The One Big Policy That Kamala Harris Needs

Kamala Harris has quickly unified and energized the Democratic coalition—and so far without being pressured into sweeping policy commitments that might provide tempting targets for the GOP. That absence of detailed proposals has itself drawn criticism from Republicans and some news-media commentators. But those complaints overlook both the degree to which a broad policy direction is already clear for a possible Harris presidency and how the goal of preventing Donald Trump from imposing his agenda eclipses other priorities for most of the voters Harris can realistically attract.

“To the extent voters could say ‘Maybe she’s a little bit different than Joe Biden,’ it’s on the economy and immigration she wants to show that,” the longtime Democratic pollster Paul Maslin told me. “Beyond that, it’s the framing vis-à-vis Trump that’s going to win the race.

“If you put me on a linear scale and say, ‘How much of this is pure policy exposition and how much is framing a choice going forward between you and Donald Trump’s world?’” Maslin added, “I’d say it’s 75–25 the latter.”

Harris has already provided signals in her stump speech about what her priorities will be if she’s elected: The list begins with protecting personal liberties and helping economically squeezed families manage the cost of living, partly by expanding federal support for services such as child care and home health care. But several Democratic strategists I spoke with said the issue on which she most needs to add detail is the cost of living. “The economy and inflation are the top issue for every voter group, including the groups that are important to the Democratic coalition, particularly younger voters and people of color,” Bryan Bennett, the senior director of polling and analytics at the Hub Project, a progressive organization, told me. “So no matter what, centering economic policy is going to be absolutely essential for Harris.”

Harris seems alert to this imperative. Her first big policy speech, today in North Carolina, will focus on the economy and inflation. The preview her campaign released made clear that her proposals—for instance, to fight market concentration in the meatpacking industry—will draw on her experience, as California’s attorney general, of suing companies that exploited consumers, to help distinguish her approach from Biden’s unpopular record. When Harris joined Biden yesterday to celebrate the reduced drug prices that the administration negotiated for Medicare, she likewise presented this breakthrough as an extension of her prior work on making drug companies accountable “for their deceptive and illegal practices.”

[Read: Does Kamala Harris have a vision for the Middle East?]

Harris aides promise that she will lay out more specific policy commitments at the Democratic National Convention, which starts on Monday in Chicago. “People need to know what she’s going to do,” says one Democratic official familiar with convention planning who asked for anonymity to discuss plans that are not yet public. “And that certainly will be a part of the convention.”

But anyone expecting from Harris a procession of policy white papers and five-point plans from now to November is likely to be disappointed, multiple sources familiar with the campaign’s thinking told me. Focused on the overriding goal of stopping Trump, the key interest groups in the Democratic coalition are unlikely to press Harris for more granular commitments.

“I don’t see the leadership of groups that would typically ask the Democratic administration for this or that policy to be imposing demands,” the progressive strategist Michael Podhorzer, a former longtime political director of the AFL-CIO, told me. “With so much goodwill out there for Harris and Tim Walz, I don’t think any of those groups would want to be seen as saying suddenly, ‘My interest is so important that I’m going to stop this momentum.’”

This deference from Democratic-aligned interest groups offers the latest example of the way Harris has benefited from the unusual upheaval that allowed her to claim the nomination without winning a single primary. For a presidential-primary candidate, especially on the Democratic side, detailing extensive (and typically expensive) policy commitments is usually a daily obligation. That can produce an intraparty bidding war that can bind a candidate to positions that become difficult to defend in a general election. Harris’s own unsteady 2019–20 primary run exemplified that problem as she embraced a series of distinctly liberal goals (such as single-payer health care, a fracking ban, and police-funding reductions) that lurched to the left of positions she’d held for most of her political career.

Trump and his allies have already targeted Harris’s 2020 campaign agenda to portray her as a “radical” and “dangerous liberal.” But her aides have quickly disavowed the main proposals that Republicans are targeting. Eventually, Harris will have to explain why she moved away from those positions, either at her debate with Trump scheduled for next month or in interviews with reporters. But that task may not be as difficult for Harris as Republicans hope it will be: Many Democrats expect her to argue that her time in the White House, at the highest level of the federal government, has changed her thinking. And she is unlikely to add many, if any, big new commitments before Election Day.

As one Harris adviser, who asked for anonymity to discuss her team’s internal deliberations, told me, the campaign doesn’t feel much need to respond to “people who are asking, ‘Where is her five-prong policy agenda in terms of surging affordable housing for low-income individuals?’” at a time when “we are living through this historic moment” of swelling enthusiasm among Democrats about the prospect of electing Harris and blocking Trump.

Even so, Republicans are trying to use the absence of new Harris policies to fashion a character argument against her. The GOP vice-presidential nominee J. D. Vance has called her a “chameleon.” In a statement, Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung described Harris as a “dishonest fraudulent failure” who is dodging the press to avoid answering questions on “why she has inexplicably flip-flopped” on many issues since her 2020 campaign. Trump stressed similar arguments in his North Carolina speech this week. Kellyanne Conway, a former senior adviser to Trump, expressed the charge in snarky terms on Fox this week when she said, “Left to her own devices, Kamala Harris is just one big old blind date, and everybody’s making her whatever they need her to be.”

Being labeled a “flip-flopper” was devastating to John Kerry in the 2004 presidential race. But it could be difficult for Republicans to make a case stick that Harris is hiding her real intentions from voters. When Harris and Walz appeared in Las Vegas on Sunday, she gave a clear account of her goals, which include action on health-care and child-care costs, abortion and voting rights, drug prices, immigration and the border, gun control, the “climate crisis,” the minimum wage, and ending taxation on tips for service and hospitality workers (her variation on a Trump proposal). All of that makes a demanding legislative dance card for any White House—especially given the probability that the best-case scenario for a President Harris would be razor-thin majorities in both the House and the Senate.

Those issues would surely preoccupy a Harris presidency for a larger reason than the fact that she’s talking about them: Up and down the party, a broad consensus backs those goals. With only a few exceptions, such as an earned pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, some version of these policies already passed the House of Representatives when Democrats controlled it during the first two years of Biden’s presidency (only to be blocked in the Senate). “These are issues that have animated the Democratic Party, and she has been a leader on that,” Neera Tanden, Biden’s chief domestic-policy adviser, told me.

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Rank-and-file Democrats are, if anything, even more enthusiastic than elected representatives about those policies. Bennett told me that in his organization’s surveys over the past few years, almost every idea Harris has discussed draws support from at least 85 percent of Democratic voters and, often, more than 90 percent. “You can see this tapestry: Economic justice, reproductive rights and freedom, and protecting American democracy are really central issues” to the voters who are plausibly open to Harris, Bennett said.

The criticism that Harris has not put forward enough policy proposals ignores this bottom-up consensus that would likely determine the agenda of a Harris administration as much as her own top-down preferences would. The issues likely to rise to the top are those for which her personal interests and the party’s institutional goals most overlap.

In a Harris presidency, those coinciding priorities would center on the so-called care economy. On those issues, the party has an agenda already on the shelf: The version of Biden’s Build Back Better plan that the House passed in 2021 included programs for universal prekindergarten and proposals to subsidize child-care costs, expand access to home health care, and establish a nationwide paid family-and-medical-leave program. These measures failed to advance in the Senate only when the dissenting Democrats Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema blocked them. “There’s obviously room to build from there, but what passed in the Build Back Better Act in the House is a very strong foundation,” Ai-jen Poo, the president of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, told me.

These areas are also a personal priority for Harris. In the Senate, she introduced legislation addressing each of the care-economy issues, as Jonathan Cohn recently documented for HuffPost. Biden has stressed the challenges of providing care to children and seniors as well, but when he talks about bolstering the middle class, he tends to sound as if he envisions a blue-collar worker on a construction site or in a factory.

In contrast, Harris is more familiar with a postindustrial landscape in California, and draws upon her own experience of caring for her mother as she died of colon cancer. That background gives Harris a keener focus on using public policy to support domestic-service workers, many of whom are women and minorities. “If there were archetypes of the working-class hero in this country, home-care workers are one of those archetypes for her,” said Poo, who also serves as the executive director of Caring Across Generations, a coalition of advocacy groups.

Democrats I’ve spoken with expect that showing voters how Harris’s agenda on the issues they care most about—the economy, crime, and immigration—derives from such personal experiences will be a major goal of next week’s convention. The aim, as I’ve written, is to do as Bill Clinton did at the 1992 Democratic National Convention: He argued that he would defend the middle class because he was a product of it.

[Read: The one policy idea uniting Trump and Harris]

Numerous polls have shown Harris significantly narrowing Trump’s advantage on the economy even before she’s issued any proposals differentiating her plans from Biden’s. The most dramatic of these recent surveys, from the Financial Times and the University of Michigan Ross School of Business, found that slightly more Americans trusted Harris than Trump to manage the economy.

Those findings suggest that Harris is benefiting less from a sense that she has better ideas than Trump on any particular issue and more from the notion that she would provide more energetic and unifying leadership across the board than the former president. That dynamic, visible in multiple recent polls, has helped her scoop up many of the “double hater” voters who disliked both Trump and Biden; in a survey released on Wednesday, the Democratic polling firm Equis Research found Harris making dramatic gains among Latino voters across the battleground states largely because she was capturing almost two-thirds of the voters who were negative about both Biden and Trump—nearly twice the share that Biden himself had been attracting.

When forced to choose between Biden and Trump, many Latinos defaulted to the belief that under Trump, “the economy was doing better [and] I had more money in my pocket,” Carlos Odio, a co-founder and senior vice president for research at Equis, told me. “But with Harris, it seems to be a different calculus. People see Harris as Option C: Turn the page.”

Odio noted that even with Harris’s big gain in the Equis poll, she still isn’t drawing quite as much support among Latinos as Biden did in 2020 (which was itself down from the Democratic performance in 2016 and 2012). Odio believes that the last few points of Latino support that Harris will likely need in states such as Arizona, Nevada, and Pennsylvania could come from voters “who are waiting to see what it is she is proposing on the economy.” Bennett thinks the same is true for the broader electorate.

Bill Kristol, the longtime conservative strategist turned staunch Trump critic, pointed to another way Harris could benefit from offering more specific economic plans: Doing so might help separate her from the discontent over Biden’s record on handling inflation. “I don’t think people need the Hillary Clinton–level detail,” Kristol told me. “But the thing about having an economic agenda is it’s forward-looking … It creates the sense that you are thinking ahead and not looking back.”

Still, more policy proposals may not be all that relevant to the particular electoral challenge Harris is confronting. Podhorzer, the former AFL-CIO political director, argues that Harris doesn’t so much need to dislodge voters from Trump as inspire turnout among the voters who reject his vision for America. “For the anti-MAGA majority voters who are not paying that much attention to politics, she’s a new face, so they just have to feel that they will be comfortable that when she’s president, everything will be fine,” Podhorzer told me. “The idea of an 86-year-old Biden was not fine with them. It wasn’t about policy. It was: Do I really trust this person to be making the big decisions that come before the president?, as opposed to having a legislative agenda. That’s [the bar] she has to clear.”

Harris’s best chance to surmount that hurdle is convincing voters that she has the personal qualities of strength and vision to succeed in the presidency. Proving that case seems much more likely to lift her over the top than stacking up policy papers.