WASHINGTON (AP) — Suddenly, Kamala Harris’ economy is becoming both a major opportunity and a potential risk for the Democratic presidential nominee.
Shortly after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race a week ago, Harris began crafting her own version of the economy, focusing on ending child poverty, promoting unions, reducing health care and child care costs and protecting “dignity” in retirement.
In speeches in Wisconsin, Indiana and Texas, she never once mentioned the word “inflation,” the overwhelming economic challenge that has dogged the Biden administration and forced it to consistently acknowledge in its remarks the pain of voters dealing with the rising costs of food, gasoline, housing and cars.
Harris is making what may come next a big priority.
“Our vision for the future envisions a place where all people have the opportunity not just to survive but to get ahead, where no child has to grow up in poverty, where all seniors can retire with dignity and all workers have the freedom to join a union,” Harris told the United Federation of Teachers on Thursday.
But Republicans have quickly moved to blame Harris for the inflation they had until recently blamed on Biden, highlighting the cumulative effect of higher prices under Democratic administrations.
Since Biden took office, consumer prices have risen 19.2% and average hourly wages have increased 16.9%, according to Labor Department data.
Republican leaders have publicly said Harris contributed to inflation without explaining how she contributed to it beyond her time as vice president.
“Vice President Harris is the record bearer of this administration,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), “and her mark is on every failure of the last four years.”
Past and current officials who have worked with Harris said in interviews that criticism of inflation is not expected to extend to her because she represents a fresh voice to many voters after nearly eight years in office under either Republican Donald Trump or Biden.
Now is the time for Harris to state her policy position on economic issues.
Some of the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss policy matters, said Harris is likely to be in line with Biden’s fiscal 2025 budget proposal and his plan to raise the corporate tax rate to 28% from 21% set in Trump’s 2017 tax overhaul.
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Her emergence as the Democratic candidate coincided with positive economic news.
The Commerce Department said Thursday that the economy grew at an annualized rate of 2.8% in the second quarter. On Friday, it reported that personal consumption expenditures, a measure of inflation, eased to an annualized 2.5% rate, and financial markets are expecting the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates in September.
People who have known Harris for years say her work as a prosecutor in California has put a sense of fairness at the core of her economic policy thinking.
“She’s a capitalist at heart and wants businesses to thrive,” said Yasmin Nelson, a former senior adviser to Harris, “but she recognizes that the scales were tipped in their favor under the Trump administration. She wants to create a level playing field.”
Trump and his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, have focused on portraying Harris as more liberal than Biden, suggesting that the former California senator would further limit the use of fossil fuels in favor of solar, wind and other renewable energy sources.
Speaking at a rally in North Carolina on Wednesday, Trump called Harris “the most incompetent, far-left vice president in the history of the United States.”
Vance criticized her policies during an interview on Megyn Kelly’s SiriusXM show on Friday.
“We cannot allow people who are trying to destroy America’s manufacturing and energy economy to come into power,” Vance said. “If we had someone even more liberal than Biden as president, it would be even worse.”
The Trump campaign was quick to revive comments Harris made during her brief run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, when she told CNN she supported banning plastic straws, offshore oil drilling and the use of fracking for oil and natural gas — controversial positions in the battleground state of Pennsylvania.
Republicans also say Harris would raise taxes, which is exactly what Biden’s 2025 budget proposal would do to wealthy families and businesses.
Harris’ campaign has said she does not support a ban on fracking, and during the 2020 vice presidential debate, she repeatedly emphasized that Biden would not end fracking.
Natural gas and oil production has risen to record levels under Biden after dips due to the pandemic, according to the Energy Information Administration, but his policies are more restrictive than Republicans would like.
A bigger risk for Harris may be how sustained inflation affects voters’ views of the economy, as many of the economic models financial firms use to analyze elections are based on the incumbent party, not the candidate himself.
Consultancy Oxford Economics said in an analysis on Monday that Trump was likely to win, a projection based on a model that uses economic data and doesn’t necessarily take into account social issues such as abortion and gun control that Democrats say give them an electoral advantage.
While the analysis stresses that there is a great deal of uncertainty and that a lot can happen in the coming months, it’s pretty straightforward to conclude that inflation remains a drag on the vice president.
“I don’t think Harris is going to do much to change swing voters’ views on the economy,” said Bernard Yaros, an economist at Oxford Economics. “Harris still carries the same baggage of having presided over high inflation in 2021 and 2022. Like Biden, her approval ratings took a hit during the inflation surge.”
