Biden's Economic Message Failed With Voters. Can Harris Do Better?

Three years ago, Vice President Kamala Harris gave a pitch for the Biden administration’s Build Back Better agenda by highlighting ambitions to use federal dollars to make life easier for caregivers.

“For far too long, investments in care have dropped to the bottom of the priority list,” she said in a virtual town hall in October 2021. “It is time to make corporations pay their fair share and pass our agenda, because care cannot wait.”

As history would have it, those items did drop off the priority list and weren’t included in Democratic legislation that boosted clean energy and aimed to reduce prescription drug prices.

But with Harris’ late entry into the presidential race, that vision has been given a sudden bolt of electricity, and her 2021 pitch is a window into her potential economic agenda if she inherits the Oval Office.

“I think she will prioritize these issues in a more authentic and enthusiastic way than we’ve seen before,” said Vicki Shabo, a longtime care policy advocate at the left-leaning think tank New America.

This has the potential to set Harris apart from President Joe Biden in an important way. Biden focused his campaign efforts on convincing people that the economy is doing well, pointing to low unemployment and rising wages. But he spent little time at all talking about what else needs to be done over the next four years, even as he acknowledged that an affordability crisis is still weighing on people.

Notably, neither Biden nor Donald Trump ever answered a question about what they’d do to make child care more affordable in the disastrous debate that ultimately ended the latter’s presidential run.

That’s not to say the White House didn’t have plans of what they’d like to do — not just on care issues, but also in other areas like housing and universal pre-K. But very few voters were going to scroll through the president’s proposed budget to find it.

While the vice president hasn’t been a leading voice on economic issues, she’s consistently supported paid family and medical leave from her earliest days in the Senate.

She’s also advocated for more funding for child care facilities and been a vocal proponent of the administration’s push to enhance the child tax credit, after a pandemic-era expansion led to a dramatic reduction in child poverty. In her first appearances since her candidacy began on Sunday, she made reference to all of these policies, including in a pitch to teachers.

These are all parts of boosting what the Biden administration calls “the care economy,” which refers to the labor — often unpaid — done by people taking care of vulnerable populations like children or the elderly.

While any initiative faces long odds of clearing Congress — particularly while the politics of inflation puts greater pressure on elected officials to offset the cost of new spending with higher taxes on at least some portion of the electorate — it’s worth noting: Having someone in the White House with a penchant for these issues could shake up the politics and give them a fighting chance of being enacted.

There is a macroeconomic pitch to making child care more affordable. According to an annual survey conducted by the Federal Reserve, nearly 40 percent of unemployed mothers in their prime working years said child care responsibilities contributed to their decision to not have a paying job — reducing the available supply of workers.

But Harris doesn’t tend to speak in macro terms.

And beyond specific positions she’s taken, it feels hard to extrapolate what her views on any given issue will be, since she’s never really articulated an overarching policy vision.

Allies of Harris say her style isn’t revamping the entire system but rather looking for targeted solutions to problems that people — particularly disadvantaged people — face.

It’s a stark contrast with Trump, who had and still has much more enthusiasm about economic policy than any other 21st century president and talks regularly about policies like putting 10 percent tariffs on all imported goods or lowering the corporate tax rate further.

Harris tends to gravitate toward issues that are more granular; she’s been a vocal player in the Biden administration’s policies that are aimed at helping minority-owned businesses get access to capital or that would eliminate medical debt from people’s credit scores.

“One of the questions she always comes back to is ‘Do these policies give people more freedom, choices, and ultimately autonomy over their own lives?’” Rohini Kosoglu, who previously served as domestic policy adviser to the vice president and as chief of staff to Harris when she was in the Senate, told me. “She is fighting for Americans to be empowered.”

Whatever her precise platform, Democrats and allies are hoping she’ll make a renewed effort to sell a forward-looking agenda for the economy.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) agreed when I asked her about the Democrats’ economic messaging outside the House floor on Tuesday, ticking off three priorities immediately, which she called “the largest pain points”: health care, housing and child care.

“We really need to have a vision of the future,” she said. “And we need to talk about what we’re gonna do once the American people hand us the keys.”