Watch key moments from Harris and Walz’s CNN interview
Mike Wendling and Max Matza
BBC News
US Vice-President Kamala Harris defended changing her mind on key issues in her first interview since entering the presidential race.
The Democratic nominee was pressed on why her policies on immigration and climate have changed since she ran for president in 2019.
“I think the most important and most significant aspect of my policy perspective and decisions is my values have not changed,” she told CNN’s Dana Bash.
She also vowed to “turn the page” on the divisive rhetoric of the Trump era, in the joint interview with her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.
Her Republican opponent Donald Trump used a single-word in his review after it concluded.
“BORING!!!” the former president wrote on Truth Social.
The vice-president was forced to defend the White House’s economic track record, as inflation and high cost-of-living prices continue to hurt Americans.
Polls have regularly suggested that voters would prefer Mr Trump’s handling of the economy.
Here are the key takeaways from the interview.
Harris pressed on fracking and climate
When asked about her shifting positions, Ms Harris referred to her previous support of the Green New Deal, a wide-ranging Democratic proposal introduced in 2019 to reduce reliance on fossil fuels.
“I have always believed, and I’ve worked on it, that the climate crisis is real, that it is an urgent matter,” she said.
The vice-president pointed to the Biden administration’s work on the Inflation Reduction Act, which funnelled hundreds of billions of dollars to renewable energy and electric vehicle tax credit and rebate programmes.
Ms Harris did not explain her reversal on banning fracking – a technique for recovering gas and oil from shale rock used by an industry that is particularly strong in the battleground state of Pennsylvania.
Ms Harris had said in 2019 that “there is no question I’m in favour of banning fracking”.
But she has backpedalled on that view since becoming vice-president – even casting the tie-breaking vote in the Senate on new fracking leases.
In the CNN interview on Thursday, she said: “As president, I will not ban fracking.”
Brian Fallon, a campaign spokesperson, said on social media that the Biden administration’s “clean energy investments have proven the ability to make progress on climate without those past stances”.
Biden policies on immigration and Gaza will continue
Image source, Getty Images
Kamala Harris and Tim Walz arriving in Savannah, Georgia
Ms Harris once held more progressive immigration views as a senator and in her campaign for president in 2020. She had previously advocated for the closure of immigration detention centres and the decriminalisation of illegal crossings.
But on the subject of “securing our border” Ms Harris said “my values have not changed” and referenced her time “prosecuting transnational, criminal organisations” as California attorney general.
Earlier this year, the vice-president supported a hardline bipartisan border security deal that would have included hundreds of millions of dollars for border wall construction.
Trump pressured Republicans in Congress to kill the deal, but Ms Harris has promised to “sign it into law” if elected. She committed to passing it again during the CNN interview.
Ms Harris also was asked about the war in Gaza, and re-iterated the White House’s position that both Israel and Hamas must “get a deal done” and that the Palestinians deserve to have their own country neighbouring Israel.
“This war must end, and we must get a deal that is about getting the hostages out,” she said.
She would not commit to an arms embargo on Israel, as some on her party’s left flank have demanded.
Harris would appoint a Republican in her Cabinet
To explain her moderated immigration view, the Democratic nominee told CNN that her travels across the country as vice-president had made her “believe it is important to build consensus, and it is important to find a common place of understanding of where we can actually solve problems”.
Along those lines, Ms Harris committed to include someone “who was a Republican” in her presidential cabinet. She said it would fulfill her promise to be a president “for all Americans”.
“I have spent my career inviting diversity of opinion. I think it’s important to have people at the table when some of the most important decisions are being made that have different views.”
CNN’s Dana Bash asked Ms Harris, whose parents were Jamaican and Indian, about recent comments by Trump in which he suggested she assumed a black identity in later life for political purposes.
The comments caused an outrage but the vice-president had not weighed in.
This time she gave a very short answer.
“Same old, tired playbook. Next question, please.”
When asked later in the interview about the historic nature of her candidacy, she said she believed she was the best person to be president for for all Americans, regardless of race and gender.
Walz says ‘passion’ led to misstatements
Mr Walz was asked about misleading statements he has made about his military service and his personal struggle to have children.
Ms Bash asked him to clarify a comment he made in which he said he “carried” an assault rifle in “war”. The campaign has clarified that Mr Walz was never in a war zone.
The governor said he wore “his emotions on his sleeve” and was “speaking passionately” about the subject of gun crime in schools when he made the inaccurate statement.
That “passion” also extended to his incorrect assertion that his wife had received in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) treatments – which have become a political lightning rod in the US debate over abortion access – to conceive their children.
She received intrauterine insemination, not IVF.
“I spoke about our infertility issues ‘cause it’s hell, and families know this,” he said on CNN.
Biden called Harris to tell her the news
Ms Harris described the moment that President Biden called her to share that he had decided to end his re-election bid in July.
She said her family was visiting her when she received the phone call. They had just eaten pancakes and bacon and were working on a puzzle.
“My first thought was not about me, to be honest with you, my first thought was about him,” Ms Harris said when asked whether she asked for his endorsement.
The vice-president also maintained that the president could have served again.
“He is so smart, and I have spent hours upon hours with him being in the Oval Office and in the situation room. He has the intelligence, the commitment and judgment and disposition that I think the American people rightly deserve in their president.”
She said Trump, by contrast, had none of those qualities.
