal candidate