Questions we’d love to ask Kamala Harris

Mr. Trump makes her task easier by regularly spouting falsehoods and wild rhetoric, such as his crack about Ms. Harris’s racial identity at a session of the National Association of Black Journalists. But at least he has taken questions, including hostile ones, both from NABJ and at a long news conference on Thursday.

If she hopes to prevail, Ms. Harris needs to present her ideas. The media and public have legitimate questions, and she should face them. This is a political necessity — Mr. Trump is already turning her avoidance of the media into an attack line. And elections aren’t just about winning. They’re about accumulating political capital for a particular agenda, which Ms. Harris can’t do unless she articulates one.

What’s more, Ms. Harris might find her best hope of persuading voters is not to reinforce familiar negative information about Mr. Trump, even if it’s repackaged as an attack on his, and his party’s, “weirdness.” Rather, a new survey published in Matt Yglesias’s newsletter by political scientists David Broockman of the University of California at Berkeley and Josh Kalla of Yale, who study political messaging, suggests that her best bet would be to provide the public new, positive information about herself — and her agenda.

To be sure, the vice president has run ads on those themes. And she has let it be known, through spokespeople, that she no longer supports a national ban on fracking or the elimination of private health insurance. The Harris campaign has said that she will stick with Mr. Biden’s pledge to not raise income taxes on anyone making less than $400,000 per year — though whether she would offset that with higher taxes on corporations and those at the very top of the income scale remains unknown.

On border security, Ms. Harris is now running commercials that highlight her support for increased enforcement. Back in June 2018, amid the movement to abolish the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, Ms. Harris said, regarding that idea, “We need to probably think about starting from scratch.” She said in July 2019 that undocumented immigrants who cross the border illegally should not be charged with a crime. Now the campaign says she believes “unauthorized border crossings are illegal.”

All of this moves her toward more popular positions. Still, it’s a lot of mind-changing for the public to absorb without further explanation. Without hearing Ms. Harris articulate her thought process, she runs the risk of leaving voters to wonder whether she is just shifting with the political winds, or, indeed, planning to revert to previous positions after she’s won the presidency. Why, for instance, did she embrace Mr. Trump’s idea to exempt tips from taxation?

On foreign policy, Ms. Harris’s aides have denied claims by activists that she expressed openness during a private meeting to an arms embargo on Israel. She’s placed added emphasis on expressing sympathy for Palestinian suffering while also supporting Israel’s right to defend itself. Both critics and supporters of Israel are reading her running-mate choice of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as a sign that her policy might be somewhat tougher on Israel and more sympathetic to the Palestinians than Mr. Biden’s has been. She needs to tell us: Are they misreading it?

Ms. Harris said in 2021 that she was the last person in the room with Mr. Biden when he decided to pull out of Afghanistan. Did she try to urge the president to keep some U.S. troops in the country? And how does she answer Mr. Trump’s charge that the total withdrawal from Afghanistan emboldened Russian President Vladimir Putin to launch his full-scale invasion of Ukraine? In 2020, Ms. Harris said she agreed unequivocally “with the goal of reducing the defense budget.” Is that still her view?

The “vibe” around the vice president’s campaign launch has been undeniably strong among Democrats, but she can’t bask in it forever. The more substance Ms. Harris can offer before the election, the more control she will have over what voters think of her and the more of a mandate she would have to govern should she prevail in November.