What would Kamala Harris’s White House agenda look like?

Good morning and welcome back to US Election Countdown. Who knows what today’s political shocks will bring . . . but in this edition we’re covering:

• Harris’s policy positions

• Why US business is wary of JD Vance

• Trump vs Harris polling

Kamala Harris is one step closer to becoming the official Democratic presidential nominee. She’s secured the pledged support of more than enough delegates to clinch her status as Donald Trump’s opponent.

So today we’re diving into where the former California senator stands on the issues. Here’s what we know about her positions on five topics that have dominated the White House race [free to read]:

Foreign policy

Harris has largely supported Joe Biden on international affairs, and has increasingly represented him at major meetings including the Munich Security Conference and the Ukraine peace summit.

Yet it’s also one of the few areas where she’s staked out some of her own positions. She diverged from Biden in March when she called for an “immediate ceasefire” in Gaza.

Economics

The vice-president has been a staunch supporter of the president’s efforts to bring down inflation. She’s also championed Biden’s legislation to boost infrastructure investment and accelerate the pivot to clean energy.

As vice-president she has focused her efforts on the “care economy”, including access to affordable childcare and aid to senior citizens.

On trade, she’s insisted that she is “not a protectionist Democrat”, but she’s opposed deals including the Trans-Pacific Partnership because of a lack of environmental protections.

Abortion

After the US Supreme Court struck down the constitutional right to an abortion in 2022, Harris became the Biden administration’s leading voice calling for a law that would guarantee access to the procedure. Democrats believe Harris will be a stronger messenger on the issue than Biden, who had in the past supported abortion restrictions.

Law and order

Harris is a career prosecutor, elected as San Francisco’s district attorney in 2003. When she ran for president in 2020, some progressives criticised her record of being “tough on crime”. However, her positions on policing and issues of racial justice appear to have moved to the left in recent years. She’s voiced support for criminal justice reform and legalising marijuana.

Immigration

Early in his tenure, Biden gave Harris the somewhat thankless task of addressing the root causes of surging Latin American migration to the US. This made her the poster child of one of Democrats’ biggest political vulnerabilities.

While she stumbled in early interviews on the topic and came under fire even from within her own party, blame has shifted in recent months after Donald Trump torpedoed the bipartisan border security deal to deny Democrats a legislative victory.

Campaign clips: the latest election headlines

• We explain what Harris has to do to lock up the Democratic nomination. To make it official, Democrats are planning to hold a virtual roll call. (FT, Politico)

• If she does become the Democratic nominee, these seven politicians are seen as likely candidates to be her running mate.

• The head of the Secret Service told Congress that the assassination attempt on Trump was the agency’s “most significant operational failure” in decades. [Free to read]

• Go inside the undoing of Joe Biden with exclusive detail on the consequential final weeks of his campaign.

• Ending his re-election bid could actually boost Biden’s impact on global affairs. His meeting with Israeli Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu will be a first test.

Behind the scenes

With US Republicans’ embrace of light-touch regulation, lower taxes and laissez-faire economics, the business world has long found a home in the party. Yet Trump’s selection of JD Vance as his running mate has raised alarm on Wall Street.

It’s a major turning point. One senior financier said Trump’s pick for vice-president was a sign that the Republican party’s “sense of direction . . . [is] not what we thought it would be”.

The FT’s Stefania Palma and James Fontanella-Khan spoke to top investors, executives, lawyers and dealmakers who sounded off on Vance’s brand of economic populism. One prominent dealmaker said:

JD Vance might resonate with the Maga base, but the broader business community is very concerned this morning, as they should be.

Much to big business’s chagrin, antitrust policy has got a shot in the arm with Biden’s appointment of Lina Khan and Jonathan Kanter at the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice. But Wall Street seems even more wary of what Vance would do with a direct line to the White House.

A top antitrust lawyer said Vance’s views were more radical than those espoused by Khan and Kanter, adding that the Biden appointees are focused on curbing market dominance rather than blanket opposition to M&A. As a prominent financier told Stefania and James:

We should all be getting out our biographies of [former US president] Andrew Jackson . . . the thing he was most opposed to was big banks. I could see [Vance] getting involved in having a point of view on bank M&A.

Check FT.com for Stefania and James’s full story publishing later this week.

Datapoint

With Harris all but certain to be the party’s presidential nominee, Democrats are re-energised.

But will this matter come November? Polls and traders in the political predictions market still think Trump will return to the White House. As of yesterday afternoon the Republican was trading at about 60 per cent on PredictIt, while Harris was trading at about 40 per cent — just shy of Biden’s own figure before the June 27 debate.

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A Financial Times average of polls shows Harris trailing Trump by about 3 percentage points, similar to the Biden-Trump gap before the president dropped his re-election bid.

But it’s worth noting that there are very few of these polls, and they rely on a once-hypothetical match-up, rather than the actual, contested campaign unfolding now.

Biden’s and Harris’s individual approval ratings have mostly moved in tandem throughout Biden’s term. Although Harris frequently trailed the president, that’s changed in recent days.

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Viewpoints

• Biden’s decision to drop out of the race puts an end to the suspense, but it doesn’t yet solve a major issue for Democrats: how to lock in working-class voters in November, writes Rana Foroohar.

• The US, and the world, is now in a better position than it was last week — despite legitimate questions surrounding Harris, writes our editorial board.

• The market seems to be using Trump’s first term to prepare for a potential second. This would be a mistake, says Bhanu Baweja, chief strategist at UBS.

• Republican pollster Frank Luntz says that Harris should not become Biden’s assumed heir-apparent.

• The post-Biden foreign policy looks set to move to the fringes of the political spectrum, writes Walter Russell Mead in the Wall Street Journal. In the Washington Post, Jennifer Rubin makes the case for centrism. (WSJ, The Post)