WASHINGTON — The presidential race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump presents the sharpest clash in anti-poverty policy in at least a generation, and its outcome could shape the economic security of millions of low-income Americans.

As the onset of the pandemic in early 2020 threatened to decimate the economy, Trump signed a large stimulus package that included substantial aid for the poor. When President Joe Biden and Harris took office in 2021, their administration pushed more big aid expansions through Congress as part of their pandemic-recovery plan, driving the poverty rate still lower.

But if the two candidates’ responses to that extraordinary period had elements in common, the lessons they took from it were different.

In the pandemic-era programs, now mostly expired or reduced, Harris and other Democrats found reinforcement of their faith in the government’s power to ameliorate hardship. If elected, she would seek to sustain or expand many of them, including subsidies for food, health care and housing, and revive a change to the child tax credit that essentially created a guaranteed income for families with children. Those policies helped temporarily cut the poverty rate by more than half from prepandemic levels.

She backs a $15 federal minimum wage, which Republicans have fought, and is a vocal supporter of programs such as subsidized child care and paid family leave meant to help balance work and family.

Trump says little about his role in pandemic-era poverty programs, which many Republicans view as having been excessive and fraud-ridden. Instead, he touts his 2017 tax cuts, which he credits for boosting the economy and reducing poverty to a prepandemic low, and he has vowed to extend them when they expire next year. Most of the direct benefit from those cuts went to corporations and the wealthy.

Trump’s poverty plans are otherwise vague, but his record is one of animosity toward the programs Harris would defend or expand. He sought to remove millions of people from Medicaid and food stamps, many of them low-wage workers. He has sought to reduce the number of people with subsidized housing and raise their rents.

There is often a difference between how candidates campaign and how they govern, and either aspirant’s power to carry out their policies will depend on who controls Congress.

Both candidates have been short on detail, and there are divisions within the parties. Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, Trump’s running mate, recently suggested a large tax credit for families with children, although it is not clear whether it would be available to the poor or if it has Trump’s support.

But their records while in office provide a road map to their priorities and approaches.

Poverty was already falling when Trump won his tax cut in his first year in office, but the pace of decline more than doubled in the next two years, to 11.8% in 2019, then a record low, using a Census Bureau figure that includes taxes and aid. Although economists debate whether tax cuts were responsible, the episode reinforced Republican faith in them.

Still, about twice as many Americans would have been poor that year without safety-net programs for food, housing, health care and other needs — many of which Trump sought to cut — according to an analysis of census data by the Columbia University Center on Poverty and Social Policy.

“I don’t see how you can say these programs don’t make a difference,” said Christopher Wimer, the center’s director.

When pandemic aid kicked in, the poverty rate fell further, to 9.1% in 2020 under Trump, and to 7.8% in the first year of the Biden administration. That is a reduction of one-third from prepandemic levels, despite the crisis. As the aid fell, poverty rose to 12.4% in 2022, the last year for which there is data.

No anti-poverty measure costs more, affects more people or divides the parties as much as health care. The 2010 Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, added millions of people to Medicaid, subsidized private insurance and cut the share of Americans who are uninsured nearly in half. Democrats regard it as a generational achievement.

Republicans say it costs the government and consumers too much and stifles innovation. They voted to repeal it dozens of times, and Trump’s high-profile effort to do so failed only narrowly. He then took action to suppress enrollment in the private plans.

Trump says he is no longer committed to killing the law but would make it “much better” without saying how. The Republican Study Committee, a Trump-aligned faction of House Republicans, recently proposed cutting $4.2 trillion over 10 years from the subsidies, Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, a reduction of more than half.

Democrats call such plans a repeal by another name.

Harris previously supported a version of “Medicare for All,” a government-run system for everyone, but now says she would focus on strengthening the Affordable Care Act.

Her campaign suggested she would preserve temporary increases in the subsidies for private plans, which led to record enrollment. The latest Biden White House budget also seeks new aid for people in the 10 states where Republicans declined to expand Medicaid.