Harris set to oppose sale of US Steel to a Japanese firm during joint Pennsylvania event with Biden

Vice President Kamala Harris plans to use Monday’s joint campaign appearance in the industrial city of Pittsburgh with President Joe Biden to say that U.S. Steel should remain domestically owned — coinciding with the White House’s earlier opposition to the company’s planned sale to Nippon Steel of Japan.

A Harris campaign official said she “is expected to say that U.S. Steel should remain domestically owned and operated and stress her commitment to always have the backs of American steel workers.”

That’s similar to Biden, who said in March that he opposed U.S. Steel’s would-be sale to Nippon in order to better “maintain strong American steel companies powered by American steel workers.”

But it still constitutes a major policy position for the vice president, who has offered relatively few of them since Biden abandoned his reelection bid and endorsed Harris in July. In her campaign’s opening weeks, Harris has been careful to balance presenting herself as “a new way forward” while remaining intensely loyal to Biden and the policies he has pushed.

The pair will attend Pittsburgh’s Labor Day parade, the first time they have both spoken at a campaign event together since the surprising election shakeup that provided a fresh jolt of Democratic enthusiasm to the 2024 election.

Harris’ team says voters in the critical swing state of Pennsylvania are newly energized since the vice president moved to the top of the ticket six weeks ago, with tens of thousands of new volunteers signed up to canvass for her and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the Democratic vice presidential nominee.

Harris’ and Biden’s appearance at the parade, one of the largest such gatherings in the country, is part of a battleground state blitz with just over two months until Election Day. Harris first heads to Detroit Monday for a campaign event before meeting Biden in Pennsylvania.

Harris, 59, has sought to appeal to voters by positioning herself as a break from poisonous politics, rejecting the acerbic rhetoric of her Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump, while looking to move beyond the Biden era as well. Yet while her delivery may be very different from Biden’s, Harris’ agenda is chock-full of the same issues he has championed: capping the cost of prescription drugs, defending the Affordable Care Act, growing the economy, helping families afford child care and now her psoition on U.S. Steel.

“We fight for a future where we build what I call an opportunity economy, so that every American has the opportunity to own a home, start a business and to build wealth and intergenerational wealth,” she said at a recent rally, echoing Biden’s calls to grow the economy “from the bottom out and the middle up.”