Democratic presidential nominee US Vice President Kamala Harris.
Credit: Reuters Photo
Washington: When Vice President Kamala Harris traveled to a locally owned brewery in New Hampshire to talk about helping small businesses -- a major plank of her economic platform -- she made sure that one group of Americans felt included: millionaires who wanted to keep more of their profits from selling stocks and real estate.
"If you earn a million dollars a year or more, the tax rate on your long-term capital gains will be 28% under my plan," Harris said in that campaign speech this fall. "Because we know when the government encourages investment, it leads to broad-based economic growth."
The moment stuck out. In remarks that her campaign had pitched as a major address to the middle class, Harris offered a striking concession on tax rates for the wealthy -- an olive branch that she used to present herself as more business-friendly than President Joe Biden, who had sought a higher rate.
Her speech underscored just how much the advice of her allies and donors from Wall Street and Silicon Valley -- as well as her own long-standing belief in pragmatic, incremental progress over sweeping ideological change -- was driving her messaging on the economy.
One important influence on Harris was her brother-in-law, Tony West, who took a leave from his job as chief legal officer at Uber to advise her campaign. Harris would often ask her staff, "Has Tony seen this?" before she would review her economic speeches or talking points, according to two people with knowledge of the conversations.
West, who served as a top Justice Department official in the Obama administration but has little background in economic policy, also flagged social media posts from her campaign and official accounts that he thought were off Harris' economic message, one of the people said. He and Brian Nelson, a longtime adviser to Harris, were in frequent contact with business executives and Wall Street donors during the campaign.
The result was a Democratic candidate who vacillated between competing visions for how to address the economic problems that voters repeatedly ranked as their top issue. Harris neither abandoned nor fully embraced key liberal goals for confronting corporate power and raising taxes on the rich. Instead, she adopted marginal pro-business tweaks to the status quo that both her corporate and progressive allies agreed never coalesced into a clear economic argument.
Voters ultimately preferred Donald Trump's broad but vague promises to cut taxes and shake up the global trading system. And as frustration with high inflation has led to losses among governing parties around the world, some Democrats doubt that Harris could have prevailed, even with a stronger economic message.
The Harris campaign and West declined to comment for this article.
Democrats from across the party saw plenty to criticize in the economic agenda that Harris' campaign had to slap together in a matter of weeks after Biden dropped out. Rather than the "opportunity economy" that Harris envisioned, several Democrats said Americans hungered for a more ambitious overhaul of the system.
"When you're too conflicted between the interest of corporate America and average working-day people, I think this is what you end up with," said Jimmy Williams, president of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades. "A message that doesn't resonate."
Failing to Call Out the 'Big, Bad Wolf'
An early case study of Harris' quandary came during her first economic policy speech, in North Carolina in August. Members of her communications team had suggested she focus her speech on cracking down on corporate price gouging, according to two people briefed on the deliberations, as a way to address rising costs. Her speech ultimately focused only on addressing price gouging for groceries.
Still, the criticism from Republicans and Harris' Wall Street allies came swiftly. They slammed the plan as price controls that would disrupt economic growth.
The blowback caught Harris' operation off guard, and campaign officials further narrowed the scope of her plan. While she brought up the idea repeatedly in campaign speeches and television advertisements, for some Democrats the approach remained too intangible.
"You can say there's a big, bad wolf blowing houses down, but you have to go after those people and point them out," said Dwan Walker, the Democratic mayor of Aliquippa, a small, formerly industrial city outside Pittsburgh. "It's effective because now you went after somebody, you brought it to bear, and you showed us what it was."
Over the course of the campaign, it became clear that Harris would de-emphasize Biden's attacks on big companies in favor of a more conciliatory approach that she hoped would appeal to moderates. She wanted corporate leaders in her camp as she tried to outrun the progressive reputation she had gained during the 2020 presidential primary race and to blunt Trump's attacks that she was a "communist."
"We're a center-right country," said Charles Myers, a fundraiser for Harris and the chair and founder of Signum Global Advisors. "One of the few things we all agree on as Americans is the American dream, and a very big part of the American dream is the accumulation of wealth."
In an economic policy speech in late September in Pittsburgh, the vice president spoke of the importance of investing in "AI, quantum computing, blockchain, digital assets and other emerging technologies" alongside a pledge to support "factory towns and workers."
Such messaging was a departure from Biden, who often styled himself as the most pro-labor president in the country's history. Still, while progressives loved much of Biden's economic message, he appeared on track for an even bigger loss to Trump.
And aides to Harris pointed out that voters graded her more favorably than Biden on the economy, as she pushed policies including expanding the child tax credit, granting $25,000 in down-payment assistance to first-time homebuyers and allowing Medicare to cover home health care.
Trump's Simple Explanation
On the campaign trail, Harris sometimes sent mixed signals about her economic agenda.
Her campaign was intentionally ambiguous about whether she backed Biden's ambitious idea to raise taxes on the ultrawealthy. She neither supported nor directly criticized financial regulators in the Biden administration. She did not talk about raising the minimum wage until two weeks before Election Day and frequently noted that Goldman Sachs analysts preferred her economic plan to Trump's.
On Election Day, voters decisively chose Trump, who promised across-the-board tariffs and the mass deportation of immigrants. Such policies would reshape the economic life of the United States -- and many economists on the right and left agree that they would significantly raise prices.
"People want to understand what's going on in their lives. Trump gave them an explanation," Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, said in an interview. "He attributed all of our problems to undocumented immigrants. What is the Democratic explanation for why the gap between the rich and the poor is getting wider and working-class people are struggling? You tell me."
The results showed that Democrats lost ground with voters across the board compared with 2020, including in working-class areas and among people of color. Although Harris campaigned hard in the suburbs, pitching herself as a centrist to try to win over moderate Republicans and independents, her support there lagged as well.
Nationwide, Democratic enthusiasm withered. While Trump received roughly the same number of votes he did in 2020 -- when he lost -- Harris appears to have fallen well short of Biden's haul four years ago.
'You Can't Out-Republican Republicans'
While Democrats were defeated, populist, progressive economic policies did well at the ballot box.
In Missouri, a red state, voters passed by a wide margin an amendment to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, even as they overwhelmingly voted against Harris. In Alaska, they were poised to do the same, with results still being tallied. Roughly 75% of voters in conservative Nebraska backed a measure to institute paid sick leave.
Harris did not make either policy a major part of her campaign.
Now the miscalculations the Harris campaign potentially made on the economy could shape how the Democratic Party moves forward as it enters a period of rebuilding and recrimination.
Progressives said the answer was to develop a distinctive message.
"There is a tendency in every general election to run to the center to court moderate Republicans," said Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., and chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. "You can't out-Republican Republicans."
Sara Nelson, international president of the Association of Flight Attendants union, said that, for Democrats, "the biggest problem is that people would say, 'I can't tell the difference between the parties.' And they leaned hard into that problem."
Some of Harris' loudest backers have been more muted since the election.
During the campaign, billionaire Mark Cuban became an increasingly prominent surrogate for the vice president. He said repeatedly that Harris would abandon higher taxes on the ultrawealthy and appeared with her on the trail in swing-state Wisconsin. But he declined to comment when asked this week to weigh in on Harris' economic messaging.
"No interest in talking politics at all," Cuban wrote in an email.