What would Kamala Harris do as president?

This was not the race Kamala Harris — or anyone else — was expecting. For most of the 2024 election, Harris' goal remained the same as it was in 2020: to support Joe Biden as his running mate against Donald Trump.

Then came the first presidential debate, and Biden's decision to step back from his campaign and endorse Harris as his replacement on the top of the Democratic ticket, with just months to go before November 5. Suddenly, what had seemed a rehash of the previous election became something new and unpredictable, with Democrats and Republicans alike scrambling to adjust to a new electoral reality.

Given her truncated timeframe, Harris' bid for the White House has necessarily operated at warp speed, focusing initially on the poetics of campaigning over the prose of policy. But as Election Day has neared, the vice president and her team have made a point of previewing a number of concrete proposals that flesh out — at least in part — what a Harris presidency might look like if she is elected.

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What did the commentators say? 

Broadly, Harris is a politician "more practical than ideological," Time said. To that end, her campaign specifics have been "in service to the larger goal of her campaign, which is to present a credible alternative to a second Donald Trump presidency." To date, Harris' campaign speeches have been "long on vibes and short on actual platforms," and — to the extent that they have gotten specific about policies — focused on "proposals originally made by Biden that he and Democrats were unable to get through Congress," NPR said.

In her first major policy speech, Harris focused on the "high costs of housing, groceries, health care and raising kids." Harris has also joined with Donald Trump in standing opposed to taxing tips earned by service workers. She later described her intention to build "what I call an opportunity economy" in a speech in North Carolina. Hers is an "aggressively populist economic agenda," which, while "building on much of Biden's economic agenda" also features her own effort to "continue, if not deepen" the current administration's hands-on engagement in "industrial, labor and antitrust policies," The Washington Post said. To that end, Harris has stressed her plans for budding entrepreneurs, promising to raise the startup deduction for new businesses "from $5,000 to $50,000, creating a standard deduction for small businesses, and incentivizing local governments to ease up red tape," Business Insider said.

Harris would also "likely continue many of Biden's foreign policy objectives" including "strong support for Ukraine's war effort," and a push to "deepen alliances in Asia and the Pacific in the face of China's geopolitical ascendance," Politico said. One area in which there may be differences is in how a Harris administration would handle the ongoing war in Gaza. She has "proven herself to be more attuned to the concerns of Democratic voters" speaking out against the war, Time said. She was also the "first senior administration official to call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza," although "rhetorical differences between Harris and Biden don't necessarily presage major policy deviations." Still, Harris is not as "fixed and intransigent" as Biden when it comes to her stance toward Israel, former State Department official Josh Paul said at Politico.

Although staffing her potential administration "hasn't been a central obsession" for Harris' team, a look at some of the names being discussed by her allies and staff "show how Harris and her team will start mapping her prospective administration," Axios said, To that end, "you won't see a bunch of new people you've never heard of," one adviser said to the outlet, which cited familiar names such as Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg as potential Cabinet members. Having completed a "stair-step progression to the pinnacle of American power," Harris is likely to "reward officials who similarly have worked their way up and are super-prepared — even over-prepared — for the jobs she gives them."

What next? 

In part, Harris' vagueness on policy specifics is a factor of her necessarily truncated campaign, in which she did not "have the time to draw out the sort of detailed policy proposals" that often take months to develop, The New York Times said. For many of her supporters, Harris' policy-lite campaign is not necessarily a bad thing, either. Some "officials who spend their lives working on policy are reluctant to suggest that she produce any between now and Election Day," the Times said. The focus, instead, should be on "doing whatever it takes to stop Trump from returning to the White House."