Since replacing President Joe Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris has flipped the 2024 election on its head, taking slight leads in key swing states and narrowing the gap in others. Yet even as Harris’s campaign surges, polling suggests that the economy is one issue in which trust in Trump, the Business Deals President, has been relatively sticky. A recent AP-NORC poll, for example, found that 45% of respondents think Trump is better suited to handle the economy, compared to 38% who place more trust in Harris.
There are signs that this trend, too, might be shifting: In another poll, this one from the Financial Times and the University of Michigan, Harris took a one-point lead on Trump on the economy—the first time this election cycle the Democratic candidate (Harris or Biden) has come out ahead. That said, the same poll found that just 33% of respondents think they’d be better off financially under Harris, compared to 42% who think the same about Trump. In other words, voters are gaining confidence in Harris, but overcoming the lingering conception of Trump as a preternaturally successful rich guy is going to take some work.
In a bid to further whittle away at (what may remain of) Trump’s advantage here, last week, Harris released her campaign’s economic plan: intertwined proposals to boost the supply of housing, extend financial assistance to first-time homebuyers, ban price-gouging on groceries, expand the Child Tax Credit, and eliminate income tax on tips for service workers. In her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention on Thursday, Harris pitched the plan as the foundation of an “opportunity economy” in which “everyone has a chance to compete and a chance to succeed, whether you live in a rural area, small town, or big city.”
Harris is not the first candidate to deploy constellations of buzzwords that extol the virtues of strengthening the middle class, and her ability to follow through will depend heavily on which party controls the House and Senate in January 2025. But it is nonetheless encouraging that, from the jump, the campaign is framing economic leadership not in terms of stock market performance, as Trump tends to do, but in terms of real-world consequences for voters—and especially working families on whom the burdens of inflation are heaviest.
For most people, the monthly jobs reports over which the political press obsesses are far less meaningful than the extent to which one job—the job they have—allows them to care for their loved ones, pay bills on time, and perhaps one day retire with dignity. Low though this bar may be, Harris is at least making plans to try to clear it. Trump, as ever, has no interest in even making an effort.
Harris’s housing plan, which builds on previous Biden administration proposals, has both supply and demand angles. The former would provide developers with tax incentives for building starter homes for new homebuyers, and aims to facilitate the construction of three million units over four years. (It would also eliminate tax breaks for profiteering investors who warp markets by buying up single-family homes to rent out.) The latter would provide first-time homebuyers with an average of $25,000 in down payment assistance. A frequent criticism of such programs is that they can artificially inflate prices in already-tight markets. By aiming to boost supply, too, Harris is aiming to avoid simply adding that $25,000 to sellers’ profit margins.
Other agenda items include eliminating taxes on tips for service workers, an idea that Trump has also flirted with. Tipped workers are already lower earners—more than a third didn’t make enough to owe any federal income tax in 2022—so this would put a little extra cash in the pockets of workers who aren’t taking much of it home in the first place. The price-gouging proposal focuses on groceries, which are about 20% more expensive today than they were at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. At a campaign event in North Carolina last week, Harris suggested that she would target “opportunistic” corporations that “exploit crises” en route to record-setting profits. “I know most businesses are creating jobs, contributing to our economy, and playing by the rules, but some are not, and that’s just not right,” she said.
Maybe the most impactful proposal is also the simplest: reinstating the pandemic-era expansion of the Child Tax Credit, which provided parents up to $3,600 per child depending on age and family income. Harris wants to boost this benefit even more for new parents, providing up to $6,000 to eligible families during the first year of a child’s life. Before the Senate’s very worst Democrats helped kill the expanded Child Tax Credit at the end of 2021, it briefly lifted nearly four million children out of poverty and reduced the monthly child poverty rate by about 30%.
Perhaps aware that this should be as easy of a layup as one gets in electoral politics, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, Trump’s vice presidential nominee, has also expressed tepid support for expanding the Child Tax Credit. Regrettably, he has yet to square this professed position with the reality that only three Republican senators voted to do so earlier this month.
Critics have framed Harris’s plan as overindulgent, under explained, and/or more than a little communist. “Progressives’ solution for inflation, healthcare, crime, sadness, and the Yankees’ bullpen is government decrees and government spending,” wrote the editors at the National Review, who are as gifted at persuasive writing as they are at baseball jokes. “It’s all they have.” The Washington Post editorial board took the bait, scolding Harris for having “squandered” an “opportunity to get specific with voters” by resorting to “populist gimmicks.” And on the campaign trail, Trump accused “Comrade Kamala” of backing “SOVIET Style Price Controls,” complete with an AI-generated image of Harris beneath a hammer-and-sickle flag, addressing a crowd of uniformed soldiers with deeply unsettling facial features.
The challenge with these lines of attack is that by the same metrics, Trump’s platform is demonstrably less coherent, to the extent that he has one at all. His proposal to implement a 10% tariff on imports, for example, would cost middle-income families about $1,700 per year, according to the nonpartisan Peterson Institute. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that a 10-year extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts would add some $4.6 trillion to the deficit, continuing to enrich the wealthiest Americans at the expense of everyone else. To extent that presidential hopefuls should, in the Washington Post’s view, avoid “populist gimmicks,” I would posit that the candidate pledging an unprecedented mass deportation of some 11 million people at an estimated cost of more than $100 billion perhaps merits more scrutiny than the candidate who wants to give new parents a little breathing room each month.
Trump has never sincerely cared about the welfare of working Americans, but ever since Harris entered the race, even his attempts to pretend to care about the welfare of working Americans have gone disastrously. Last week, for example, he held a campaign event outside his golf course in Bedminster, ostensibly to discuss a literal kitchen-table issue: the increases in prices of groceries during the Biden administration. (You have to applaud the political savvy here. Nothing demonstrates one’s deep understanding of the struggles of everyday Americans like bemoaning the cost of a dozen eggs outside a golf course with your name on it.)
This should be straightforward normal politician stuff, and for several minutes, Trump dutifully read from prepared remarks, flanked by carefully arranged boxes of Honey Bunches of Oats. But he quickly got bored and began playing the Trump rally hits, touching on, among other things, MS-13, crime in Chicago, and “bird cemeteries.” He only wrapped his litany of grievances and returned to the subject at hand—as a reminder, food prices—toward the end of this stand-up set from hell. “I haven’t seen Cheerios in a long time,” he said. “I’m going to take them back with me.” (Again, as a politician, a surefire way of showing how in touch you are with voters is marveling at the continued existence of America’s best-selling cereal.)
During his rise in Republican politics, Trump was often labeled as a populist—a nod to his appeal both to voters who were angry with the political establishment, and also to bigots who delighted in a major-party candidate’s willingness to say the quiet part out loud. Yet eight years later, despite a status quo riddled with failures that cry out for government intervention, Trump is having more trouble than ever staying on message. Meanwhile, his Democratic opponent is pushing a more inclusive brand of populism that would (at least try to) confront (at least some of) the problems caused by corporate power, but without demonizing the immigrants and poor people who are affected by those same challenges.
Like Trump, Harris acknowledges that the U.S. economy does not work for most people. Unlike Trump, Harris seems to realize that people want elected officials who will do something about it.