Is Harris—Dare We Say It?—Actually Doing a Good Job Talking to Voters About the Economy?

Kamala Harris, by most available measures, has run a successful campaign so far. Since she became the presumptive Democratic nominee in late July, she's gone from losing most national polls against Donald Trump to leading them by an average of about 3 points. Her "favorability" numbers have risen sharply , she's currently the slight favorite in most election forecasts , and according to a wide majority of viewers, she was the "winner" of the Sept. 10 debate.

She's only been successful by most available measures, though. Harris has consistently trailed Trump when voters are asked who they trust more to handle two of the race's most high-profile issues: immigration and the economy .

There may not be much she can do on immigration, given the baked-in median-voter perception that Republicans are the "tougher" of the two parties and therefore the most capable of handling anything that involves security or "law and order." The economy, though, is a different matter.

It's true that voters have long associated the Republican Party with the business community and that, his actual record aside , Trump is perceived by many Americans as a successful entrepreneur and "builder" who intuitively understands how growth works. But the GOP doesn't have a permanent polling advantage on the issue.

In the late 1990s, as Bill Clinton presided over high employment and a surging stock market, voters told Gallup that they had more faith in Democrats than Republicans to manage the economy. Barack Obama was trusted more on economics than John McCain , and even managed to fight Mitt Romney to a draw on the issue in 2012, despite Romney's record in business and an unemployment rate that was still at almost 8 percent on Election Day.

Harris doesn't face economic conditions that are particularly severe, historically speaking. Unemployment is just over 4 percent, the stock market is up more than 20 percent on the year, and both inflation and interest rates are falling. Nor is it unheard of for popular modern Democrats to have "pro-business" reputations. In fact, Harris has chosen one of them—Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz—as her running mate, and the summary of her economic platform she delivered during a Wednesday speech in Pittsburgh suggests she is taking cues from his approach in what is not just the Land of 10,000 Lakes, but the headquarters of Land O'Lakes Inc.

What did Walz's approach look like? Before he became the VP nominee, he was most known nationally for a photo in which a gaggle of adorable schoolchildren embrace him while he signs a bill guaranteeing free breakfasts and lunches to every public school student in the state. Signing the bill was a plainly progressive and "populist" move, one of several Walz has made during his tenure, like guaranteeing free college tuition for lower-income students and committing more than a billion dollars to affordable housing.

But he has also maintained Minnesota's reputation as a good place for business ; several Fortune 500 companies call the state home, including General Mills, Target, and UnitedHealth, and CNBC ranks it as having the sixth-best business environment in the country despite a relatively high corporate tax rate.

"He kept good relations with the Fortune 500 presence here," Patrick Coolican, the editor in chief of an independent news site called the Minnesota Reformer , told me. "Minnesota has a tradition of pro-business progressives, like Sen. Tina Smith, who worked at General Mills, and [former Sen. and Gov.] Mark Dayton, whose family owned the Dayton's department store, which turned into Target. And I think Walz identifies somewhat with that tradition." (The Minnesota Dem pitch to companies, Coolican explains, is that the state's taxes pay off in useful infrastructure and a high-quality, happy workforce. "Once these companies get somebody to move here, which can be tough," he says, "they don't want to leave.")

Walz has worked on two tracks: As a populist Santa Claus delivering universal benefits for the people but also as a cheerleader for industry who understands its needs. Harris tried working both of these tracks at once in her Pittsburgh speech as well. The cheerleading part included a section that came about as close to saying I am not too liberal for the median voter as it's possible to come without just saying it:

"I believe that most companies are working hard to do the right thing by their customers and the employees who depend on them," she added. (Bless those hardworking companies, rising before the rooster crows to meet demand for goods and services.)

Abstract, ideological defenses of capitalism are probably not something a lot of swing voters care about. Instead, these statements are basically news-cycle harm mitigation. A national conversation about whether Harris is too radical and hostile to "job creators" would be Donald Trump's best-case scenario at this point in the race; think of this part of her message as a friendly suggestion to business leaders and CNBC anchors not to participate in one. (Her promise to heavily subsidize businesses in a variety of tech-related fields , if they manufacture their products domestically, would also count as such.)

The funny thing about U.S. voters, though, is that while they love the free market and limited government in the abstract, they also tend to like redistributive, socialist-ish policies in the particular. Harris has that stuff in her pitch too, including a promise to prosecute monopolistic price gouging in the grocery business, a promise to cut taxes for first-time homebuyers and parents, and an easy-to-remember commitment, which is currently bordering on catchphrase territory, about building 3 million new homes to lower the cost of housing.

These ideas test well ; they also please the left-leaning policy community. "It's a substantial shift in our understanding of economics," Darrick Hamilton, a professor at the New School in New York City who has worked as an adviser to Bernie Sanders and other Democratic politicians, told me. "In the recent past, economics has almost exclusively defined production largely as what it is that a firm might contribute to our GDP. But when you give people at the low and moderate income distribution additional resources, it doesn't just enhance them personally, it enhances our economy because it facilitates work. It facilitates them to engage productively."

Relatedly, I've noticed that Harris says the word wealth in an aspirational context—as opposed to something that exists to be taxed or shared—more than prior Democratic candidates . As she put it in a post-speech interview on MSNBC :

Harris is running a yes-and campaign. She is telling the corporate, Wall Street world that she respects and appreciates its work (don't laugh; recent history has shown that hurt feelings can be disastrous when it comes to the finance industry's relationship with Democrats!) and offering to support its firms against global competition. She is building this goodwill so she can reach playfully into those firms' pockets for some of the ensuing profits, in order to fund the popular stuff. And she is framing it all as an appeal to the innate, cross-ideological American desire to have an absolutely disgusting, Scrooge McDuck level of wealth tied up in one's property value.

That is how Harris is trying to thread the needle of being a Democrat who needs to have a big plan for the economy—but not a "radical" one. It doesn't necessarily make for viral rhetoric, because it involves a lot of points being made for the benefit of a lot of audiences. But it might be working: Harris has been close to even with Trump on "economy" questions in three polls released in the past 10 days. Biden typically trailed on the subject by margins well into the double digits.

In a twist that must infuriate Republicans, Harris is benefiting from having nudged the issue of inflation (backward-looking, involves high-level banking stuff you'd expect Republicans to be good at, Biden's fault ) off the table in favor of discussing the cost of living (forward-looking, regular-person stuff, classic kitchen-table Momala topic). Of course, they are the same thing. But the associations of the latter term are better for Democrats .

"Joe Biden took office in the midst of the pandemic and the economic dislocation that came with it, and perceptions of the economy, as filtered through partisanship, have been poor for the last four years," says Mark Blumenthal, a pollster who currently works on a running YouGov/Yahoo survey.

But! "We asked in our last survey , which was done right after the debate, which candidate would better handle the 'cost of living,' and Trump had only a 2 point edge on that, 42–40," Blumenthal said. "We had follow-ups for anyone who said they either watched the debate or saw enough coverage of it that they felt they had an opinion, and we said, 'Who do you think gave better answers on each of these topics,' one of which was cost of living, and they gave Harris a 45–39 advantage over Trump."