Kamala Harris Plagiarized Joe Biden’s Campaign Policies for Website

In an article titled “Embarrassing Copy-Paste Plagues Harris’s Launch of Policy Platform,” The New Republic reported Monday:

Shortly after Kamala Harris released her policy agenda on Sunday evening, users on X spotted something in the metadata: Much of the language appears to have been lifted from Joe Biden’s campaign website.
On Sunday night, X user Corinne Green pointed out that the issues section of Harris’s website contained metadata with language urging voters to reelect Joe Biden. This language was visible when links to the campaign site were shared, and in the website’s description on Google searches.

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All of this creates the impression that at least some of the Harris campaign’s policy language was copied and pasted from Biden’s documents. That would be an embarrassing miscue from the Harris campaign, which partly came into being because of a perception that a refresh was needed to garner enthusiasm in the Democratic Party. It doesn’t help that the section on her website about her Israel-Palestine policy seems very similar to what Biden’s campaign was saying.

While the language calling for Biden to be reelected was removed, The New Republic said, the Harris campaign had failed to live up to the claim of her “issues” page to represent a “new way forward.” In a separate article Tuesday, the left-wing publication declared that “Kamala Harris Can’t Keep Running Like This,” arguing:

This was always going to be a very close election, even after Harris replaced Biden. But the tightening of the polls over the past week point to a failure in Harris’s campaign. She had nearly two months to show voters who she is and what she stands for. Instead, she has played it safe, hoping to maintain the positive vibes and momentum of the summer by deliberately not staking out positions on controversial policies. It’s now clear that that approach is no longer working. As the Times’s Nate Cohn wrote on Sunday, “More than anything, voters say they want to hear more about where she stands on the issues, something her campaign has seemed to struggle to lay out.”

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The Harris campaign is only now, belatedly, realizing that this is a problem. On Sunday, they finally added an “Issues” section to her website. It includes a slew of policies that the campaign has previously outlined, as well as sections on reproductive and civil rights. Unfortunately for Harris, its release was undermined by a simple but telling error: The page’s source code revealed that parts of the platform were copied directly from Biden’s campaign page.

This is dangerous territory for Harris, given that the Times poll found that more than 60 percent of voters wanted the next president to represent a “major change” from Biden—and only a quarter felt that Harris represented that change. That makes sense, given that she’s his vice president! But it means she should be working overtime to distinguish herself from her boss. Instead, she’s doing precisely the opposite. Unwilling to break publicly with Biden—to criticize his handling of say, inflation, immigration, or Israel—she has simply positioned herself as a younger version of him. Whether that’s intentional on her part, or the result of her campaign being run largely by the same people who ran Biden’s disastrous reelection bid, is unclear.

The news that Harris’s policies are copied from Biden’s website comes as she prepares for the debate, where she is under pressure to create a favorable public impression after avoiding the media for seven weeks, sitting down for only one interview on CNN with her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.