Straw poll: Harris adds another ban to the list of things she’s flip-flopped on

Vice President Kamala Harris has changed her mind about banning plastic straws in her latest move to appeal to voters as a centrist.

When Harris ran for president in the 2020 election, she said during a CNN town hall that the government should ban plastic straws.

But on Thursday, a campaign official told Axios that Harris no longer supports the ban, though she remains steadfast in her efforts to combat climate change.

"She cast the tiebreaking vote on the most consequential legislation to combat climate change and create clean energy jobs in history, and as president, she is going to be focused on expanding on that progress," a campaign official told the outlet.

Calls to ban plastic straws have dwindled in popularity, as research suggests only 0.025% of the 8 million tons of plastic entering the ocean each year can be traced to plastic straws.

Trace amounts of plastic pollution entering the ecosystem have also been paired with wildly unpopular paper straws restaurants have used to replace sturdier plastic ones. The straws fall apart while they sit in liquids, making them difficult and distasteful to use.

"She joked even then about how crappy paper straws are and the need to come up with better eco-friendly alternatives," the official said.

The apparent position switch is the latest instance of Harris, through staffers and intermediaries, turning on a dime on policy issues. The Democratic nominee has rarely denounced her former positions herself, leading her critics to question whether the changes of heart are genuine or if she is simply posturing in an attempt to paint herself as more centrist than she is.

This is not the only environmental policy issue that Harris has drastically changed her mind about. With Pennsylvania making its way to the center of her campaign's attention, she has embraced fracking, a key pillar of the Keystone State's economy, after saying she supported banning the practice in 2020.

"We can grow, and we can increase a thriving clean energy economy without banning fracking," Harris told CNN’s Dana Bash during her first sit-down interview of the 2024 campaign.

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Harris has also flip-flopped on her support for Medicare for All, a mandatory gun buyback program, and promised to sign a bill that would continue to build Trump’s border wall.

Harris told Bash that her “values have not changed.” Instead, she is abandoning her more progressive policies in an effort to appeal to a wider base of voters.