In under a week, Kamala Harris has all but completed her swap to the top of the Democratic ticket.

On Sunday, President Joe Biden announced he was dropping out of his reelection campaign and endorsing Harris instead. Within a few days, she collected most of the remaining big-name endorsements as well. She also took over the reins of Biden’s campaign.

Where she steers that campaign remains to be seen, though. Harris ran to the left of Biden on a number of issues during the 2020 primary campaign, including gun policy. But will she bring those more stringent views on gun control to the 2024 general election?

Biden and Harris aren’t miles apart on firearms. They’ve both backed many of the same policies over the years. The main difference is in degree.

They both opposed the Supreme Court’s landmark 2008 finding that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms, but Harris signed on to a brief in the case as California Attorney General. They both back a so-called assault weapons ban and buyback, targeting popular guns like the AR-15. However, Harris has also advocated for the government to force owners to sell their firearms. The two also back using executive power to unilaterally implement new gun restrictions but clashed over the extent of that power.

“Upon being elected, I will give the United States Congress a hundred days to get their act together and have the courage to pass reasonable gun safety laws,” Harris said at a 2019 CNN town hall. “If they fail to do it, then I will take executive action.”

“You have no constitutional authority to issue that executive order, the ones they’re talking about. ‘I’m going to eliminate assault weapons’ — can’t do it by executive order any more than Trump can do the things he’s saying he can do by executive order,” Biden responded in a press conference a few months later.

With Biden besting Harris and picker her as his Vice President, the subsequent Biden-Harris Administration hued closer to his preferences than hers. The same has been true for Biden’s now-defunct 2024 reelection campaign. While Biden was already on track to run on the most aggressive gun-control platform since the 1990s by centering it around an assault weapons ban, he hasn’t pushed for the mandatory buyback scheme Harris backed in 2020.

In her early efforts since taking over the campaign, Harris has kept to the Biden script. She has kept the focus on guns with mentions in both of her first two campaign speeches and her first ad. But she hasn’t expanded her policy promises beyond what Biden was already touting.

“That’s why we will work to pass universal background checks, Red Flag laws, and an assault weapons ban,” Harris said in her first campaign speech.

She has yet to revive her mandatory buyback or plan to ban AR-15s via executive order. And there’s reason to think she won’t go in that direction.

For one, Harris took her most aggressive policy positions on guns during a primary where most of the field was trying to track to the left of one another. But now she’s running as an underdog in a close general election. Once the relative shock of the last two weeks of wild campaign developments wears off, she’s likely going to be battling against a concerted Republican effort to define her as too liberal in the public eye.

On top of that, early polling indicates voters actually prefer former President Donald Trump’s handling of gun policy to Kamala Harris. While Trump can no longer legally own guns since his felony convictions and he’s gone silent on gun policy in recent weeks, 40 percent of adults said he would do better with firearms, according to a YouGov poll published on July 22nd. Just 34 percent said Harris would do a better job.

So, Harris has several good reasons to shy away from a further left turn on the issue or ratchet things back a few clicks toward the center.

Of course, the tight nature of the race could lead the Harris Campaign to double down once more on the gun issue. Biden was already in the process of ramping up the focus on gun control in an apparent attempt to reenergize the Democratic base. Maybe Harris decides that’s still the right direction to travel, even if her ascension to the top of the ticket seems to have solved some of the party’s enthusiasm problem for now.

Her Vice Presidential pick will provide some key insight into what the campaign, which appears to be sticking with most of Biden’s top strategists, is thinking.

And there’s little reason to think she wouldn’t govern to the left of Biden on guns if she does win the election, regardless of how the campaign unfolds. The Biden Administration has called on Congress to ban AR-15s, and it’s used executive rulemaking to ban things like pistol-braced firearms or homemade gun kits. However, it has not tried to use executive rulemaking to ban AR-15s or released a plan to confiscate them in a mandatory buyback.

A Harris Administration might go that far. But the Harris Campaign is unlikely to run on doing so.