Kamala Harris entered the presidential race with a dilemma: The economy is the most important issue for swing voters, but most Americans view the Biden-Harris administration’s economic record as a failure. To complicate things further, the economy is strong by most objective measures, and many of the administration’s individual policies tend to poll quite well.
While he was still the presumptive nominee, President Joe Biden addressed this disconnect by trying to convince Americans that things were actually good. He and his surrogates touted the strength of the labor market, the slowing of inflation, and the success of his legislative agenda in spurring investment around the country. This was logical enough for a sitting president—how could he say the economy was in the tank without indicting his own job performance?—but it didn’t work. Consumer sentiment kept dropping, and voters kept blaming Biden for the state of the economy.
Harris’s message is markedly different from her boss’s. Instead of touting the economy’s virtues, she’s acknowledging its flaws and emphasizing her plan to fix them. Although that plan is full of policies that Biden himself has proposed, they have been repackaged not as a continuation of the president’s agenda but as a solution to the cost-of-living crisis that metastasized under his watch. Call it Bidenomics without Biden.
When Biden stepped down and endorsed his vice president, Harris seemed poised to inherit voters’ anger over economic conditions. (I certainly thought so, anyway.) That hasn’t happened. Poll after poll shows that, when it comes to the economy, she is largely unburdened by what has been: Voters don’t hold her as responsible for inflation as they did her boss, and they rate her higher than Biden (though still lower than Trump) on running the economy.
Harris is taking advantage. In her Democratic National Convention acceptance speech last night, she began by describing her upbringing and background as a prosecutor, then pivoted quickly to the economy. And Harris was completely focused on the future, not on the legacy of the administration in which she is serving. She announced that “a strong and growing middle class” would be “a defining goal” of her presidency, and promised “to create jobs, to grow our economy, and to lower the cost of everyday needs like health care and housing and groceries.” There was no defense of the current economy or the Biden administration’s economic record at all.
So it was throughout the convention. Democrats spent very little time touting the strength of the Biden economy and quite a bit of time acknowledging the high cost of living—and framing Harris as the candidate committed to fixing it. “If you’re a middle-class family, or trying to get into the middle class, Kamala Harris is going to cut your taxes,” the vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz said. “If you’re getting squeezed by prescription-drug prices, Kamala Harris is going to take on Big Pharma. If you’re hoping to buy a home, Kamala Harris is going to help make it more affordable.” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez described Harris as a “woman who fights every single day to lift working people out from under the boots of greed trampling on our way of life.” A prime-time video flashed graphics of Harris’s proposals to fix the housing shortage, reduce prescription-drug prices, and cut taxes for families with children. The message was relentlessly consistent: We know ordinary Americans aren’t happy with the economy, we know that costs are out of control, but Kamala Harris is going to fight to make things better.
And yet. Even as Harris’s message implied a decisive break from the past—from her boss—her actual proposed solutions were taken straight from Biden’s economic playbook. What has become known as “Bidenomics” is a three-legged stool that combines building out supply of important sectors (largely through investments in semiconductors and clean energy), providing social support to families (such as pandemic stimulus checks and the expanded child tax credit), and taking on corporate power (including through stricter antitrust enforcement and regulating the price of prescription drugs).
Harris seems on board with Bidenomics in spirit if not in name. The week prior to the convention, she released her first economic-policy agenda, which incorporated many of Biden’s own proposals, including permanently raising the child tax credit, providing down-payment assistance for first-time homebuyers, and extending Biden’s cap on prescription-drug costs. A few days ago, the campaign announced that Harris endorsed all of the tax increases on wealthy individuals and corporations in the most recent White House budget.
In some areas, Harris has pushed Bidenomics further than Biden himself. She called for the construction of 3 million new homes and put forward a suite of policies that would reduce the barriers to doing so. She promised to crack down on algorithmic price-fixing that has contributed to rising rents in the real-estate market. She even endorsed a federal ban on price-gouging in the food-and-grocery sector, although the details are ambiguous and somewhat controversial. As my colleague Frank Foer wrote on Wednesday, Harris’s rhetoric “is far more economically populist than that of any other Democratic nominee in recent history.” The same can be said of her early policy ideas.
In that sense, Harris’s similarities with the sitting president may run even deeper than a shared policy agenda. For most of his long career in politics, Biden was not known as an economic populist. He was instead known for having a finely attuned sense of where the ideological center of the Democratic Party was at a given moment. So it may be with Harris. As the party has moved to embrace Elizabeth Warren–style policy objectives and Bernie Sanders–style populist rhetoric, Harris has moved with it. Even as Democrats said a grand farewell to Joe Biden the person at their convention this week, they collectively embraced his economic vision. Progressives and moderates, governors and senators, party elders and rising stars all coalesced around the message of lowering costs, strengthening the middle class, and fighting against concentrated corporate power.
A victory for Harris in November seems likely to entrench Bidenomics even more deeply as the core policy agenda of the Democratic Party. The irony is that, if that happens, it will only be because she successfully distanced herself from the president who created it.
