“We believe in a future where no child has to grow up in poverty … where every person has access to paid family leave and affordable child care,” Harris said in Wilmington at her campaign headquarters. “Together, we fight to build a nation where every person has affordable health care, where every worker is paid fairly and where every senior can retire with dignity.”
Embracing these economic policies could help sharpen the contrast between the Democratic and Republican presidential nominees in a race that has so far largely been defined by abortion, Trump’s criminal convictions, and questions around Biden’s age and mental acuity. Before dropping out, Biden’s candidacy was also dogged by widespread anger over inflation, and it’s unclear how Harris plans to keep voters from punishing her for that as well.
“Trump has been campaigning on the premise that Biden is too old and unfit to serve, and if Harris runs a policy-focused campaign it will be interesting to see if Trump has to respond,” said Avik Roy, founder of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, a think tank that pushes free markets, and a former adviser to leading GOP policymakers.
The effort is not without risks. Biden’s attempts to pass trillions of dollars in new domestic programs collapsed amid resistance from Sen. Joe Manchin III (I-W. Va.) and criticism even from some Democrats that the administration was trying to approve too many policies simultaneously. Some economists also caution that the United States cannot afford new domestic spending programs with annual deficits of more than $1.5 trillion, although Democrats say they would pay for their plans with higher taxes on the rich.
The plans also speak to a broader conundrum for Harris’s candidacy: She will try take credit for the administration’s economic accomplishments, such as low unemployment and fast growth, but will be reluctant to tie herself too closely on the economy to a president who suffered from high disapproval ratings over the highest rate of inflation in decades.
So far, Harris has largely endorsed the agenda that Biden campaigned on. But she will also face numerous choices about which part of Biden’s legacy to emphasize on the campaign trail, as well as which aspects of the president’s policy agenda, if any, she wants to jettison. In the past few weeks alone, Biden endorsed numerous controversial ideas, including a cap on rent increases for some units, in a bid to save his sinking candidacy. It’s not clear whether Harris will take these up, revive some of the ambitious policy ideas she ran on during her failed 2020 primary campaign — or go in a different direction altogether. These ideas were not mentioned in Harris’s first two speeches.
“The challenge now is she needs to present a policy vision that has to be in line with the administration she served in, while also being unique to her. Do you have enough time to develop something like that and put it forward? Or do you have to run on what the Biden-Harris administration has put out?” said Kenneth Baer, who served as a budget official during the Obama administration. “It’s absolutely uncharted territory, so it’s exciting.”
These decisions will likely be shaped in part by a policy brain trust that is likely to evolve over the next few months of the campaign. Harris’s closest economic adviser for most of her tenure as vice president was Mike Pyle, who had served in the Obama administration and at the BlackRock investment firm. Pyle was widely seen as allied with a group of younger Obama alumni, including Brian Deese, Biden’s former director of the National Economic Council. Carolina Ferrerosa Young, a former aide to Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), is Harris’s top economic adviser. Many people who have worked with Ferrerosa Young see her in the mold of Brown, a strong defender of labor unions.
Harris’s policy priorities have been the subject of speculation for years. Before she became Biden’s running mate, Harris as a senator campaigned for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 2020 on a different set of far-reaching economic policies, including a $2.8 trillion tax cut that she does not now mention. Her reversals on Medicare-for-all in the 2020 presidential campaign also fueled criticisms that her views on health care were unclear.
Two senior Democrats, speaking on the condition of anonymity to be more candid, said that even in private conversations, Harris has been supportive of Biden’s agenda, rarely objecting even on controversial questions among Democrats such as rent caps or mass student debt relief. The Biden-Harris administration’s budget proposal for next year — which reflected Democratic priorities on dozens of issues — is likely to form the starting point for her priorities, they said.
“The administration’s 2025 budget lays out her thinking in detail, and as president she might adjust things a bit — but just a bit. I think what we’ve seen from President Biden is what I think Harris will pursue,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. “I think she’s cut out of the same economic cloth as President Biden.”
But there are some places where Harris could shift the party’s emphasis. In the Senate, Harris unveiled the first “bill of rights” for domestic workers not covered by traditional labor laws. As vice president, Harris has been a forceful advocate for policies aimed at protecting poorly paid child care and eldercare workers, said Ai-jen Poo, president of the National Domestic Workers Alliance.
“Vice President Harris has been one of our biggest champions on the care agenda — from child care, to paid leave, to aging and disability care. She has been a consistent leader for us,” Poo said.
That focus may align with Harris’s political identity. In May, she gave a speech to the Service Employees International Union, which represents millions of workers in the service sector and has a more racially diverse membership than many other unions, where she called on better pay for care workers.
“Part of her constituency will clearly be women, clearly be women of color, and clearly families of color — and these are disproportionately folks in the service industry,” said Felicia Wong, president of Roosevelt Forward, the advocacy arm of a left-leaning think tank. “So it’s not just that she knows investing in the care sector is good for the economy and in line with her values … in political terms, she sees an advantage in the care agenda.”
Conservatives and Republicans, though, see Harris as a big-spending liberal who has embraced Biden policies that fueled the worst inflation in several decades and added trillions to the federal debt.
Trump allies are also planning to criticize Harris over the rise in migration across the U.S.-Mexico border, after she led White House efforts to handle the issue early in the administration.
“We will skewer her for her border performance,” said Stephen Moore, a Trump adviser.
In terms of new policies, however, the difference between Biden and Harris may ultimately prove limited. Biden already installed allies of the left in important administrative and regulatory positions, and his legislation was constrained by centrist Democrats in Congress who regarded his proposals as too liberal. That obstacle is likely to be the same for Harris even if Democrats retain the Senate.
“The administration has already put progressives in charge of most of the agencies markets care about, so there’s not much room for a leftward push there,” said Tobin Marcus, head of U.S. policy and politics at Wolfe Research and an economic policy staffer to Biden when he was vice president during the Obama administration. “For the most part, this is a political story just about voters’ perceptions of what they stand for. It will likely be a more forceful and cogent articulation of the case against Trump, without that much of an identifiable difference in their proactive Democratic mission.”
