It’s the Economy, Harris!

The vice president needs swing voters—and they need to hear an economic message.

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(Photo by Chris duMond/Getty Images)

Every candidate for public office needs a compelling story or narrative, one that resonates with enough voters to win an election. A core piece of any such story is the issues a candidate plans to run on. Consider:

• In 2008, as Barack Obama fashioned himself the candidate of hope and change, he pledged to end the highly unpopular Iraq War and championed a slate of populist economic policies to address longstanding inequalities and voters’ growing frustration with Wall Street.

• In 2016, Americans were extremely pessimistic about their government and the direction of the country. Along came Donald Trump, who tapped into this anger, billing himself as the only candidate in both the Republican primary and the general election who could not be bought by special interests and famously pledging to “drain the swamp.”

• As fatigue around Trump’s chaotic presidency set in, Joe Biden offered a “return to normalcy” and promised steady leadership, a message that many voters appeared desperate to hear.

Now, it’s Kamala Harris’s turn to build a narrative about her candidacy. However, she must contend with the fact that her party’s issue priorities don’t currently seem to be aligned with those of the broader electorate. Last week, The New York Times’s David Leonhardt shared an informative chart (below) with the paper’s latest polling data that examined the issues influencing Americans’ votes this year.

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The graphic is instructive on multiple fronts. Not only does it show that Democratic voters are far more likely than anyone else to say that abortion and democracy protection are the most important voting issues in this election, but they are also less likely than the average voter to prioritize cost-of-living issues (a possible byproduct of the party becoming more affluent in recent years).

However, in the early running, Harris’s campaign has tied the former set of issues to its raison d'être, centering them in her first ad and at her first official rally. And although this focus echoes some of President Biden’s own messaging, it also deviates from it in important ways. For example, NBC’s Sahil Kapur highlighted two different campaign emails, sent just days apart, which juxtaposed Biden’s warnings that a second Trump presidency would be bad for workers with Harris’s assertion that abortion rights and democracy would be threatened under a Trump regime.

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One problem with this approach, though, is that voters who are primarily motivated by abortion rights and democracy protection are likely already planning to vote for Harris. On abortion, a recent Gallup survey found that a record 32 percent of Americans say they would “only vote for a candidate for major office who shares their views on abortion,” and that this sentiment is especially strong among pro-choice voters. Meanwhile, just four percent of undecided voters in the above New York Times poll said abortion was the most important issue informing their vote.

The case for running a campaign on “defending democracy” is even less compelling. As the Times poll noted, a paltry two percent of undecided voters listed it as the issue most important to their vote. Moreover, a recent Blueprint poll tested 15 messages about Harris’s candidacy, and the one focusing explicitly on her campaign themes of freedom and democracy performed the worst.¹

By contrast, Blueprint found that the message that resonated the most with voters focused on Harris’s advocacy of pocketbook issues and economic populism—but did so in a way that incorporated bipartisan messaging. It touted her support for popular left-leaning ideas such as fighting price-gouging and allowing Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices and also promoted curtailing government spending and supporting an all-of-the-above approach to the country’s energy policy. And while other polls have shown that voters trusted Trump more than Biden to handle inflation, Blueprint found no evidence that Trump had the same advantage over Harris.

There are signs that at least some people in Harris’s orbit understand that leaning into economic issues is bound to pay dividends with the voters who will decide this election. The top super PAC backing her campaign, Future Forward, recently released an ad in six swing states highlighting her record of taking on big banks as a prosecutor and fighting to cap insulin prices as vice president.

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She will also have the opportunity to prosecute an economic case against Trump, who has, among other things, called for yet another round of corporate tax cuts in a second term. Author Michael Sandel has suggested that Harris could put Trump on the defensive by focusing on the “dignity of work” and treating economic fairness as a moral imperative:

The dignity of work is important to a healthy democracy because it enables everyone to contribute to the common good and to win honor and recognition for doing so. For Ms. Harris, offering concrete proposals to honor work—and to reward it fairly—could force Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance to choose between the working-class party they hope to become and the corporate Republican Party they continue to be.

A laser-like focus on these issues carries numerous possible benefits. It can help create a broader narrative around Harris as the champion of average Americans, which may resonate with key groups like the working-class and union households—both of which are overrepresented in the Democrats’ “Blue Wall” states. Additionally, it is far likelier to move undecided voters and persuade soft Trump supporters than trying to convince them for the millionth time that Trump is a threat to democracy.² It could also help the Democrats begin to shift the tide of working-class support back in their favor over the long run.

Despite all this, Harris maybe be tempted to pursue a less conventional path to victory, one in which she wins by energizing young people, racial minorities, women, and college-educated voters in the Sun Belt around issues like abortion and democracy. But it’s important to remember a couple of things. First, these groups often motivated by the same issues as everyone else—specifically, the economy and inflation. And second, to the extent that Harris is trying to reassemble Obama’s winning coalition, she must also turn in a respectable performance with the white working class, which means speaking to issues they care about—again, like the economy and inflation.

The formula for Harris’s success isn’t a secret. Trump remains an unpopular figure, and she is currently enjoying a boost in standing in large part by simply not being him or Biden. The trick now is not to get too cute by shedding a tried-and-true path to victory and instead simply commit to championing the everyday issues that ordinary Americans care about.

In other words: it’s the economy, it’s pragmatism, and it’s the Blue Wall.

1. My colleague, Ruy Teixeira, has a more thorough analysis showing why “protecting democracy” isn’t the Trump card some Democrats might think it is.

2. If that messaging hasn’t moved them definitively against Trump over the last four years, there’s little reason to think it will be effective now.