Vice President Kamala Harris delivers her economic message to voters in final weeks of 2024 election

In the closing weeks of the 2024 election, Vice President Kamala Harris is honing her economic message to voters in an attempt to set herself apart from both Donald Trump and the “Bidenomics” platform that former President Joe Biden supported before withdrawing from the contest.

While on the campaign road, Harris has completely renounced any reference to Bidenomics, a word that Republicans have derided and which the White House has often used to characterize Biden’s efforts to expand renewable energy, infrastructure, and domestic manufacturing.

Harris has replaced it with what she refers to as the “opportunity economy,” a strategy to expand the middle class that includes tax cuts, a $6,000 child tax credit for first-time parents, help for first-time homeowners, and tax credits for newly established small businesses, among other measures.

In an address to the Pittsburgh Economic Club on Wednesday, Harris detailed her platform in great detail and positioned herself as a “pragmatic” pro-capitalist Democrat a la Franklin Roosevelt.

The vice president promoted the speech—which her team touted as a significant policy speech—by pushing for job-creation initiatives and stating that the economy benefits regular Americans most when private businesses follow “consistent and transparent rules of the road.”

“I believe an active partnership between government and the private sector is one of the most effective ways to fully unlock economic opportunity,” Harris said.

In several ways, the discourse was similar to Biden’s. The president has repeatedly said that his policies are intended to grow the economy “from the ground up and the middle out, not the top down,” a jab at the Republican Party’s long-standing support for “trickle down” economics. He has also urged large corporations and wealthy individuals to pay their fair share of taxes.

Democrats countered that Harris has discovered a narrative that not only highlights the Biden administration’s efforts in reviving the economy during the epidemic, but also gives voters fresh ideas.

According to Tory Gavito, a Democratic strategist and the head of the organization Way to Win, “she’s threading that needle of being able to point to the success that the Biden administration has had and what the future [economy] would look like” under a Harris presidency.

According to Christian Weller, a senior scholar at the liberal Center for American Progress, Harris’ emphasis on wealth creation—a topic she also touched on in her Pittsburgh speech—has helped set her apart from Biden and other previous Democratic Party leaders.

“The thing that sets her apart from Democrats of the past 20, 30 years is that she emphasizes wealth, not just income,” Weller said. “The pandemic showed us people not only need income but they also need wealth to fall back on in emergencies.”

It goes without saying that Harris’ main objective is to contrast her ideas with Trump’s economic performance while in government and his 2024 campaign promises. In addition to suggesting lowering the corporate tax rate for businesses that manufacture items in the US from 21 to 15 percent, Trump has floated ideas to put tariffs on the majority of imports

During this week’s speech and other campaign appearances, Harris made the case that companies and affluent Americans would profit from Trump’s economic ideas.

Newsweek was informed by the national press secretary for the Trump campaign, Karoline Leavitt, that Harris had “three and a half years to prove herself, and she has failed.”

“Credit card debt is on the rise, personal savings are declining, small company confidence is at an all-time low, and individuals are finding it difficult to pay for housing, food, and petrol. “It’s becoming more and more evident with each speech Kamala gives that President Trump is the only one who can rebuild American prosperity,” Leavitt said in a statement.

A request for comments from Newsweek was not answered by the Harris campaign.
Harris has a difficult time managing the economy, and this has been made worse by consumers’ enduring pessimism in spite of excellent economic growth indicators.

Negativity

The rate of unemployment is almost at all-time lows. After peaking at 9.1 percent under Biden in June 2022, inflation fell to 2.5 percent in August, prompting the Federal Reserve to lower the benchmark interest rate last week for the first time since March 2020.

Although “the economy is performing well,” “the angst the typical American has about the economy is dominating the picture,” according to Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi.Harris “seems like she really has an uphill battle [to convince voters] the Biden administration has a very solid economic record,” according to Arizona State University economic research center director Lee McPheters.

For months, Trump’s winning platform has been the economy. Before Biden withdrew his candidacy for a second term, he routinely outperformed Biden by large majorities on the economy and inflation, and surveys indicate that most Americans believe Trump would be a better candidate to manage these problems than Harris.

However, the new economic message of the Harris campaign is beginning to bear fruit.
A survey conducted this month by Fox News indicates that 51% of registered voters supported Trump on the economy, while 46% supported Harris. In a March Fox News survey, Trump held a 15-point advantage against Biden on the subject.

Following the Sept. 10 presidential debate, an ABC News/Ipsos poll revealed that Trump led Harris by 7 points on the inflation and economic. Trump’s advantage over the economy has been narrowing in recent weeks, according to other national surveys.

Republicans said Harris has made some progress on the problem, but she doesn’t have enough time before November’s election to change the minds of those who believe Harris and Biden are to responsible for the inflation that peaked in June 2022 at 9.1 percent.

“The inherent advantages that the Trump campaign possesses on the matter will never be overcome by Harris,” said Terry Holt, a former George W. Bush senior campaign strategist. According to Holt, “she’s got a lot of work to do in a short amount of time.”