Kamala Harris has revealed only the vaguest of policy platforms
SCARCELY A MONTH ago, Democrats were awaiting their convention in Chicago as one might a four-day root canal. Despite losing the confidence of his party after a disastrous debate performance, the 81-year-old president, Joe Biden, was due to formalise his seemingly doomed candidacy—and perhaps drag many other Democrats down with him. But then, on July 21st, despair gave way to ecstasy, as Mr Biden dropped out and endorsed Kamala Harris, his vice-president. She became the de facto nominee within 24 hours. The dreaded ordeal was suddenly transformed into a raucous coronation.
Elated delegates were feted at elaborate parties. At an event for social-media influencers called “Hotties for Harris” (your correspondent stuck out), guests sipped from coconuts, a viral symbol of Ms Harris’s campaign. There were free pregnancy tests, condoms and morning-after pills, alongside signs that warned that sex would be endangered if Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, his running-mate, were elected. By 1am gyrating Democratic youth filled a big dance hall, as memes featuring Ms Harris and Tim Walz, her running-mate, lit up the walls.
It is tactless to interrupt a good party with talk about work. Ms Harris plainly hopes the euphoria will last until election day. The details of what she plans to do with the presidency remain skeletal in the case of economics and totally unclear in the area of foreign policy—and she seems in no rush to explain herself. She has been buoyed not by her ideas, but by being neither the doddering Mr Biden nor the swaggering Mr Trump.
Graded on that scale, the jubilation that has greeted Ms Harris everywhere she goes begins to make sense. Giddy Democrats are already comparing her to Barack Obama, the party’s most successful recent presidential candidate. Her favourability ratings have shot up, she has reversed Mr Biden’s polling deficit and now enjoys a three-point advantage in the popular vote according to The Economist’s poll tracker. Her campaign, the infrastructure of which she inherited from Mr Biden, has been sucking in money: more than $300m in a month (see chart). Whereas young supporters of the geriatric Mr Biden had little to crow about online, the hotties and their ilk have been briskly sharing feel-good memes about Ms Harris (more coconuts, mostly, or non sequiturs involving the word “brat”). The coverage America’s mainstream press has afforded her has often been only slightly less fawning, even though she has not given an interview since becoming the nominee.
Hotties for hot air
Ms Harris, in short, would like to fight the election on broad values rather than nitty-gritty proposals. She has had a long career in politics, as the top prosecutor in San Francisco, California’s attorney-general, a senator and vice-president. Yet a careful study of it reveals few consistent beliefs or ideas. When she ran for president in 2020, she was a standard-bearer for the left who wanted to spend $10trn fighting climate change, provide state-funded health care to all Americans, ban fracking and decriminalise illegal border crossings. Her campaign has said she has since changed her stance on all those issues, in line with the more moderate politics of Mr Biden. It has not explained, however, how or why her thinking evolved. She has been deliberately vague about contentious problems such as the war in Gaza and the ballooning federal deficit. Her campaign website, like Mr Biden’s, lacks any policy page at all, whereas Mr Trump’s has several. The economic agenda she has announced is obviously designed to earn votes, not boost growth.
This woolly approach may endure until November. Ms Harris, whose own policy platform won few admirers in her previous presidential run, seems content this time to inherit Mr Biden’s without many tweaks. Democrats are so elated that their candidate can speak in complete sentences that few are inclined to press her to take stances she would find awkward. Mr Trump’s loud protests about her vague agenda and dearth of media interviews have fallen on deaf ears. Although our presidential-forecast model says she has a far-from-comfortable 52% chance of winning the presidency in November, the momentum is in her favour for now. There is good reason, in other words, for Ms Harris to remain mum.
The Economist has examined transcripts of all Ms Harris’s public remarks in the month since she became the likely nominee. Several conclusions leap out. Her messaging is consistent, disciplined and largely undetailed. Her favourite phrase, used more than any others, is, “We are not going back”—a pointed contrast to Mr Trump’s revenge candidacy. She tries as much as possible to discuss Project 2025, a fiercely conservative plan for the presidency that Democrats have taken to attacking and that Mr Trump has disowned. When she does discuss policy, it is cleverly framed as defence of freedoms: “the freedom to vote”, “the freedom to be safe from gun violence” and “the freedom of a woman to make decisions about her own body”.
Equally notable is what Ms Harris does not say. There are barely any references to climate change, which has been a focus of the Biden administration. She does not cast the election as part of a grand contest between democracy and autocracy, both at home and abroad, as Mr Biden did. The word “autocrat” does not appear at all. There are also no mentions of China, America’s geopolitical rival, although few subjects will be more pressing if she becomes president.
A speech delivered in Raleigh, North Carolina, on August 16th was supposed to present Ms Harris’s economic agenda. What she pitched was Bidenomics with more populist characteristics. Industrial policy would be maintained, as would a popular price cap on the cost of insulin and an expansion of the federal government’s authority to negotiate down drug prices. Her campaign appears to be soliciting the opinions of some of Mr Biden’s top wonks, such as Brian Deese, who championed bills subsidising the manufacture in America of computer chips and electric cars as head of the National Economic Council.
A tip on taxes
As a sop to voters infuriated by the high inflation of the early Biden years, Ms Harris has promised a federal ban on price-gouging for food. How gouging would be defined and whether any Americans are a victim of it remain unclear. Ms Harris has also proposed a $25,000 tax credit for first-time homebuyers, which, other things being equal, is likely only to push up prices. Weeks after Mr Trump unveiled a proposal to eliminate income tax on tips, Ms Harris endorsed it, too. (Mr Trump accused her of policy “plagiarism”.)
Democrats and Republicans are in accord on other economic matters, too. They both agree that spending on entitlements (government-funded pensions and health care, for the most part) is sacrosanct, even as they accuse the others of secretly plotting cuts. Both parties are considering expansions of the child tax credit. And both parties are paying no attention to the cost of their promises.
Ms Harris’s policies would cost $1.7trn over the next decade, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, an advocacy group. Having retained Mr Biden’s pledge not to raise taxes on Americans making less than $400,000 a year, she would struggle to pay for them. A hazy undertaking to make child care affordable would add yet more to the bill.
How a President Harris would handle foreign affairs is even less clear. Her long stint in state politics in California provides few clues. When she served in the Senate, in 2017-21, she opposed trade deals including Mr Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership and the USMCA (an update of NAFTA negotiated by Mr Trump), saying their protections for both workers and the environment were inadequate. As vice-president, she has travelled the world glad-handing allies. Mr Biden asked her to help alleviate the problems fuelling migration from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras and to co-ordinate with allies on the regulation of artificial intelligence. But on the Biden administration’s big foreign-policy challenges—the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the effort to support Ukraine, the war between Israel and Hamas, competition with China—she seems to have had less influence than Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, Antony Blinken, the secretary of state, and Bill Burns, the head of the CIA.
“I think it’s safe to assume that she shares a lot of values and priorities of President Biden,” says Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut and a member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. “There’s no doubt she’s going to make her own mark. I don’t think it’s terribly useful to guess where those departures would be,” he adds, though he also points out that she has shown “elevated concern for the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza”. Ms Harris skipped the recent speech of Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, to Congress; at a subsequent meeting at the White House, Ms Harris made sure to tell reporters, “Israel has a right to defend itself, and how it does so matters.” She lamented “the images of dead children and desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety” and insisted she “will not be silent” or “become numb to the suffering”.
Some Atlanticists who might have fretted that a president born and brought up in California would be less interested in Europe are reassured that her national security adviser at the White House is Philip Gordon, a diplomat who has written several books on European security and the NATO alliance—and even personally translated a book by Nicolas Sarkozy, a former president of France. Mr Gordon’s latest book, “Losing the Long Game”, is a long critique of America’s obsession with regime change, which involves “exaggerated threats, wishful thinking, costly or failed military interventions, premature declarations of victory, and often disastrous long-term results”. Many diplomats in Washington assume Ms Harris would stick to Mr Biden’s approach until new crises are thrust upon her. Despite the opacity of her agenda, Democrats argue she would be a steadier leader than Mr Trump. “The two campaigns present night-and-day visions for China competition,” says Mr Murphy, the senator from Connecticut. “The only way that you can manage China’s rise is with allies.”
Before he withdrew from the race, Mr Biden had sketched a campaign strategy that glossed over specific plans for a second term, other than “finishing the job”, and instead dwelt on Mr Trump’s unfitness for office and the Supreme Court’s unpopular curtailment of abortion rights in 2022, when it reversed a pivotal ruling known as Roe v Wade. He gave few searching interviews, preferring fluffy “sit-downs” with adulatory social-media influencers.
Ms Harris, who has retained most of Mr Biden’s senior campaign staff, appears to be sticking with that strategy, including dodging the press. Ms Harris is better at delivering upbeat stump speeches and slashing attacks against debate opponents than she is at interviews. And abortion is the topic with which she is most comfortable. In March she became the highest-ranking American official ever to visit an abortion clinic, in St Paul, Minnesota. Grassroots campaigns to enshrine the right to abortion in state constitutions, including in battlegrounds such as Arizona and Nevada, will undoubtedly boost her campaign. Mr Trump has been trying to distance himself from the most extreme factions of his party—which would like to ban pills used for abortions at home, enact federal restrictions on abortion and even curb the use of in vitro fertilisation—by saying that each state should decide policies on these matters for itself. It is an uncomfortable defensive crouch for a man who is used to attacking.
Mr Trump may have assumed that Ms Harris would be equally uncomfortable defending the Biden administration’s record on illegal immigration. The number of people arrested attempting to cross the border illegally reached a record of nearly 2.5m last year. What is more, Ms Harris’s assignment in Central America has given him an excuse to label her Mr Biden’s “border tsar”, a big exaggeration. Yet, perhaps unexpectedly, Ms Harris is not crouching in response, but counter-attacking. In a new advert, she describes herself as a “border-state prosecutor” who took on gangs and cartels. She has pledged to hire thousands more border-patrol officers once president and frequently lambasts Mr Trump for sabotaging a bipartisan immigration bill earlier this year that would have further fortified the border with Mexico and made asylum laws more restrictive.
Ms Harris’s studied vagueness may be more than an electoral strategy. It may also be a way to forestall disappointment if Americans keep the government divided (at the moment, Republicans control the House of Representatives and Democrats the Senate). Although voters tend to re-elect incumbents (and Ms Harris is the next-best thing to one), the party controlling the White House has not regained control of both chambers of Congress, having lost one, since 1948.
Democrats are optimistic about their chances of winning back the House, which currently has a slender Republican majority. There are more Republicans running in districts won by Mr Biden in 2020 than there are Democrats in seats won by Mr Trump. Favourable redistricting as a result of court orders has probably narrowly improved the Democrats’ odds. Enthusiasm, which had been lacking when Mr Biden was at the top of the ticket, has returned now that Ms Harris has supplanted him. “We are seeing a huge wave of grassroots enthusiasm, a lot of volunteering, just a lot more positive energy. People are really excited to have a pro-choice woman at the top of the ticket,” says Kristen Engel, the Democratic candidate for a hotly contested congressional district in south-east Arizona. “We have as women had our rights stripped away from us with the repeal of Roe v Wade. And my opponent, [Republican congressman] Juan Ciscomani, has been part of that.”
Republicans, however, are likely to win the Senate, where the Democrats currently have a majority of one. Only a third of its seats are contested at each election. The ones up for grabs this year happen to be in quite inhospitable terrain for Democrats. The party is almost certain to lose one seat, in West Virginia. Even to keep the chamber evenly divided, Democrats would have to win all the close contests, sweeping, in approximate order of difficulty, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, Ohio and Montana. Winning the latter two seats, in states that look certain to plump for Mr Trump, would require a lot of ticket-splitting—something that has become ever rarer in recent years. Even then, Ms Harris would have to win the presidency to give Mr Walz the deciding vote in the chamber. Only then would any items on Ms Harris’s wishlist—restoring a right to abortion, imposing modest controls on guns, raising the federal minimum wage, establishing a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants—stand even the remotest chance of being enacted.
Kamalama Ding Dong
Most of the rhetoric from the convention stage was ebullient and combative. “I, for one, am tired of hearing about how a two-bit union buster thinks of himself as more of a patriot than the woman who fights every single day to lift working people out from under the boots of greed trampling on our way of life,” thundered Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a hero of the left. Michelle Obama, Mr Obama’s wife, denounced Mr Trump’s “same old con”: “Doubling down on ugly, misogynistic, racist lies as a substitute for real ideas and solutions that will actually make people’s lives better.” Mr Obama himself then gibed, “This is a 78-year-old billionaire who hasn’t stopped whining about his problems since he rode down his golden escalator nine years ago. It’s been a constant stream of gripes and grievances that’s actually gotten worse now that he’s afraid of losing to Kamala.”
But amid all the fighting talk and crowd-pleasing swipes at the other side, Mr and Mrs Obama also reminded Democrats that the election remained close and would probably be decided by extremely narrow margins in a handful of swing states. “We only have two and a half months, y’all, to get this done. Only 11 weeks to make sure every single person we know is registered and has a voting plan,” Mrs Obama chided. Democrats could do worse than heed her advice. ■