The Stakes of the Election

Presidential campaigns are often scripted spectacles. They can overshadow policy ideas. So editors of The Morning asked reporters at The Times — who dig through tax records, travel to the southern border and study the science of climate change — to explain what Donald Trump’s and Kamala Harris’s positions on several important issues might mean for the country.

Their reporting revealed two drastically different trajectories for America.

Immigration

• Harris embraced a bipartisan immigration bill that would have funded the border wall, empowered the president to restrict border crossings and modestly expanded legal immigration. She also supports a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.

• Trump promises a tougher crackdown on immigration than he carried out in his first term. He says he will mount the “largest deportation effort in American history,” using the military and law enforcement to remove millions of undocumented immigrants from the country.

• Read the full article.

Presidential power

• Harris hasn’t said anything to suggest she would expand presidential power, though she would likely use executive orders to push through some policies that fail to pass in Congress, as previous presidents have done.

• Trump, by contrast, wants to concentrate more power in the White House and advertises his authoritarian impulses. He has vowed to use the Justice Department to prosecute his adversaries; to replace tens of thousands of civil servants with loyalists; and to deploy American troops on domestic soil to enforce the law.

• Read the full article.

Abortion

• Harris has made abortion rights a central part of her candidacy. She has promised to sign a bill re-establishing Roe’s nationwide protection for abortion, and says she supports ending the Senate filibuster to pass that bill.

• Trump privately expressed his support for a national abortion ban earlier this year, but he later walked back that position and said last month that he would veto a federal ban. He now says he would leave abortion laws to the states.

• Read the full article.