Harris to more fully detail economic plans

WASHINGTON — Vice President Kamala Harris is set to ramp up her economic message this week, with a speech reframing her policy vision and a lengthy new document describing her approach in more detail.

Her focus on economic issues comes at a pivotal moment, as many voters remain skeptical of her ability to improve the economy, which has been a top issue in the presidential campaign.

Harris’ economic speech in Pittsburgh on Wednesday and the policy blueprint, described by three people familiar with the matter, are part of an effort by Harris’ campaign to weave together various economic proposals into a broader, thematic message.

Over the course of her truncated campaign, Harris has released plans to offer assistance to homebuyers, expand the child tax credit and raise taxes on large corporations and high-income Americans. Like her Republican rival, former President Donald Trump, Harris has not offered detailed plans on many other issues. The expected document will be a roughly 80-page overview of her economic policy priorities, though it is unclear how many specifics it will include.

A goal for Harris’ campaign is to present a tangible economic plan that it can contrast with Project 2025, a conservative policy blueprint that Trump has tried to distance himself from, according to one of the people familiar with the campaign’s thinking.

The Harris campaign declined to comment.

Many voters still say they want to know more about Harris, and the economy remains the top issue in the election. In recent polls of Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina conducted by The New York Times and Siena College, 12% of voters who are still open to changing their mind on a candidate said they had concerns about Harris’ handling of the economy. Trump led in all three states.

Trump has long enjoyed a polling advantage on the economy in this race, first over President Joe Biden and then over Harris after she replaced the president as the Democratic nominee. Many voters remain pessimistic about the economy’s direction under the Biden-Harris administration and nostalgic for its performance under Trump — and they often blame the current administration for a surging inflation rate that has only fallen back to historically normal levels in the past year.

But Harris has begun to narrow Trump’s economic advantage in some recent polls, and there are some signs that Americans are beginning to feel slightly more optimistic about the economy. A delicate balancing act for Harris is how to depart from Biden’s agenda, which she has done only sparingly since becoming the party’s nominee.

Outside groups that support Harris have urged her to be more direct and populist with voters about her economic philosophy — though they do not always agree on what that should look like.

The Democratic research firm Blueprint has pushed the vice president to blend a message of reducing the federal budget deficit and cracking down on “bad actor” corporations that it says unfairly rip off Americans.

“On the economy, Harris has the opportunity to thread the needle by presenting a message that focuses on lowering prices, addressing fiscal concerns and promoting targeted government action against corporations that exploit consumers,” the firm wrote in a swing state polling memo this week.

Other liberal groups have pushed Harris to go further and pitch herself more firmly as siding with consumers over big companies.

“Harris should lay out her diagnosis for why Americans don’t have the economic opportunity she wants them to have,” said Lindsay Owens, executive director of Groundwork Action in Washington. “This is key to connecting with voters on the economy because it helps them to understand what types of policy remedies she will prescribe if elected.”

Voters, Owens added, “want to know if the problem is that corporations have too much power and workers have too little — or if she is more worried about something else.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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