WASHINGTON — Kamala Harris is looking to neutralize a glaring vulnerability that has jeopardized her prospects since she replaced Joe Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee: voter frustration with high prices.
Harris is talking about the economy in hope of winning over voters who continue to feel nagging economic pain. It may be the most deliberate and clear break she has had with Biden since she took over the ticket.
Biden spent the past year touting “Bidenomics” and insisting that voters would come around and give him credit for a slew of legislative victories, without ultimately blaming him for the high cost of groceries and other necessities.
But Harris is more willing to lean into voter anxiety over the cost of living and pitch herself as the best candidate to mitigate pocketbook pressures. She isn’t criticizing Biden. But her tone and message suggest she doesn’t want to be cast simply as his protégée.
“We’ve lived through a historic inflation shock,” said a Harris campaign adviser, speaking on condition of anonymity. “That has affected every American economically in different ways, and it takes time for that to work through peoples’ lives.”
Harris has announced a flurry of proposals meant to assure voters that if she is elected she’d enact new laws to cut costs. She is also adopting a more populist message than Biden did when it comes to financial pressures that millions of people confront. Harris is casting profit-minded corporations and landlords as villains who’ve been jacking up grocery prices and rent.
Voters who’ve been crucial to Democratic victories in past elections hold a sour view of the economy, polling shows. Gen Z voters under age 30 ranked inflation and the cost of living as their biggest worry, far outstripping abortion, health care, threats to democracy and other issues, an NBC News survey this month found.
Inflation is already dropping. But prices remain about 20% higher than they were during the pandemic.
A CNBC survey of registered voters last month asked whether a victory by Harris or Donald Trump would leave them better off financially or whether their situations wouldn’t change. A solid plurality, 40%, said they’d do better financially if Trump won, compared with only 21% who said they’d fare better under a Harris presidency.
Harris says her plans are good policy. But presidential campaigns aren’t think tanks; they’re built to win votes. What Harris is offering could boost her standing among key constituencies with whom she’s lagging or whose vote she needs to maximize.
Her face-to-face debate with Trump on Tuesday night is perhaps her best chance to drive her message that as the daughter of a single mother who struggled to buy a house, she empathizes with people’s fears and has an antidote to economic anxiety.
“When I am elected president, I will make it a top priority to bring down costs and increase economic security for all Americans,” she said last month in a speech in North Carolina. “As president, I will take on the high costs that matter most to most Americans, like the cost of food.”
Appeals to younger voters
Harris has made younger voters who are starting families and buying homes a special focus. She has rolled out plans to give a $6,000 tax credit to parents of newborns, along with a $25,000 subsidy to help first-time homebuyers cover their down payments.
“Clearly, housing has been a big point of pressure for younger voters. She’s speaking directly to that,” said Brendan Duke, who was a senior adviser in the Biden White House’s National Economic Council.
Harris needs to galvanize young voters if she is to re-create the Democrats’ winning coalition from 2020. In the NBC News survey of Gen Z registered voters under 30, 50% said they favored Harris, compared with 34% who preferred Trump.
Substantial though a 16-point margin sounds, Biden beat Trump by 24 points in 2020 among voters in that age group, according to a comprehensive study by the Pew Research Center.
Both campaigns are investing in ads centered on the economy, which Trump clearly sees as a liability for Harris. Trump’s ads tend to focus heavily on immigration and crime. Yet in the important swing state of Pennsylvania, he and allied groups spent more money on Google platform ads devoted to the economy than on other issues, an analysis by the University of Pennsylvania’s Program on Opinion Research and Election Studies found.
A problem for Trump has been his familiar tendency to swerve off topic. In what was billed as a policy address in North Carolina last month, Trump blamed his opponent for the economic pain people are feeling, invoking the term “Harris price hikes.” But he used the same speech to mock her laugh (“The laugh of a crazy person”) and criticize a sketch of Harris that appeared on Time magazine’s cover (“They don’t use a picture; they use an artist sketch.”)
Trump stumbled over a question about child care costs at an appearance last week before the Economic Club of New York. A questioner asked what piece of legislation he’d promote to reduce the burden on families. Trump didn’t answer directly. Instead, he talked about the large sums of money the U.S. would take in by slapping tariffs on imported goods, implying that the windfall could be used to cover child care costs.
Reshma Saujani, the woman who posed the question, told NBC News later that his response “felt incredibly out of touch, especially when you know that to win this election you need moderate women.”
Trump’s villains vs. Harris’ villains
At a rhetorical level, Harris has waded into the populist terrain Trump has inhabited for years. Unlike Trump, who blames many of the country’s problems on migration and “globalist” forces, she is singling out wealthy interests that might be looking to make money on the backs of regular Americans.
High housing costs? “Corporate landlords collude with each other to set artificially high rental prices,” she said recently in North Carolina, vowing a crackdown.
High food prices? “Price gouging” by “opportunistic companies,” she said, calling for new authority to go after the culprits.
A new TV ad from Harris’ campaign last week opened with a narrator saying, “We all know prices are too high, but while corporations are gouging families, Trump is focused on giving them tax cuts.”
Identifying villains and promising to hold them accountable for high rents and grocery store prices may help Harris pick off some of the working-class voters who’ve gravitated to Trump. Corporations offer a natural foil given that voters are inherently skeptical of wealthy and powerful interests, especially since the 2008 financial crash.
“This is really political and communications gimmickry that is, frankly, popular with voters. And it works,” said Brian Riedl, an economic policy expert at the conservative Manhattan Institute.
Corporate bashing is “a new angle” for Harris to “acknowledge flaws in the economy without turning the blame back onto the current administration or its policies,” he added.
Harris’ strategy departs from Biden’s habit of reciting his legislative victories over the past 3½ years. Simply rehashing Biden’s talking points would appear to be a losing formula: Leaders pushed Biden out of the race in part amid historically low approval ratings.
Harris’ message seems to be drawing less from Biden than from another Democratic president, Bill Clinton, who presided over a strong economy in the 1990s and who saw the government’s role as that of furnishing “opportunity” to people willing to seize it. Clinton’s final State of the Union speech in 2000 mentioned the word 13 times.
In her speech last month in North Carolina, Harris avoided the word “Bidenomics” and steered clear of the latest portmanteau, “Kamalanomics,” and instead touted what she called an “opportunity economy.”
“Biden throughout his presidency was announcing action after action, and it was falling on deaf ears,” said Danielle Deiseroth, executive director of the progressive polling and strategy firm Data for Progress. “Harris is a much more adept messenger.”
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