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Last month, we asked you, our readers, to tell us the top three issues that are motivating you to vote in November. We received over 150 responses on a broad range of topics.
Once we landed on the six that were most mentioned — abortion, gun control, caregiving, climate, Israel and Palestine, and health care — we asked our reporters to write about the policy positions of both presidential candidates on each topic. We’ve since expanded our topics to focus on five additional issues, including criminal justice, disability and LGBTQ+ rights.
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Here’s a look at the positions of former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.
Abortion | Caregiving | Climate | Criminal justice | Disability and aging | Education | Gun control | Health care | Immigration | Israel and Palestine | LGBTQ+ rights
Abortion
Harris
Kamala Harris has emphasized reproductive rights both as vice president and on the campaign trail. Since the overturn of Roe v. Wade, she has become the White House’s most prominent advocate for abortion rights, touring the country to speak about the issue and, in March, becoming the first sitting president or vice president to visit an abortion clinic. As California’s attorney general, Harris worked to tighten regulations for anti-abortion centers, which are non-medical facilities that discourage people from terminating their pregnancies and face little government scrutiny.
As a presidential candidate, Harris has said she would protect abortion rights by working with Congress to sign a law codifying the federal protections that existed under Roe v. Wade. Under that standard, states could restrict abortion only after fetal viability, which typically occurs between 23 and 25 weeks. But enacting that kind of law would require not only a Harris White House, but Democratic majorities in both chambers of Congress — an uphill battle for the party.
Harris is also likely to continue efforts made under President Joe Biden’s administration to challenge individual state abortion bans and to defend the legal availability of mifepristone, a medication used in most abortions.
Beyond abortion, Harris has said she would defend Americans’ rights to access contraception and fertility treatments like in vitro fertilization, both of which have come under fire from some sectors of the anti-abortion movement. When asked in mid-August by The 19th, her campaign did not explain how she might do that.
Trump
As president, Donald Trump was a reliable ally for the anti-abortion movement, appointing three of the Supreme Court justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade. Even now on the campaign trail, Trump regularly takes credit for Roe’s fall.
Beyond judicial appointments, Trump’s administration worked to undercut access to abortion. His Health and Human Services department excluded health centers from the federal Title X program — which supports family planning services for low-income people — if those clinics referred patients for abortion. More than 1,000 clinics lost funding as a result. The administration also sought to block minors who were detained in immigration facilities from getting abortions. Trump was the first sitting president to address the March for Life, a major anti-abortion gathering.
After campaigning in 2016 and 2020 on abortion restrictions, Trump has been less clear in 2024 about how he would approach abortion if granted a second term. Though he reportedly considered embracing a national 16-week ban, he has lately argued that abortion law should be left up to individual states — a stance polling shows most women oppose. Former Trump advisers have endorsed leveraging an anti-obscenity law from the 1800s to bar the mailing of abortion pills. That could block patients in states with abortion bans from one of their few options for care and undercut access in states where abortion is legal. Trump recently said he would not seek to enforce the law if elected. But others in his orbit — including his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance — have endorsed that approach.
Even though Trump recently criticized Florida’s six-week abortion ban, he said he opposes a state ballot measure that would codify Roe’s protections in the state, where he is a voter. Trump’s opposition came after heavy pressure from anti-abortion advocates, who anticipate having far greater influence with a Trump administration than a Harris one.
Caregiving
Harris
Vice President Kamala Harris’ approach to economic and family policy places caregiving and caregivers at the center. It’s a position informed by her own upbringing: She was raised by a single mother with the help of a neighbor, who was also a child care worker and became like a second mother to her. Later, Harris became a caregiver for the final years of her mom’s life. A decade ago, she became a step-parent to her husband’s children, Ella and Cole.
During her presidential run, she has proposed expanding the child tax credit to as much as $3,600 from $2,000. She also wants to introduce a new tax credit that would be available during the first year of a child’s life, worth up to $6,000 for middle- and low-income families.
As vice president, Harris was the face of the Biden administration’s initiative to cap child care copayments for the lowest-income families at no more than 7 percent of their income. As a senator, she was the first to propose the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, which would grant employment protections to care workers who face significant wage theft, discrimination or sexual harassment.
When she ran for president in 2019, she proposed a six-month paid family and medical leave at the federal level — one of the most ambitious policies Democrats have ever put forward. The United States is one of a handful of nations that doesn’t have such a policy. As of early September, Harris had not yet announced what her paid leave policy would be if elected this year.
She also has not said how her proposals would be financed. The child tax credit expansion alone is estimated to cost more than $1.2 trillion over 10 years, according to an analysis by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a non-partisan organization.
Trump
During his administration, former President Donald Trump addressed caregiving policy several times with the support of his daughter, Ivanka Trump, who was a vocal advocate. In 2019, she convened more than a dozen legislators and governors — Republicans and Democrats — for a summit on child care and paid leave. The nation had a “historic chance” to pass paid family leave and child care reform, she said at the time. But that didn’t lead to any policy changes.
As a candidate, Trump has not addressed child care or paid leave, nor has he laid out what his policy approach would be. He dodged the question during the debate with then-candidate Joe Biden. During an economic event in September, he said it was a “very important issue,” but that relative to tariffs and other issues, child care is “not very expensive.” Trump did not respond to a question asking what child care policy he’d advance as president.
His running mate, Sen. JD Vance, has called universal child care, or free care subsidized by the government, a “massive subsidy to the lifestyle preferences of the affluent over the preferences of the middle and working class” and a “class war against normal people.” He has argued that this is not what most “normal Americans” would prefer, but rather that one parent should care for children while the other works. Vance, who has three young children, is in favor of policies that would support grandparents who want to care for grandchildren and cut back on what he considers unnecessary child care regulation.
Trump’s greatest caregiving achievement came in 2017 with the expansion of the child tax credit as part of his Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. He doubled the credit to $2,000 and increased the portion of it that was available for the lowest-income families. That expansion expires in 2025, when Congress will decide whether to keep the credit the same, reduce it or expand it.
Trump has indicated that he supports keeping the credit and is interested in expanding it, but hasn’t committed to a specific dollar value. For his part, Vance has floated raising the credit to $5,000.
Climate
Harris
During her time as a U.S. senator, Kamala Harris introduced several pieces of legislation addressing environmental injustices and promoting climate action. These included co-sponsoring the Green New Deal, a resolution championed by youth climate activists that called for creating well-paying jobs for marginalized communities as part of a clean energy transition. While it did not pass, it cemented her reputation as a progressive politician on climate.
As vice president, Harris cast the tie-breaking vote for the Inflation Reduction Act, which earmarked $369 billion to expand clean energy, incentivize the manufacturing of electric cars and reduce carbon emissions. Last year, she was the highest-ranking U.S. official to attend COP 28, an annual climate summit, in Dubai.
While most activists see the Inflation Reduction Act as a big climate win, they also point out that the Biden-Harris administration made some compromises to the oil and gas industries at a time when the country urgently needs to curb its fossil fuel emissions. Last year, the administration approved a permit for the Mountain Valley Pipeline in Virginia and West Virginia and the controversial Willow Project in Alaska.
Harris has also switched her position on the topic of fracking, or extracting oil and gas from rock. During her first run for president in 2019, she stated she would support a national ban on fracking. But over the last few years, she has said she no longer supports one.
In a recent interview with CNN, she affirmed her commitment to addressing climate change, calling it a “real” and “urgent” crisis.
Trump
When Donald Trump was president, he rolled back over 100 environmental regulations. Some weakened the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to lower fossil fuel emissions from polluting industries. Others made it easier for the Department of the Interior to issue permits and leases for oil and gas production. He also withdrew the United States from the Paris Climate Accords, an international agreement signed by nearly 200 countries that aims to reduce global warming.
Trump has previously called climate change a “hoax” and his official 2024 campaign agenda makes no mention of it. Instead, Trump’s agenda says he will ramp up energy production and “make America the dominant energy producer in the world.” He also promises to cut “costly and burdensome regulations” passed during the Biden administration that reduce vehicle emissions and incentivize the production of electric cars. The Republican platform linked on his website expands on some of his bullet points, stating, “We will DRILL, BABY, DRILL.” It also says that the party wants to “end market-distorting restrictions on Oil, Natural Gas, and Coal.”
The scientific consensus is that burning fossil fuels is causing climate change and that in order to avoid the worst outcomes, the world needs to curb those fuels’ consumption and transition to clean energy sources like solar and wind. In April, Trump told oil and gas executives that he “hates wind,” referring to offshore wind projects, and that he would once again speed up permitting for oil and gas projects.
Criminal justice
Harris
As a prosecutor and a political candidate, Harris has attempted to toe the line between a “tough on crime” approach with growing interest from the public in reform and prevention measures. While district attorney of San Francisco, one of her signature efforts was the “back on track” initiative launched in 2005 to reduce recidivism among young adults charged with nonviolent offenses, which included job training and placement, assistance with education and mental health services.
As district attorney, Harris vowed to “never charge the death penalty.” But as California attorney general, she appealed a court ruling in 2014 that would have effectively ended capital punishment in the state, stating that the ruling was “not supported by the law.”
In 2017, while in the U.S. Senate, Harris introduced legislation to replace the use of money bail in pretrial detention. In 2019, she introduced the Ensuring Quality Access to Legal Defense Act, which sought to award grants to invest in state, local and tribal public defenders’ offices. In 2020, she was a cosponsor for the Justice in Policing Act, which called for increasing accountability for police misconduct and better data collection. All three measures stalled in committee.
During her first run for president in 2019, Harris told journalist Soledad O’Brien, “If a child is molested, if a woman is raped, if one human being kills another human being, I do believe there should be serious consequences of accountability.”
“But the truth also is that we have got to understand that we are incarcerating people left, right and center, for nonviolent offenses, for non serious offenses, and we have a revolving door in the criminal justice system, which has led to this issue of mass incarceration,” she continued.
On her 2024 campaign website, Harris celebrates the Biden administration’s investment of $15 billion in expanding local law enforcement and promises to continue to fund the hiring and training of law enforcement officers.
Trump
Trump entered office in 2017 calling for a crackdown on crime and broader protections for members of law enforcement. Attorney General Jeff Sessions was the face of the administration’s criminal justice work early on.
In February 2017, Sessions announced that the Justice Department would “pull back” on President Barack Obama’s efforts to sue police departments for civil rights violations. That same year, Sessions made it easier for police to seize cash and property from people suspected of crimes. He also rescinded a memo by Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder that had sought to reduce mass incarceration by avoiding mandatory sentencing. Before Sessions resigned from his position in November 2018, he signed a memo formally restricting the Justice Department’s ability to enter into consent decrees with state and city governments that could bring about reform.
Trump signaled some interest in prison reform but also called for the death penalty for drug dealers. In December 2018, he signed the First Step Act, a bill passed by Congress that sought to reduce prison recidivism with programming aimed at rehabilitation. The policy also retroactively reduced sentences for certain drug crimes. In four years, Trump granted clemency — either early release or a full pardon — to 237 people, which is less than half the number that Obama reached in eight years, but 37 more than President George W. Bush in eight years.
Before Trump took office, there hadn’t been a federal execution in 17 years, but there were 13 during his term.
As a 2024 presidential candidate, Trump has repeatedly indicated he wants broader use of the death penalty. On his campaign website, Trump promises “record funding to hire and retrain police officers, strengthen qualified immunity and other protections for police officers, increase penalties for assaults on law enforcement, put violent offenders and career criminals behind bars, and surge federal prosecutors and the National Guard into high-crime communities.”
Trump has faced more than 70 criminal charges in state and federal courts and has been convicted of 34 felony counts.
Disability and aging
Harris
Harris has a long record of engagement on disability and aging issues, in both her professional and personal lives. In a recent conversation with the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ), Harris talked about caring for her mother while she was dying from cancer — a story she first told in her autobiography.
“When my mother was sick with cancer, I did a lot to take care of her. The work of taking care of a loved one, particularly an elder, is extraordinarily heavy. But we do it because it is what we need to do,” she said during her NABJ speech.
During her time as a senator, Harris cosponsored the Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights, which would have given more protections and recourse to home health aides, nannies and house cleaners, among others.
Harris has a history of allyship with unions like the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) that represent paid caregivers like home health aides and nursing home workers. SEIU endorsed Harris in July, shortly after she entered the race.
Harris is likely to continue the Biden administration’s efforts to lower prescription drug prices through Medicare price negotiation, as well as his efforts to increase pay transparency for home health aides, mandate more staffing in nursing homes and improve air travel for people using wheelchairs and other mobility devices.
During the Biden administration, Harris has frequently taken the lead on meeting with disability leaders on disability.
Harris is likely to continue the Biden administration’s relatively hands-off approach to the ongoing spread of COVID-19.
During her presidential campaign, Harris has pledged to expand home care services for older adults and people with disabilities. She has also pledged to end subminimum wage for people with disabilities. Currently, the Fair Labor Standards Act allows some people with disabilities to be paid pennies per hour for their work. She has not explained how she plans on achieving either of these goals, and it is worth noting that Biden also pledged to end subminimum wage for people with disabilities during his 2020 campaign. He has not done so, though he has a few months left in office.
Trump
Trump made the repeal of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), as well as cuts to and block granting of Medicaid, among his signature issues during his 2016 presidential campaign and the first year of his presidency. His efforts were unpopular and ultimately failed.
The ACA guarantees that people with preexisting conditions, including disabilities, cannot be denied health insurance on account of those conditions. Medicaid is the largest funder of long-term care for older and disabled adults.
It is unclear if Trump will take another run at the ACA if he wins the 2024 election. His campaign website promises not to make cuts against Medicare and social security, but makes no such promises about Medicaid and the ACA. During the September presidential debate, Trump would not say whether he would attempt to repeal and replace the ACA again, claiming he actually “saved it” and that he has “concepts of a plan” for something better.
In a recent interview, Trump’s running mate, Senator J.D. Vance, put forward the idea of moving individuals with chronic conditions to a different insurance pool than healthier people. Before the ACA, 35 states had so-called “high risk pools” for people deemed “uninsurable” by individual market insurers due to their health conditions. The premiums were usually twice what healthy people paid.
Trump’s platform and campaign website do not mention disability.
During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the Trump administration instituted rules to prevent discrimination in ventilator allocation to people with disabilities who contracted COVID-19. It also instituted rules allowing people with significant disabilities to continue support from aides while hospitalized.
At the same time, Trump promised that COVID-19 would be “gone by Easter” of 2020 and regularly downplayed the danger of the virus.
Although Trump rarely acknowledges it, likely due to vaccine skepticism among many in his base, his administration spearheaded Operation Warp Speed, which led to rapid development of safe, effective vaccines for COVID-19.
In a recent book, Fred Trump, his nephew, recounted multiple instances of the president saying that perhaps Fred should just let his significantly disabled son and others like him die, due to the cost of keeping them alive. The former president has denied that these exchanges took place.
Education
Harris
Throughout her career, Harris has prioritized education, choosing Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a former teacher, as her 2024 running mate.
She has sought to make college affordable and accessible, suing the for-profit Corinthian Colleges in 2013 for defrauding students when she was California’s attorney general. The Biden administration applauded her work after discharging the loans of former Corinthian students in 2022.
Harris has compared her record on for-profit colleges with that of Trump, who started the now defunct Trump University. “As attorney general, I took on one of our country’s largest for-profit colleges that was scamming students,” she said in July. “Well, Donald Trump ran a for-profit college that scammed students.”
Harris, however, has downplayed a controversial aspect of her tenure as a lawmaker — championing a 2011 California truancy law that led to parent arrests. Harris later expressed regret about the legislation’s “unintended consequences.”
During a 2019 presidential debate, Harris recalled participating in a voluntary school busing integration program in Berkeley, California, as a child, noting that Biden had opposed court-ordered busing.
As his vice president, Harris supported the broad student loan forgiveness Biden tried to give borrowers in 2022. The Supreme Court later blocked the relief plan, which would’ve given borrowers with incomes of less than $125,000 a year $10,000 in loan forgiveness and Pell Grant awardees in the same income bracket $20,000 in relief. This echoed Harris’ plan as a 2020 presidential candidate to cancel Pell recipients’ debts.
Harris graduated from Howard University, a historically Black college. As a senator she introduced legislation to tackle food insecurity among students at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), and as vice president, she’s seen the Biden administration invest unprecedented funding into HBCUs, most recently a $1.3 billion investment.
Harris has criticized Republicans for disinvesting in education.
“They even want to eliminate the Department of Education and end Head Start,” she said in July. She also attacked “extremists” for denying children the opportunity “to live safe from gun violence.”
Trump
Trump has repeatedly said that he wants to eliminate the Department of Education. By selecting Betsy DeVos as his secretary of education when he was in the White House, he already laid some of the groundwork to achieve this controversial goal.
During and after her tenure, DeVos backed school voucher programs to get taxpayer funds to cover private school tuition and related expenses. DeVos, a billionaire, was one of Trump’s most contested cabinet picks, with critics accusing her of wanting to dismantle public education rather than support it.
Republicans have described their support of vouchers as “school choice,” but this term can refer to choices within public school systems instead of solely the opportunity to attend private or religious schools. Still, Trump has characterized himself as a champion of school choice and charter school expansion.
DeVos drew criticism not only for her hostility to public schools but also because of her updates to the Title IX regulations that bar educational institutions that receive federal funds from engaging in sex discrimination. Advocates against sexual violence on school and college campuses say that the DeVos-era regulations made it harder for survivors to report sexual misconduct and easier for perpetrators to avoid accountability.
Now, Republicans object to Title IX updates under the Biden administration, particularly that they offer more protections for LGBTQ+ students. Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign platform states that he will cut federal funding for schools “pushing critical race theory or gender ideology on our children” and will fight to “keep men out of women’s sports.”
Trump also intends to abolish teacher tenure, cut school administrator positions and establish a parental bill of rights, among other measures designed to disempower public school officials and personnel.
Courting Black voters, Trump has touted his financial support to HBCUs. In 2019, he signed the FUTURE Act, a law that has given HBCUs $85 million annually.
Gun control
Harris
Vice President Kamala Harris has made the “freedom to live safe from gun violence” a key part of her presidential campaign. As the head of the first White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, Harris has spearheaded the current administration’s work on gun safety, including the passage of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. The most substantive piece of federal gun safety legislation in over 30 years, it included record funding for school-based mental health services. The Biden-Harris administration also issued an executive action to close the “gun show loophole,” in which people who know they cannot pass a background check turn to unlicensed sellers, and worked to further regulate gun dealers and tighten background check requirements.
This spring, Harris announced the launch of a National Extreme Risk Protection Order Resource Center. Operated by the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions and paid for with a Justice Department grant, the center helps state and local governments optimize the use of local red flag laws, which allow for the temporary seizure of firearms from a person who may be a danger to themselves or others.
Harris’ history as an advocate for gun safety pre-dates her time in the White House. As the first woman to serve as San Francisco’s district attorney, she prioritized prosecuting domestic violence cases. There is a 500 percent increase in deaths when a firearm is present during a domestic violence incident, and 70 women are fatally shot each month in the United States in domestic violence incidents.
As California’s Attorney General, Harris championed the state’s own “red flag,” law; California became the third state to implement one. And as a U.S. senator, Harris co-sponsored the Disarm Hate Act to prohibit individuals convicted of violent hate crimes from purchasing and possessing firearms. She also pushed legislation to regulate ghost guns, large-capacity magazines, 3D-printed guns and bump stocks; close the “boyfriend loophole” and prohibit stalkers from purchasing firearms; and provide protections for survivors of domestic violence and help survivors of gun violence access resources. Throughout her political career, she has called for a reinstatement of the federal assault rifle ban.
Trump
Speaking to the National Rifle Association (NRA) in February, former President Donald Trump asserted that “no one will lay a finger on your firearms” should he win back the presidency. Since then, Trump has routinely vowed to roll back the gun safety measures enacted by the Biden administration as soon as he takes office. But Trump’s own presidential record on gun safety has been mixed: While he supported measures to loosen restrictions on hunting on public lands and to classify gun stores, shooting ranges and weapons’ manufacturers as “essential services” during the COVID-19 pandemic, he also occasionally faced heat from the NRA.
The criticism followed the 2019 mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, when Trump called for the passage of red flag laws, also known as extreme risk protection orders. The Trump administration had already antagonized the NRA following the 2017 mass shooting at the Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas, when the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms and Tobacco submitted for a rule change that would allow the agency to create a federal rule banning bump stocks, circumventing the need for congressional approval.
Trump himself issued an executive memorandum urging the U.S. attorney general to expedite the rule change, though it took over a year after the shooting for the administration to actually implement this change. This summer, the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority — including Trump appointees Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch — ruled that a federal bump stock ban was unconstitutional.
This year, at a campaign rally held just days before the Iowa caucuses, Trump urged victims of a January school shooting in the state “to get over it” and “move forward.” A sixth-grade child was killed during the shooting and seven others at the school were injured. One month later, he told NRA members that he was “the best friend gun owners have ever had in the White House.”
Health care
Harris
As a U.S. senator in 2019, Harris co-sponsored the Medicare for All bill, a piece of legislation introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders that would have replaced private health insurance with a single government-run insurer for everyone.
Since becoming the Democratic presidential nominee, however, Harris has not been pushing for single-payer government health insurance anymore, but is focused on expanding access to reproductive rights and lowering prescription drug prices.
“Our plan will lower costs and save many middle class families thousands of dollars a year,” Harris said at a campaign event in Atlanta.
The 2024 Democratic National Committee’s platform supports Medicaid expansion and pushes Congress to allow millions to use coverage similar to Medicaid, even in states that haven’t expanded the program.
“We are not going back to when Donald Trump tried to cut Social Security and Medicare,” Harris said during her acceptance speech during the 2024 Democratic National Convention. “We are not going back to when he tried to get rid of the Affordable Care Act, when insurance companies could deny people with pre-existing conditions.”
Trump
When Trump was president, his administration pushed the Supreme Court to strike down the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and the 2010 law that prohibited insurance companies from charging people more for pre-existing medical conditions and imposed federal standards on what health insurance had to cover.
The Trump administration issued regulations and changed the ACA to allow employees to deny birth control coverage if they had moral or religious objections and let some health insurance companies discriminate based on gender identity and sexual orientation. Trump also favored changing Medicaid to a block grant program, which means states would receive a fixed amount of money for their own programs and face fewer coverage requirements, and making it so that people would have to submit proof of employment in order to be eligible for Medicaid.
This year, as a presidential candidate, Trump appears to have softened his stance to repeal and replace the ACA, a position that proved to be unpopular in previous years. He has said he would “not cut one penny” from Medicare and Social Security, according to the Republican election platform released ahead of the party’s national convention in July. The platform outlines that there should be “no changes to the retirement age,” but does not mention Medicaid.
Immigration
Harris
When she was running for president in 2019, Harris said she would close private immigration detention centers, limit deportations and prioritize finding paths for undocumented immigrants to become U.S. citizens. She also called Trump’s family separation policy a “human rights abuse.”
In March 2021, President Joe Biden tapped Harris to lead U.S. diplomatic efforts and work with officials in Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras to stem migration to the United States — but her role did not include managing the border. Instead, she wrote a U.S. strategy that focused on the root causes for Central American migration: economic insecurity, corruption, human rights violations, criminal gang violence and gender-based violence.
In her 2024 campaign, Harris has said her position on border crossings is the same as the Biden administration. She supports the bipartisan border security bill that failed to pass in 2024 after Trump signaled his opposition, which led to Senate Republicans walking away from the deal. The bill would have overhauled immigration law for the first time in more than three decades. It would revive and codify a variety of Trump-era border policies, including construction of a wall, keeping migrants seeking asylum in detention facilities outside of the United States and expediting deportation of unaccompanied children.
“We can create an earned pathway to citizenship and secure our border,” Harris said at the Democratic National Convention in August. “I will bring back the bipartisan border security bill that he killed, and I will sign it into law.”
Trump
The Trump administration set an unprecedented pace for executive action on immigration, enacting more than 470 administrative changes in his four years in office. Trump originally ran in 2016 on an immigration-centered platform, promising to deport millions and build a wall along the entire 2,000-mile border with Mexico. One of his first actions as president was to freeze refugee admissions, citing security concerns.
The Trump administration also worked to shift the nation’s immigration system away from family reunification — which helps citizens and permanent residents sponsor their relatives to also become permanent residents — and toward employment-based migration, proposing education-based green card requirements and denying immigrants more likely to use Medicaid or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. By 2021, legal immigration was reduced by nearly 50 percent under the Trump administration, according to a National Foundation for American Policy analysis.
During his 2024 campaign, Trump has said he intends to implement the largest mass deportation of undocumented immigrants in American history by using law enforcement officials to round them up in migrant camps before “expedited removal.” Trump has also said he would restore many of his policies, including separating migrant families at the border to deter immigrants from coming, suspending the refugee program, barring entry from Muslim-majority countries and diverting asylum seekers to countries willing to accept them.
“Under my leadership, we will use all necessary state, local, federal and military resources to carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” Trump said at the Conservative Political Action Conference in March 2023.
Israel and Palestine
Harris
The Biden-Harris approach to Israel and Palestine largely aligns with the longstanding pro-Israel stance of previous administrations, though the issue took a back seat early on in President Joe Biden’s foreign policy priorities.
In 2021, while visiting George Mason University, Harris drew criticism for not challenging a student who described the conflict as “an ethnic genocide.” Harris’ team later clarified that she “strongly disagrees” with the student’s characterization and has been “unwavering in her commitment to Israel and to Israel’s security.”
Since the Oct. 7 attack on Israel last year that ignited the latest phase of the conflict, Harris has repeatedly stated that Israel has a right to defend itself and has not committed to withhold U.S. military aid to Israel. Her first notable remarks on the issue since launching her 2024 presidential campaign came from her speech accepting the Democratic Party’s nomination at the national convention.
“The scale of suffering is heartbreaking,” Harris said from the DNC stage. “President Biden and I are working to end this war such that Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom and self-determination.”
Days later, in her first major interview as a 2024 candidate, Harris indicated that she would not deviate from the approach of the Biden White House.
When asked by CNN’s Dana Bash if there would be a policy change from the Biden administration, Harris replied, “No. I — we have to get a deal done.”
She added: “I remain committed — since I’ve been on October 8 — to what we must do to work toward a two-state solution where Israel is secure and in equal measure, the Palestinians have security and self-determination and dignity.”
Trump
Trump started his presidency by publicly criticizing Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory, but over the years, he has cast himself as a loyal supporter of Israel. In December 2017, he fulfilled a campaign promise to declare Jerusalem Israel’s capital city and ordered that the U.S. embassy be relocated there from Tel Aviv. Trump’s order officially cemented a move that previous Democratic and Republican presidents supported but never acted on.
Both Palestinians and Israelis claim Jerusalem as their capital, and Palestinian officials condemned Trump’s decision, stating that it would disrupt efforts to broker peace. The new U.S. embassy in Jerusalem officially opened in May 2018.
In 2018, Trump stated his support for a two-state solution, a proposal to end the conflict that would allow Palestinians and Israelis to have their own territories. However this year, in an interview with TIME, he backtracked. “Most people thought it was going to be a two-state solution. I’m not sure a two-state solution anymore is gonna work,” he said.
Trump strengthened the White House’s relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu following a strained dynamic under President Barack Obama. In January 2020, Trump unveiled a Middle East peace plan that would guarantee Israel control over Jerusalem and would maintain Israeli settlements in the West Bank, one of two Palestinian territories.
Since the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, Trump has spoken on the war, stating in an April interview that Netanyahu needs to “get it over with” and “get back to normalcy.” In the TIME interview weeks later, Trump did not commit to withholding American military assistance to Israel. Since October, more than 1,200 Israelis and more than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to officials.
LGBTQ+ rights
Harris
When then-presidential Biden announced Harris as his vice presidential pick in 2020, a number of LGBTQ+ Americans had reservations. Harris had just come out of a Democratic primary where she made a name for herself as a more centrist candidate, and her record as a prosecutor raised eyebrows in a community that historically sees itself marginalized by law enforcement and the criminal legal system.
But Harris’ record also suggested she might be an ally to LGBTQ+ people. In 2004, she became one of the first in her party to back marriage equality by performing same-sex weddings in San Francisco. As San Francisco district attorney, she helped create an LGBTQ+ hate crimes unit, and as California attorney general, she fought against gay and trans “panic” defenses, wherein perpetrators of violent crimes attempt to use homophobia as a justification for violence.
In 2015, her office fought against gender-affirming care for an incarcerated transgender woman, something she has since apologized for. She has also supported bills banning sex work, legislation that some advocates say particularly harms queer and transgender people who are statistically more likely to work in underground economies.
Over the past four years, Biden and Harris have delivered meaningful policy change for LGBTQ+ Americans. The administration has issued the nation’s first gender-neutral passports, undone former Trump’s transgender military ban, reinstated transgender health care protections, made high-level LGBTQ+ appointments and lifted the ban on blood donations from gay and bisexual men.
Biden and Harris have run the nation at a time when anti-trans legislation in the states is at an all-time high, and transphobia and homophobia are central to some Republicans’ campaigns and agendas. Now, LGBTQ+ Americans are eager to see if Harris will put resources and attention into halting the hate facing their community.
Trump
Before taking office in 2016, Trump vowed to be a “friend” to LGBTQ+ people. While a small but vocal group of queer Republicans claim he fulfilled that promise, Trump’s administration is widely characterized as one of the most hostile toward LGBTQ+ rights in modern history.
Media advocacy organization GLAAD tallied 210 anti-LGBTQ+ actions taken by the former president during his four years in office. Those including barring transgender people from serving in the military, banning embassies from displaying Pride flags during Pride month, flat-funding HIV/AIDS efforts globally, promoting exemptions that allow health care workers to turn away transgender patients, and outlawing the words “transgender” and “diversity” in Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data collection efforts.
Trump is also the first sitting president to host a Southern Poverty Law Center-designated hate group at the White House by inviting the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) in 2018. In 2015, ADF argued in favor of the forced sterilization of transgender people before the European Court of Human Rights. The group also openly promotes the belief that gay people are pedophiles.
Since leaving office, Trump’s views have evolved with the political climate. In July, the Republican National Committee put out a new Trump-backed platform that scrapped language limiting marriage to “a man and a woman.”
He has doubled down on anti-transgender rhetoric, however, criticizing Harris for wanting to do “transgender operations on illegal aliens,” and lambasting her running mate Walz for being “very heavy into transgender.”
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Candice Norwood, Chabeli Carrazana, Jennifer Gerson, Jessica Kutz, Kate Sosin, Nadra Nittle, Mariel Padilla, Sara Luterman and Shefali Luthra contributed reporting.
