(NewsNation) — After President Joe Biden announced he would not seek reelection in the 2024 presidential race, Vice President Kamala Harris is widely seen as the most likely Democratic candidate to take his place.

The latest polling average from Decision Desk HQ puts GOP candidate former President Donald Trump at 42.6%, Harris at 36.9% and independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at 5.8%.

Ahead of the 2024 election, NewsNation is committed to covering the issues that matter most to voters so they can make the most informed choices possible at the polls. Here is how the three leading candidates’ policies compare on key voter issues. You can also read specific policy breakdowns for Vice President Kamala Harris, former President Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

• Abortion
• Inflation
• Border crisis
• Social Security
• Crime
• Policing and gun safety
• War in Ukraine
• Israel-Palestine conflict
• Fentanyl crisis and opioid epidemic
• Climate Change

Abortion

Trump

• The former president wouldn’t initially say during a town hall whether he supports a federal abortion ban.
• He called the overturning of the landmark abortion rights case Roe v. Wade “a great victory” during a CNN town hall.
• In April 2024, he said on his social media platform Truth Social that it’d be best if states handled abortion the way their constituents want, adding he’s in favor of exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother.
• Also said on Truth Social that he “strongly” supports fertility treatments and that he “has never and will never” advocate for restricting birth control and other contraceptives.

Harris

• Harris is aligned with Biden in her view on abortion, going as far as saying last month “everything is at stake” regarding women’s reproductive rights.
• The vice president is in favor of ensuring all American women have access to legal abortions.
• “Every person of whatever gender should understand that, if such a fundamental freedom such as the right to make decisions about your own body can be taken, be aware of what other freedoms may be at stake,” Harris said in a joint MSNBC interview with Hadley Duvall, an abortion rights advocate from Kentucky who was raped by her stepfather as a child.
• Harris falsely wrote on X that Trump would ban abortion nationwide. She then added: “President Joe Biden and I will do everything in our power to stop him and restore women’s reproductive freedom.”
• Harris also visited a Planned Parenthood clinic in Minnesota in March, describing the banning or heavy restriction of abortions as “immoral.”
• “How dare these elected leaders believe they are in a better position to tell women what they need,” Harris said at the time. “We have to be a nation that trusts women.”

Kennedy

• Kennedy, who referred to the first presidential debate between Biden and Trump as “depressing,” said that abortion should be the choice of the woman.
• In his real-time response to the debate, Kennedy said that state intervention on the issue of abortion should not happen until a fetus reaches viability.
• He also said that he does not support late-term abortions.
• However, he also said he felt that “every abortion is a tragedy” and that most women have abortions because they can’t afford to have the child. If elected, he pledged to put money into child care, which he said would stop abortions.
• “My policy is more choices, fewer abortions.”

Inflation

Trump

• Promised “lower taxes, bigger paychecks, and more jobs for American workers” by enacting universal baseline tariffs that “reward domestic production” and tax foreign companies.
• Said he would lower interest rates.
• Claimed to have achieved the lowest unemployment rate in 50 years — 3.5% with 6.4 million added jobs before the pandemic.
• During his presidency, federal debt held by the public rose from $14.4 trillion to $21.6 trillion, influenced by Trump’s tax cuts, particularly his slashes to the corporate tax rate, according to the Annenberg Public Policy Center’s FactCheck project.

Harris

• Shortly after taking office as vice president for Biden, the administration signed the American Rescue Plan, a $2 trillion stimulus package that delivered checks to Americans, boosted unemployment insurance benefits and expanded the child tax credit.
• Inflation peaked at a four-decade high of 9% in summer 2022 but has since receded to around 3.5%.
• Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act in August 2022, which invested in clean energy that the White House estimates created 117,000 jobs and will reduce Americans’ energy costs by as much as 9% by 2030.
• Harris has said inflation was a high priority for the administration: “The President and our administration’s probably highest priority is bringing down the price of gas and cost of living,” Harris said.
• During her time as a senator, Harris tried to get a bill passed where tax credits up to $6,000 would be available for middle- and low-income households.
• Harris has also been a strong proponent of forgiving student debt; spearheading the Biden administration’s move to abolish debt for several hundred-thousand students at Corinthian Colleges.
• In 2017, she co-sponsored Bernie Sanders’ proposal for free college for middle-class students at four-year public schools and all who attended two-year institutions.

Kennedy

• Kennedy has said he will enact policies that favor “small and medium businesses” and break up “too-big-to-fail” banks and monopolies.
• “When crisis strikes, bail out the homeowners, debtors, and small business owners instead,” Kennedy said on his campaign site.
• Kennedy also wants to provide tax-free government-backed mortgage bonds to lower the interest rate. He would pair this plan with an aggressive affordable housing program, Reuters reported.
• He also believes health care is a key economic issue, and has vowed to make existing services available to all, including “alternative and holistic therapies that have been marginalized in a pharma-dominated system.”

Border crisis

Trump

• Would launch the largest deportation effort in U.S. history, paid for with redirected military funds, Reuters reported.
• Would restore his 2019 “Remain in Mexico” program, which required asylum-seekers at the U.S. border to wait in Mexico while their cases are processed.
• End what he called “catch-and-release” and instead detain all migrants who are caught entering the United States without authorization or violating other immigration laws.
• Deputize the U.S. National Guard and local law enforcement to help with rapid deportations, according to Reuters.
• Enact travel bans denying entry to people from the Gaza Strip, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen and “anywhere else that threatens our security.”
• Block communists, Marxists and socialists from entering the U.S. and send deportation officers to “pro-Hamas” protests.
• End “birthright” citizenship for children born in the U.S. to undocumented parents.
• End Biden’s immigration parole program and roll back Temporary Protected Status designations.
• Try again to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, commonly referred to as DACA.
• While he was president, about 450 miles of barriers were built along the Southwest border, according to the Associated Press.

Harris

• Among Republicans, Harris has the ironic moniker of “border czar,” owing to her work wherein she oversaw diplomacy with Mexico and the Northern Triangle as a means of addressing “root causes” of migration.
• Biden gave her the responsibility of manning everything immigration along the southern border in 2021, with her role, according to the White House at the time, to stem the arrival of “irregular migrants.”
• As recently as this week at the Republican National Convention, Republicans heavily criticized the Biden-Harris approach to the border, a hot-button issue this election cycle.
• Under the Biden-Harris administration, migrants crossing into the US from Mexico hit record highs at the end of 2023.
• Close to 250,000 crossed during December 2023, surpassing the previous high of 224,000 encounters in May of 2022, also under the Biden-Harris watch.
• Harris announced in March that $5.2 billion in pledges from private companies had been made to prop up Central American communities to deter illegal entry to the U.S. under her guidance.
• “The problems, of course, did not occur overnight, and the solutions will not be achieved overnight,” Harris said of the border at the time.

Kennedy

• Kennedy visited the nation’s southern border last year, calling it a “dystopian nightmare.” Kennedy said during his real-time response to the presidential debate that the U.S.-Mexico border must be sealed.
• Kennedy agreed with Trump when it comes to border protection, saying that Biden stopped the construction of the wall and dismantled other security measures leading to mass border crossings.
• He said he interviewed people coming through, and only two people had asylum claims, which made him concerned about terrorists coming into the country. He also blasted Biden’s “catch-and-release” policies.
• The presidential candidate described seeing hundreds of people cross the border, a seemingly “hopeless” situation he said was “created by the federal government, that local people are being forced to hold the bag on.”
• “It’s extraordinary,” Kennedy told NewsNation. “It’s kind of the best part of America and the worst part at the same time.”
• During WMUR’s town hall, Kennedy said he’s “not a big fan of Trump” or his border wall. After speaking with officers patrolling the border, however, he said physical barriers are necessary in some areas with high-density populations and advocated doing more to keep migrants and U.S. citizens safe from cartels.
• Kennedy also advocated for expanding America’s immigration process by adding more immigration judges and agents to quickly deal with asylum claims and aid in preventing illegal border crossings.

Social Security

Trump

• Told Republicans in Congress not to cut “a single penny” from Medicare or Social Security.
• Later made comments suggesting he was open to cuts to Medicare and Social Security; his team walked these back and claimed the remarks were taken out of context.
• Encouraged Republicans to focus their funding cuts on areas of “waste, fraud and abuse” in addition to programs dealing with foreign aid, immigration, climate change and LGBTQ rights, Reuters reported.
• Said in a campaign statement he would reduce the cost of prescription drugs and health insurance premiums.

Harris

• When she was a U.S. senator for California, she supported the Social Security Expansion Act, which is now championed by leaders including Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., CNBC reported.
• As vice president, in Biden’s 2024 budget proposal, the administration called for “protecting and strengthening” Social Security but offered few specifics on reforms to the program, CNBC reported.
• During the 2020 campaign, the administration proposed raising taxes on those making more than $400,000 to shore up Social Security but largely dropped the idea after taking office, Politico reported.
• The National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare has endorsed Democrats’ Social Security plans, which call for applying additional taxes on wealthy individuals with incomes over $400,000, CNBC reported.

Kennedy

• Kennedy has promised to cut military spending in half and instead put that money into government-subsidized child care and Social Security funding.
• His economic plans include reigning in spending on military campaigns and regime-change wars in areas such as Ukraine. Money spent on the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Libya is enough to make Social Security solvent for another 30 years, he said.

Crime

Trump

• Move homeless encampments out of cities.
• Give police more authority, deploy the military to fight the nation’s drug problem and impose the death penalty for convicted drug dealers.
• Deliver record funding to hire and retrain police officers, strengthen qualified immunity and increase penalties for assaults on law enforcement.
• Send federal prosecutors and the National Guard into high-crime communities, according to his campaign website.
• As president, Trump granted pardons to 73 people and commuted the sentences of an additional 70. That includes former staff members and advisers such as Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, Stephen K. Bannon and George Papadopoulos.

Harris

• Harris in April hosted reality television star Kim Kardashian at the White House to discuss criminal justice reform, after the Biden administration granted clemency to people convicted of nonviolent drug offenses.
• The U.S. incarcerates more people than any other country. About 1 in 5 of those 1.9 million people are behind bars for a drug-related offense. Black and Latino people are disproportionately incarcerated, and drug law reform has the broadest support among young voters. Black, Latino and young voters tend to favor Democrats.
• “Everybody makes mistakes, and for some that might rise to the level of being a crime,” Harris said at the White House. “But is it not the sign of a civil society that we allow people a way to earn their way back and give them the support and the resources they need to do that?”
• Harris’ record as California attorney general, however, drew the ire of many progressives during her 2020 bid for the presidency.
• During her seven years as a district attorney, and then six as attorney general, she defended the cash bail system in a pair of federal court cases, shifting course only weeks before she entered the Senate.
• As a presidential candidate in 2020, she pledged a wholesale overhaul of the country’s criminal justice system, arguing for marijuana legalization, bail reform and a moratorium on the death penalty.

Kennedy

• The independent candidate hasn’t said much about crime but has addressed gun safety.
• Kennedy said during WMUR-TV’s town hall that he believes in gun control but won’t “take people’s guns away.”
• “I’m not going to take people’s guns away and I believe in gun control myself.”
• He also came under fire for baseless comments he made during a Twitter Spaces event during which he seemingly linked shootings to pharmaceutical drugs.

Policing and gun safety

Trump

• During his first presidential campaign, Trump positioned himself as a defender of the Second Amendment.
• A Trump-era ban on bump stocks was overturned by the Supreme Court in June 2024, which said the Trump administration overstepped when it banned the rapid-fire gun attachments.
• After the May 24, 2022, Uvalde, Texas, shooting at Robb Elementary School, Trump called for “drastically” changing the nation’s approach to mental health and “a top-to-bottom security overhaul. at schools across this country” but dismissed calls for further firearm restrictions, AP reported.
• Trump vowed at an event sponsored by the National Rifle Association (NRA) in February to undo Biden-era gun restrictions if reelected.

Harris

• Harris took a tough stand on policing in the wake of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of Minneapolis police. She co-sponsored legislation in the Senate that would’ve banned police from using chokeholds and no-knock warrants, set a national use-of-force standard and created a national police misconduct registry, among other things. It would have also reformed the qualified immunity system that shields officers from liability.
• The list in the legislation included practices Harris did not vocally fight to reform while leading California’s Department of Justice. And while she now wants independent investigations of police shootings, she didn’t support a 2015 California bill that would have required her office to take on such cases.
• In June, as vice president, Harris said that more needed to be done at the federal level to prevent gun violence during a campaign stop in Maryland.
• Harris, after high-profile shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, in 2022, called for a ban on assault-style weapons.

Kennedy

• Kennedy said during WMUR-TV’s town hall that he believes in gun control but won’t “take people’s guns away.”
• “I’m not going to take people’s guns away and I believe in gun control myself.”
• He also came under fire for baseless comments he made during a Twitter Spaces event when he seemingly linked shootings to pharmaceutical drugs.

War in Ukraine

Trump

• Called for a cease-fire in an official campaign statement.
• Said he could “solve the conflict in a single day.”
• Trump: “Every day this proxy battle in Ukraine continues, we risk global war.”
• More generally suggests overhauling the State Department, the “defense bureaucracy” and intelligence services to fire who he called members of a “deep state.”

Harris

• Harris announced that the U.S. would donate over $1.5 billion to Ukraine, with funds coming from the State Department and USAID.
• The financial assistance will aid infrastructure, security, energy and refugee assistance.
• Harris has been in lockstep with Biden about helping Ukraine amid its war with Russia.
• During the June summit regarding peace in Ukraine, Harris spoke about the American commitment to the Eastern European nation.

Kennedy

• Kennedy has made peace a priority when it comes to foreign policy, promising to “end the proxy wars, bombing campaigns, covert operations, coups, paramilitaries, and everything else that has become so normal most people don’t know what’s happening.”
• He’s specifically vowed to end the war in Ukraine. His plan to stop the fighting includes offering to withdraw U.S. troops and missiles from Russia’s borders and convince Russia to withdraw its troops from Ukraine.
• “UN peacekeepers will guarantee peace to the Russian-speaking eastern regions,” Kennedy said on his campaign website. “We will put an end to this war.”
• During the first presidential debate, Kennedy slammed Biden for the Ukraine war, saying the president wanted to weaken Russia.
• “Putin was asking to settle this war from the beginning,” Kennedy said.

Israel-Palestine conflict

Trump

• Hasn’t announced plans regarding the Israel-Hamas war if reelected in 2024.
• Suggested the war will just have to “play out.”
• Said during an October Fox News interview, “We need to protect Israel, there is no choice.”
• Has positioned himself as a strong ally to Israel while being critical of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
• Told Israel’s intelligence agencies to “step up their game.”

Harris

• Harris called for an “immediate cease-fire” in Gaza in March, describing the situation as a “humanitarian catastrophe,” the New York Times reported.
• She said Hamas’ threat to Israel “must be eliminated” but added that “too many innocent Palestinians have been killed.”
• She opposed an Israeli invasion of Rafah, southern Gaza, where over a million people had fled. “I have studied the maps. There’s nowhere for those folks to go,” she said, noting about 1.5 million people were there after being told to go.
• Harris has repeatedly expressed support for a two-state solution.

Kennedy

• Kennedy defended Israel’s right to respond to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, saying Israel had a moral obligation to do so. He believes the United States and the rest of the international community could have done more to help Israel prevent the conflict, according to Reuters.
• Kennedy has said that the U.S. “must support Israel” above all else. Kennedy said he was “heartbroken” over “bloodshed in Gaza” but that Americans must understand that “Israel is in an existential battle.”

Fentanyl crisis and opioid epidemic

Trump

• “Impose a total naval embargo on cartels.” 
• Designate cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.
• Order the Department of Defense to “inflict maximum damage” on cartel leadership and operations.
• Seek death penalty eligibility for cartel members and traffickers.
• Permanently designate fentanyl as a federally controlled substance.
• Threaten China with “a steep price” unless it works to end the export of fentanyl’s chemical precursors.
• Create partnerships to encourage companies to provide job opportunities and skills training to people recovering from addiction.
• Expand federal support for faith-based counseling, treatment and recovery programs.
• Promised family leave to care for relatives trying to overcome addiction.

Harris

• In May 2024, the Biden-Harris administration announced the approval of over $1.5 billion in state or tribal opioid response funding to address the overdose crisis.
• Harris gathered state attorneys general from across the country at the White House in July 2023 to discuss fentanyl and illicit drugs in America. 
• “We each recognize and have joined together today because we are facing a public health crisis, and it also, therefore, is an issue that must have a response that addresses the underlying public health concerns that are both about addiction and treatment,” Harris said.
• Harris wants to increase access to and the affordability of naloxone, which reverses overdoses, with the vice president calling it “the difference between life or death.”

Kennedy

• Kennedy says he would end “the failed War on Drugs,” grant amnesty to nonviolent drug offenders, and transition prisons to strive for rehabilitation.
• He’s been open about his 14-year struggle with addiction and says he’s spent his life “studying recovery.” Rather than imprisoning people living with substance use disorder, Kennedy said rehabilitation will yield better outcomes.
• “We should have east rehabilitation centers available for them,” he told Fox Carolina News earlier this year. “We need to heal our country.”

Climate Change

Trump

• Claimed he will end the “Green New Deal atrocities” on his first day if reelected. The measure was never signed into law.
• Said he would free up stores of liquid gold for energy development.
• Speed up approval of natural gas pipelines into the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and New York.
• Exit the Paris Climate Agreement again. Trump previously pulled the U.S. from the agreement, but Biden rejoined upon taking office.
• Fight litigation from environmentalists.

Harris

• Harris has backed the Biden administration’s climate initiatives, including legislation providing billions in tax credits for renewable energy and electric vehicles, the New York Times reported.
• “The clock is not just ticking, it is banging,” she said last year, referencing climate change-driven disasters. She noted the administration made “the largest climate investment in America’s history.”
• During her 2020 presidential bid, Harris emphasized environmental justice, addressing climate change’s effects on poor and minority communities. She’s continued this focus as vice president.
• In 2019, as a senator, Harris and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., proposed legislation to evaluate environmental rules’ impact on low-income communities. It would have created an Office of Climate and Environmental Justice Accountability and climate justice advisers in federal agencies. Harris introduced a broader version in 2020. Neither bill passed, the New York Times reported.

Kennedy

• Kennedy references himself on his campaign site as “the best environmental president in American history,” pledging to protect the environment from “corporate corruption” and contamination.
• An environmental lawyer for 40 years, Kennedy has sued companies including Mobil Oil, DuPont, Mitsubishi, and Ford over chemical spills and pollution. He also founded the environmental organization Waterkeeper Alliance, from which he resigned in 2020.
• Despite those accomplishments, Kennedy received backlash from other environmental groups upon entering the 2024 race. Organizations including Sierra Club and League of Conservation Voters denounced in an April letter Kennedy’s “false environmentalist claims.”
• If elected, Kennedy says he would reduce toxic chemical pollution and plastic waste, protect natural wildlife habitats, and “end the corporate capture of environmental regulatory agencies.”