“[Harris] acknowledged that ‘prices, in particular for groceries, are still too high,’ and she mentioned her proposals to expand the child tax credit and subsidize first-time home buyers. She also listed a number of the Administration’s achievements, including capping the cost of insulin for seniors at thirty-five dollars a month, creating eight hundred thousand manufacturing jobs, and making the U.S. economy less dependent on global supply chains for basic needs.”

‍John Cassidy, New Yorker

“Her response [to questions about her shifting policy positions] was that her values have not changed but her experience as vice president has given her a different perspective and made her appreciate the importance of achieving consensus. You may not like that answer, but she was confident and unapologetic in explaining herself…

“Even as she projected strength and seriousness, Harris needed to give people a sense of her as a real person, to let them peek behind the curtain a bit. Her story about the morning that Biden called to tell her that he was stepping aside did this nicely. There were baby nieces and pancakes and bacon involved. What could be more American? Does Harris still have questions to answer and concerns to allay? Yep. The self-defining is not yet done. But this felt like a good first effort.”Michelle Cottle, New York Times

“There’s a difference between adjusting one’s views on a specific and frankly not-all-that-vital policy after learning more, as Harris has [with fracking], and speaking out of both sides of one’s mouth on some of the most fundamental issues voters must consider, as Trump and Vance often do. Trump has both bragged about ending the era of abortion rights in America and then saying he’ll be great for reproductive freedoms, while Vance has compared Trump to Hitler and then run alongside him.”

‍Jill Filipovic, Daily Beast

“What Harris’s opponents cast as ‘flip-flops’ — and, yes, she has changed her positions on, among other issues, fracking and aspects of immigration policy — are about more than, say, the urgent need to carry Pennsylvania. They also reflect a progressive movement that found a way during the Biden years to manage the trade-offs that progress requires…

“Some might call these shifts ‘selling out’ or, more blandly, ‘moving to the center.’ Neither formulation grasps one of the genuine achievements of Biden’s presidency: He created policy coalitions that brought center and left together on behalf of incremental but significant changes with an eye toward more progress down the road. Harris is now the standard-bearer for that approach.”

‍E.J. Dionne, Washington Post