The Scene
The candidate was new, but the pitch was familiar.
As Kamala Harris spoke to staffers at her Wilmington campaign headquarters on Monday, the vice president and presumptive Democratic nominee offered an early peek at the economic case she would make to voters. “We believe in a future where every person has the opportunity not just to get by, but to get ahead,” Harris said. “Building up the middle class will be a defining goal of my presidency.”
It was a line that would have been equally at home in a speech by Joe Biden, or most other Democrats for that matter. The first policies she namechecked, childcare and paid leave, were priorities the administration had tried to push through as part of its sweeping Build Back Better agenda in 2021, only to see them stymied by Sen. Joe Manchin’s opposition. She nodded to keeping healthcare affordable and reducing child poverty, possibly an allusion to bringing back the administration’s short-lived expansion of the Child Tax Credit. She reiterated much of the same at her first official campaign rally in Milwaukee on Tuesday.
Harris also praised Biden for a legacy “unmatched in modern history.” The underlying message seemed to be that she would provide continuity from a president whose economic record the party faithful celebrate, even if the wider public might not, and given majorities in Congress, would try to tie up unfinished business.
Still, there are some lingering unknowns with Harris. One is who, exactly, might have her ear on economic issues. She appears to lack the sort of trusted, longtime aides that Biden brought with him, such as Council of Economic Advisers Chair Jared Bernstein. Asked who might have the best insight into her thinking, many around Washington point to her former chief economic adviser Mike Pyle, who eventually left her office to join the National Security Council, before decamping for the private sector this year.
Jordan and Joseph's View
Whether Harris can deliver a compelling economic message is one of the critical questions facing her candidacy in a race where post-pandemic inflation has given Donald Trump an edge on the issue. It’s also a task she’s struggled with in the past.
Harris regularly found herself tripped up during the policy debates of the ideologically charged 2020 Democratic primary, as she tried to stake out an identity somewhere between the leftism of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden’s relative moderation.
After initially endorsing Sanders’ Medicare for All plan, she told a debate audience she favored eliminating private insurance, before walking it back and producing her own complicated proposal that she had some trouble describing on stage. Her idea to forgive student debt for Pell Grant recipients who started a business in a disadvantaged community (but only if it survived for three years) was widely lampooned for its baroque criteria. She rolled out a massive new tax credit for families, the LIFT Act, that contained some glaring design problems, then rarely talked about it.
Know More
This time around, Harris has the advantage of not having to piece together an agenda from scratch, and of campaigning in a general election rather than a crowded primary. Former administration officials, progressive activists, and Senate colleagues told Semafor they didn’t expect that Harris would significantly change course on economic policy from Biden, but that she seemed to be most invested in issues around the care economy, such as paid leave and child care, as well as pocketbook challenges facing families.
“She gets these issues,” said Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz, who worked with Harris’ office on college affordability. In the White House, she was involved in topics like medical debt relief, broadband access and affordability, and the cost of housing, one ex-White House aide told Semafor. The aide added she focused on ensuring government benefits reached its intended audience without a complicated application process.
Harris also has close ties to organized labor, particularly the Service Employees International Union, whose convention she headlined in May. “She definitely believes in supporting workers, especially low-wage workers, in addition to manufacturing workers, so that combination is a one-two punch,” Roosevelt Institute President Felicia Wong, who attended the convention, told Semafor.
Progressive groups have other reasons to be happy with Harris. She’s viewed as at least as aggressive on climate issues as Biden, and her own 2020 plan focused strongly on the sorts of environmental justice issues — like the effect of pollution on minority communities — prioritized by activists. She has also aggressively advocated ditching the filibuster, tweeting for instance in 2019 she would eliminate it to pass a “Green New Deal.” That’s a contrast with Biden, who only gradually came around to the idea of poking holes in the 60-vote Senate threshold for specific issues like voting rights and abortion access.
One way Harris differs from Biden is her relatively friendly relationship with Big Tech, the dominant force in her home base of San Francisco. Her circle includes a number of industry executives and venture capitalists, including brother-in-law Tony West, now the chief legal officer at Uber. But she’s also expressed openness to ideas like breaking up giants like Facebook and called for careful regulations of artificial intelligence.
Progressive leaders said they were also skeptical Harris would ease up or scale back the administration’s broader push on antitrust.
“The American people are really on board with what they’ve been able to do on junk fees, on Ticketmaster, on requiring airlines to refund canceled flights — all of that has just been wildly popular,” Lindsay Owens, executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative, told Semafor. “I just have a hard time picturing a scenario in which she would want to deviate from something so successful.”
But it’s unclear whether the promise of continuity will win over an electorate that was, by and large, dissatisfied with Biden’s economic leadership. In Gallup’s polling, only 38% of Americans said they had at least a fair amount of confidence in the president to do the right thing on the economy, versus 46% who said the same for Trump. Recent YouGov polling shows that Harris currently trails Trump badly — 29% to 43% — on the question of who would better handle inflation. Democrats might be ready to rally around more of the same; other voters still need to be convinced.
Room for Disagreement
CNBC’s Jim Cramer thinks a Harris presidency would mean a new, lighter approach to antitrust. He argued on air she would likely replace current Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, noting her brother-in-law’s work for Uber, and suggested she was more moderate on business issues than Biden.
Notable
- Harris navigates talk of race and sex, our Semafor colleagues report.