Hey, everyone, I'm David Chalian, CNN's Political Director. And welcome to the CNN Political Briefing. Since being catapulted from running mate to presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris has been a bit cautious about rolling out policy positions. So far, her campaign has been light on specifics but has promised more details, especially on her plans for the economy. Jasmine Wright is a political reporter for NOTUS, the nonprofit news arm of the Allbritton Journalism Institute. She's covered Harris since 2019, and she joins me now to talk about what we know about Harris' policy positions since becoming the Democratic nominee, and how her positions have changed since her first run for the Oval Office. Jasmine, thank you so much for being here.

I'm so happy to be with you, David.

You have no idea what a thrill it is for me to talk to Jasmine Wright about Kamala Harris, because I am responsible for Jasmine Wright becoming a national Kamala Harris expert

Tell them, David. Tell them, David.

Because when Jasmine worked here at CNN, her assignment from basically the day you walked in the door in 2018 was to keep your eye on all things Kamala Harris, was it not?

It absolutely was. You had the vision, I gotta be honest. You had the vision.

'So this is obviously Kamala Harris's moment, but in terms of having a journalism target that you have been following for years, it's a Jasmine Wright moment, as well, which is why I wanted to talk to you this week about where we are in the Harris campaign and trajectory. Obviously, she's had, as good of a three weeks as any politician could wish for in terms of, very successfully coalescing the party behind her and getting a running mate chosen and getting through the battleground states with that running mate, and that being well-received and her obvious impact on the polling and bringing a lot of pieces of the Democratic base back into support of her and enthusiastic about the election, all those things. But she's got 12 more weeks that she's got to produce that kind of outcome, which is going to be tricky. And this week she is debuting, she says, her economic policy, or at least pieces of it in North Carolina. What do we expect her to focus on? And should we expect this kind of thing more often that she's going to focus on different slices of policy? Or is this not going to be a policy focused campaign?

'Yeah, I don't think that you can expect her to roll out policy in the way that she did in 2019 for the exact reason that, you know, back in 2019, she had to figure out what her position was between then Vice President Joe Biden on the center-right, right of Democrats and, Bernie Sanders all the way on the left. And so all of those policy rollouts in 2019 were trying to position herself between those two poles, trying to show to the American voter, particularly Democratic voters, because she was looking to get the nomination exactly where she stood between these two very, very well known men. I think what they believe that she needs to do is that she needs to reintroduce herself to the American public. They recognize, and it's very apparent, both in internal polling and public polling, that Americans don't necessarily know the ways in which she would govern if she were president. So they want to lead them to that. They want to put little droplets down there, put little policy positions. But I don't think that they're going to be as detailed as what we saw in 2019. For instance, back in 2019, her first policy proposal, her first major policy proposal was a raise for teachers. She wanted to give teachers across America $13,500, adding billions of dollars to the economy. And that is a very specific plan. Now, it was important 2019 because it showed that she wanted to position herself as somebody who was really moved by folks like teachers who are giving a service back to Americans, really moved by trying to make sure that they could pay their bills and other services like that across America. But that's a very specific policy. I don't think that we're going to see that on Friday. Again, another economic policy that she put out in 2019 was the LIFT Act. If you remember, it was supposed to go to working families, middle-class couples, $6,000, just a tax credit for people to be able to pay their bills. Livable expenses is how they put it in 2019. That's a very, very specific policy that's meant to show where she is on these issues. I don't think that they believe that they need to do that this time around. So I think what you're going to see on Friday is kind of the broad strokes of it. Her not necessarily trying to put distance between the current president, where he is on the economy, but certainly trying to distance herself from the negativity that is associated with Biden on the economy. So we're going to hear her talking about how to tackle high prices in health care and grocery stores and medical costs. And we're also going to hear her talk about corporate price gouging. But I don't think it's going to be anywhere near the scale of detail that we saw the candidates in 2019 lay out.

Yeah, and I'm sure you're right. And of course, with detail, as they like to say, the devil is in the details. So like with detail, you invite a whole lot of controversy and, scrutiny from the left and the right, and it gets her into a place that she's trying to sort of stay above, at this moment. But, what you just described that we may hear here, and they've sort of previewed this, a little bit, this focus on bringing costs down. That's kind of what we heard from President Biden at the state of the Union message earlier this year when he was talking about this corporate greed piece of it and this whole notion of shrinkflation and like, you know, you don't get as much of your Snickers bar as you used to and you're paying more. And it's very, sort of micro pocketbook issues. We got a little piece of this from her in Nevada, where she adopted what Donald Trump had proposed, this notion of no taxes on tips she specified for sort of the hospitality service industry.

And it is my promise to everyone here: When I am president, we will continue our fight for working families of America, including to raise the minimum wage. And eliminate taxes on tips for service and hospitality workers.

It was hard for me to see that as anything other than like an actual political play in Nevada for union workers there. But what did you hear from her team about what they were trying to do there, and did they mind that she was following in Trump's footsteps on that?

Right. I think that they actually didn't mind that she was following in Trump's footsteps. I think that the people that they are trying to actually get on their side are those service workers in Nevada, in Las Vegas specifically, who have for years been trying to get national attention on the fact that they want to eliminate taxes on their tipped wages. And so I think that this was a nod to them. There is no doubt that they would have liked to be first on this. I mean, to be very honest. But they're happy to say, yes, we are also on the table on this. Even if it elicits comparisons to Trump, that's something that they feel that they can withstand because their base is different than Trump's base. When this all happened, yes, I think it was a bit confusing. Everyone was like, what? But I also think if you really look at her record, it's not that surprising that she would be in favor of something like this, knowing just what we talked about, that she wanted to increase wages for teachers, that she wanted to give families these kind of livable taxes, that she has been somebody who while vice president, yes, she had been an advocate for the child tax credit, something within that care economy that she has leaned into, but she's also talked about creating more tax breaks for people within the "sandwich generation," the folks who take care of both their children and their aging parents. So this is something that is very much so within the realm of who Kamala Harris is and what she believes in, which is incremental change. I think that's kind of the most authentic version of how she approaches the economy.

I wonder, I really, truly wonder how much of that care economy piece you mentioned we're going to hear about in this campaign in the fall, because, you know, for those listening, if you remember, Build Back Better like the other sort of piece, the care economy piece of the Biden agenda got scuttled because there weren't votes for it; Joe Manchin wasn't in favor of it. They couldn't get it through the Senate. And so things like, making the child tax credit permanent or putting other pieces of the care economy into place legislatively just went by the wayside. And yet she was central to that piece of the package. That is a lot of what, as you said, would not be surprising to anybody who's followed Kamala Harris' career and her policy proposals as a senator, as a presidential candidate. But while some of the pieces are popular with the American people, you know, there's a high cost to them and footing that bill and how that all gets sort of part of the definition of her, because that's what she's battling right now, is like, not — is resisting the frame that the Trump team is eager to build around her, which is some California, out of the mainstream liberal. And so it's just — I just wonder how long we think, can she ride out this entire campaign, sort of not getting buried in specifics?

I think that they hope so. Right? I think that we've seen in the last three weeks that they actually have been pretty good at not getting goaded by the Trump campaign into positions that they don't want to be in. When we're talking about immigration, they didn't allow the Trump campaign to paint who she is on immigration. Instead, they tried to remove themselves from being on the defensive and go on the offensive. We're seeing it now with the economy. Obviously, we know that the Trump campaign has tried to say that she's a liberal who's going to add trillions of dollars to the national debt, right? And so this policy rollout, even if it's not going to be very specific, is an ability to not just push back on that, but to say, hey, America, this is who I am. And so they're going to try to do small things around the edges to show that these are where her intentions are. These are where her policies could go, I think, without actually detailing, you know, maybe we want to go 31% on the corporate tax. If you remember, I think back in 2019, she had proposed 35% for a corporate tax rate. Right now, I think it's around 28 or something like that. So, much higher than what we're seeing now. And all these policy positions that she's had in 2019, I think they're going to have to answer for them. And it could just be done in a singular interview or something like that. But I think one thing that this campaign has been efficient in, in just the three short weeks, is not being goaded into certain policy positions by the Trump campaign, and that's what they're going to try to continue to do, working on their own time, establishing their own policies on their own time.

You know, she also does have some actual data points in some of the issue areas where Trump is strongest and she's weakest in the polls, which is like, you know, inflation is down, illegal border crossings are down. Violent crime is down. These are his three issues. And she does have sort of recent statistics to be able to point to, as you said, to sort of get off of defense and a little bit more onto offense. We're going to take a very quick break. We're going to have a lot more with NOTUS political reporter Jasmine Wright in just a moment.

'Welcome back. We're here with NOTUS political reporter Jasmine Wright. We're talking about Vice President Kamala Harris, her policy positions and how she plans to move forward in these next three months as the Democratic nominee. And, of course, what has changed since her last run for president of the United States. Jasmine, one thing that I cannot get out of my head from her 2019 run was the tortured pretzel she twisted herself into around the "Medicare for All" proposal she had, you know, back in 2018 or whenever she had signed up as a co-sponsor with Bernie Sanders on Medicare for All, she then came out of the gate and said she was running on Medicare for All and let's get away with all that private insurance, she told Jake Tapper at the CNN Town Hall.

I believe the solution, and I'm, and I actually feel very strongly about this, is that we need to have Medicare for all. That's just the bottom line.

And then her team was constantly trying to clarify, and it was never clear. And then, she landed in some less than Medicare for All position. She was all over the map on that issue. She becomes the presidential nominee on the Democratic side in the last few weeks. And her, you know, staff just puts out a blind quote to newspapers saying, yeah, no, she doesn't support Medicare for All right now.

'Yeah, she doesn't support single-payer health care anymore. Yeah.

They're just wiping away some position she had taken. Do you think she is going to need at some point to explain her thinking on the evolution?

'I absolutely think that she's going to need to. There, to me, is almost no way that she can get to November without somebody being like, explain to me how you have changed and why you've changed. Now I think that they have already kind of put out blindly, the reason behind it or what they're going to lean on. Right? They've said that they will lean on the fact that she has experienced so much in executive leadership at the White House as vice president and being vice president, you know, is explaining or can explain away some of these drastic changes. Her learning under Biden, her learning under somebody that is really, you know, he has done some relatively progressive things in office, but he is kind of a middle-of-the-road politician, particularly when it comes to the economy — her learning under him. Right? I think that these are the things that she is going to lean on as she explains it away. But people have questions because in 2019, the whole single-payer debacle, the whole Medicare for All debacle, in a lot of ways, it was unforced error. She just could not physically say where it was she believed, whether or not she believed in Bernie's version of Medicare for All. And, to be frank, right, it is a little bit difficult because there are a thousand different ways that people can actually say what Medicare for All is, what the actual description of it is. Right? But whatever thousand of those ways, she couldn't really say one. And so that was such a huge part of particularly the first six months of her campaign until she did that big debate with Biden. She said, "That little girl was me." That really dominated. And so they were forced to come out with that, actually, we're not going to support single-payer health care, but what we are going to support is a form of that, but also private insurance will still play in some ways. Right? And it was still extremely confusing. So I think she's going to have to say what was that about and how did you change? And I think that she'll lean on her experience in the White House to do that. But she has to do it and she will be kind of forced to do it, I think, by reporters.

On immigration also — during that campaign, she said that she thought the illegal crossing of the border should not be a criminal matter, but a civil matter, not be treated as a crime. That is clearly not what she believes now and not what she's been, you know, executing as vice president in this administration. And they made clear that that's not her current thinking. Again, she'll need to walk through that. Right? How she moved through that.

'And I actually think that on immigration, she has a better chance of being like, look, the last three years that we've been vice president, we've absolutely been getting slammed at the border. There is no way that we can have all of these people in our country without it being illegal. I think that that is a better argument to make than whatever argument she can make on Medicare for All, right? I think that that is a place where she could actually make a kind of credible argument of like, you know, I've seen it up close. I've seen up close what it — how it, you know, hurts our systems or whatever the argument may be, versus maybe some of her economic policies or even the gun buyback program. I mean, do you remember that, the mandatory buyback program for AR-15s. Even in 2019, after they released that, we were all like, oh, is that constitutional? You know, like there was a question of whether or not it could actually even be done. And so I think she's gonna have to explain away that one as well.

'But it is clear they are on a strategy right now to avoid this kind of scrutiny for as long as they possibly can get away with that. And as you noted, they've been doing that pretty successfully, thus far. So now I just want to get your larger thoughts on her performance on the stump. And just when you observe her in this new role of the last three and a half weeks and, you know, leading this Harris-Walz ticket. Do you see the same Harris you saw back in Iowa in 2019? Do you see someone that has evolved? Do you see glimmers of that person? I'm just wondering your observations. I just don't know anyone that has observed her as much as you have over these last 5 or 6 years. If you think she is, I don't know, either more comfortable in her skin or more confident, or actually changing her approach to politics and how she's packaging herself and presenting herself.

'I think it is a yes to everything you just said. I am absolutely seeing a candidate that has evolved. I'm just going to be very honest. Anyone that says she has is just flat-out wrong. I actually am in the minority where I always thought that she was pretty good on the stump. I think she was always much better one on one in those really intimate moments. That's where her personality showed. That's where she could be funnier, because as you, we both know, she actually is a pretty funny person. That's where she could, you know, put her guard down and not be so, kind of guarded around people just on those one-to-one. And then on the stump, it was a little bit different because I think in a real way, David, the 2019 positions were not necessarily her most authentic to who she is, because she is somebody who really believes in incremental change. And those drastic policies that were in 2019, maybe didn't message to the Democratic voter that this is somebody who really believes in what they're saying. And I think what you're seeing now is somebody who's really confident in who they are and what they've been through. Obviously, her first two years in office were not easy. She really galvanized herself after, the Dobbs decision when Roe v Wade was, you know, taken down by the Supreme Court. And so I think you're seeing somebody who is a very different person than who they were in 2019. I think you see it in the decisions that she's making — the decisions not to break up the campaign, not to potentially remove the campaign head because it would lead to instability, would lead to infighting. That's a mature decision that she may have not have made in 2019 had she been in this position. The decisions to invite in all of these Obama people who, you know, she's not necessarily comfortable with, but could have a real dramatic effect in keeping that momentum inside of her campaign and then just her as a person. I think that I've always seen somebody who feeds off the energy that she's been given, who feeds off of how much a crowd is responding. And you're seeing that really play out in real-time when she's so confident on the stump. Now, I think you could argue that, yes, it doesn't really have the details that she was talking about in 2019, but still, that confidence is there, that authenticity is there. Her adopting her record as a prosecutor — I mean, in 2019, you could not get her to talk about it. You could not get her to talk about her record as a prosecutor in 2019, because her advisers at the time thought that it was such a liability because of where the Democratic Party was. Now, that's the first thing that she says when she steps on the stage. So I think absolutely, as somebody who has watched her, both on the stump, in private moments, you know, looking at her from the corner as an embed, watching her every move, sitting outside of her apartment during Veep stages and watching her and Doug go in and and say, "We're getting coffee. Don't tell on us. We're not meeting with Biden yet." I think that she's absolutely changed. I think she's matured. And I think that this is her moment, and what we're seeing is her really revel in that moment and her accepting that this is the way it's going to go in trying to put her best foot forward, whether or not that means she's successful come November. You know, I think that's an open question, but I think this is somebody who has accepted the role and is really trying to lean into it.

I'm not big on predictions, but I will predict she will have some moments in this campaign in the next 12 weeks that are not like these last three and half weeks that are going to be really, really tough and then really bumpy. Whether it is because she made a mistake or just the context of what's happening around her. That is inevitable, because campaigns have those moments for every candidate and how she responds in those moments that throw the campaign back on their heels will also be very telling about how she's evolved as a candidate.

'Exactly. Because you can't just measure somebody on how much they've evolved in the good moments, right? She is somebody who has not necessarily dealt with the bad moments that well. Obviously, after 2021, she kind of went back into the bunker and to herself and took a while to come back out and really start engaging with the media and start engaging with the political process in the same way that you would have hoped that she would have. And so I think this is not going to be a time where she can kind of go back into that. Right? They can't allow her to go back into the bunker if things are going wrong. And so I think you're going to see her in real-time if things become destabilized, trying to re-stabilize, trying to get this campaign back on track in a way that she just wasn't able to in 2019 if these things happen.

Jasmine Wright, thank you so much for your time and your expertise and your insights. It's a great, truly, a great pleasure to chat with you. Thanks for being here.

Thank you. Anytime.

'That's it for this week's edition of the CNN Political Briefing. And we want to hear from you. Is there a question you'd like answered about this election cycle? Is there a guest you really want to hear from? Give us a call at (202) 618-9460, or send us an email at CNN Political Briefing at gmail.com. And you might just be featured on a future episode of the podcast. So don't forget to tell us your name, where you're from, how we can reach you, and if you give us permission to use the recording on the podcast. CNN Political Briefing is a production of CNN Audio. This episode was produced by Emily Williams. Our senior producer is Felicia Patinkin. Dan Dzula is our technical director, and Steve Licht II is Executive Producer of CNN audio. Support from Alex Manasseri, Robert Mathers, Jon Dianora, Leni Steinhardt, Jamus Andrest, Nichole Pesaru, and Lisa Namerow. And special thanks to Katie Hinman. We'll be back with a new episode on Friday, August 23rd. Thanks so much for listening.