Vice President Kamala Harris has an economic plan, a glossy 82-page booklet detailing proposals on housing, taxes and health care, which her campaign handed out to supporters gathered at a campaign event in Pittsburgh this week.
Former President Donald J. Trump doesn’t have any such details. The policies section of his campaign website has none. He offered a string of four- or five-word slogans promising tax cuts, some of which even his advisers can’t fully explain. He considered putting tariffs as high as 20% on all goods imported into the U.S., promised to deport millions of immigrants to reduce demand for housing, and bragged about cutting energy prices in half in a year.
Despite these improvised and vague policies, Trump still leads Harris in public opinion polls on economic policy, though the gap has narrowed in some surveys. Many economists warn that Trump’s policies, if implemented, could slow economic growth, raise consumer prices and widen the federal budget deficit.
But many voters find Trump’s powerful promises easy to understand. His basic message of lower taxes, fewer regulations and less trade with other countries is what originally brought him to the White House. Most Americans fondly remember the economy during Trump’s first three years in office, before the pandemic and years of inflation.
A central question in the final stretch of the presidential race will be whether Harris’s trove of more detailed — but still largely not fully formed — policy proposals can be coalesced into an overriding economic argument.
In a deeply polarized country, it’s striking that Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump share many common goals when it comes to the economy: cutting costs, deregulation, cutting taxes for the middle class and encouraging companies to make products in the United States.
The two sides disagree sharply on how to achieve those goals and how best to sell them to the public.
In his third presidential run, Trump has taken a much bolder approach to the economic policies he has pursued in previous elections, promising a “new American industrialism” and trying to connect those policies with the deep insecurity Americans continue to feel about the cost of everyday living.
His plan to reduce the cost of renting or buying a home would deport all immigrants in the United States without legal documentation, which would immediately reduce competition for housing and likely slow economic growth. His plan to create millions of factory jobs centers around imposing extremely high taxes on imported goods, forcing manufacturers to bring production and jobs back to the United States.
To reduce food costs, Trump has said he would ban the import of some foreign foods, which would likely raise food prices in the U.S. To reduce gasoline and electricity costs, Trump has said he would deregulate the energy sector and encourage a surge in new oil and gas drilling. Economists question whether these proposals will get what Trump says they will.
Harris’ 82-page plan tackles all of these same problems, but by very different means. To reduce rent and mortgage costs, she would offer a $25,000 tax credit to new homebuyers and spend tens of billions of dollars to rapidly expand the nation’s housing supply. To curb food prices, she would impose a federal ban on “price gouging” by grocery stores, though aides acknowledge that the ban may not be effective in the current economy.
Harris supports much more limited tariffs than Trump, promising instead tax cuts to encourage domestic manufacturing of low-carbon energy technology, biotech and other advanced industries. She would also expand tax credits for parents, especially those with infants, to help them cover the costs of child care.
Ms. Harris’s plan is more detailed than Mr. Trump’s, but far less specific than those of previous Democratic candidates. Advisers are in no rush to fill in the gaps. Instead, they are using Ms. Harris’ existing proposal to promote a broader message: that she is a pragmatic capitalist focused on the middle class, not the communist that Mr. Trump portrays her to be.
To figure out how to convey that, Ms. Harris’ campaign has been consulting closely with business giants and donors, who have pressed her to break with Biden on some strategic issues that have riled up business leaders, including the size of proposed corporate tax hikes and the ambition of some of the federal regulators.
Their hope is that by taking more moderate positions on issues that interest her wealthy donor base, such as capital gains taxes and cryptocurrencies, Harris will be broadly portrayed as a responsible leader who will promote economic growth. Billionaire TV personality Mark Cuban has been a regular on Harris’ campaign trail and appeared at her Pittsburgh speech. Cuban likes candidates with a plan.
“The vice president and his team are thinking through policy,” Cuban said at a campaign news conference this week. “She’s not just going off the cuff and saying what she thinks her audience wants to hear, like the Republican candidate.”
Ms. Harris’s shift has raised questions among Democrats who believe voters are more in favor of populist ideas, not the centrist views favored by billionaires, but many liberal policy advocates are optimistic that she will remain largely consistent with the ideas that animated Mr. Biden’s term in office.
“The message here seems to be ‘pragmatism,’ which I take as a critique of 40-plus years of Republican efforts to cut taxes and deregulate, regardless of the question,” said Jen Harris, a former Biden administration economic official. “Given the emphasis on small business and cutting costs, I was encouraged to see her calling out the main culprits: big corporations and corporate middlemen for their alleged misdeeds.”
Harris’ economic message, which mixes both progressive and moderate arguments such as cutting red tape and raising corporate taxes, could ultimately be confusing, and many liberals worry she is not doing enough to explain who she is and who she stands for to voters.
To be sure, Trump’s economic thinking, a mix of an ultra-conservative approach to corporate tax cuts and an opposition to free trade that was once a fringe view on the left, defies ideological categorization. But he has redefined Republican economic policy at the center of American politics for the past eight years. Harris suddenly rose to the top of the Democratic field this summer, giving her only a few weeks to clarify her economic message.
Harris has tried to do so primarily through contrast with Trump, arguing that his lack of detail is a disadvantage.
“He hasn’t really thought hard enough about some of these issues,” she said in an interview on MSNBC. “He needs to get serious and have a plan. And he needs to have a real plan, not just talking points at political rallies with exclamation points.”
While the Trump campaign has been eager to attack Harris’s finer points, such as calling her price-gouging plan “price controls,” Trump has been keen to soften his own plan and give free rein to his speech.
“I don’t use a teleprompter very often, because when I do, it gets really boring,” he said midway through a speech on the economy this week. “If I read it out word for word, it would be over in 35 minutes, and you’d say, ‘That was pretty boring.'”
