Kamala Harris’s Campaign Thinks She Can Win on the Economy. Here’s How.

Kamala Harris’s Campaign Thinks She Can Win on the Economy. Here’s How.

Harris advisers point to a number of brightening public polls showing that Donald Trump’s lead is eroding on the critical question of whom voters trust most on the economy.

• Share full article

By Shane Goldmacher

For many months, it has been an undisputed and durable fact of the 2024 race that former President Donald J. Trump held a strong political advantage on the most pressing issue to the most voters: the economy.

But with less than six weeks until the election, some of Vice President Kamala Harris’s top strategists are making the seemingly audacious case that she will not only neutralize the longstanding Republican edge on economic matters but also flip the script entirely by Election Day.

“This is not just a central challenge, but a challenge that is winnable,” David Plouffe, a senior Harris adviser who served as former President Barack Obama’s campaign manager in 2012, said in an interview.

In fact, Mr. Plouffe and other Harris advisers say, the turnabout has already started.

They point to a number of brightening public polls that show that Mr. Trump’s once-daunting lead is eroding on the critical question of whom voters trust most on the economy. At the same time, there are economic atmospherics working in her favor with the stock market hitting record highs, gas prices dropping and the Federal Reserve slashing interest rates for the first time in four years.

In the battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, Mr. Trump’s edge on the handling of the economy was only two to four percentage points in the most recent set of Quinnipiac University polls. And while individual polls do not universally agree on the size of Mr. Trump’s edge, the trend line across a number of surveys, including from Fox News, CBS and Suffolk University/USA Today, shows Ms. Harris gaining ground with voters on the economy.

Patrick Ruffini, a Republican pollster, dismissed the Harris team’s talk of outright winning on the economy as “a little far fetched” and “bluster.” But he said her gains on the issue were real and substantial.

In June, Mr. Ruffini’s monthly national survey showed Mr. Trump with an 11-point edge on the question of who would make the economy work better over President Biden. That lead had shrunk to a single percentage point over Ms. Harris in late August, and in September she held a one-point edge.

“What they needed to do is get the economy to a draw, and arguably they’ve done that already,” Mr. Ruffini said. “It’s no longer this unique Trump strength.”

The change comes as Ms. Harris and her allies are pouring tens of millions of dollars into advertising that seeks to define her economic approach as focused on the middle class. The ads promote a list of poll-tested Harris policy proposals, including stopping price gouging on groceries, lowering housing costs and cutting taxes. The goal, advisers said, is to make her seem attuned to the concerns of working-class voters who are likely to swing the election.

And while she is not exactly distancing herself from Mr. Biden, she is trying to carve out her own distinctive identity.

The latest pitch came in Ms. Harris’s speech on Wednesday at The Economic Club of Pittsburgh, where she framed the economic debate as a choice between “two fundamentally, very different paths.” She described her approach as “pragmatic” and “practical,” talking about her middle-class upbringing and at one point laughing off a reference to Mr. Trump’s oversized inheritance.

“For Donald Trump, our economy works best if it works for those who own the big skyscrapers,” she said. “Not those who actually build them, not those who wire them, not those who mop the floors.”

Mr. Trump’s team scoffed at the notion that voters were suddenly starting to trust Democrats after nearly four years of frustration about inflation under Mr. Biden. To press the point, the Trump campaign has been running ads that picture Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris together and end with her declaring “Bidenomics is working.”

“If the White House were a storefront somewhere on main street in America she would be out on the sidewalk trying to scrape her name off with a razor blade,” Tim Murtaugh, a Trump campaign spokesman, said. “She acknowledges it’s a wreck and wants nothing to do with it.”

In some ways, Ms. Harris is reprising the economic playbook of the Obama campaign in 2012, when Mr. Obama was battling persistently high unemployment and doubts about the Democratic stewardship of an uneven recovery.

The Obama campaign pressed to disqualify Mitt Romney, a former governor and corporate-turnaround artist, by casting him as a multimillionaire looking out only for himself and his rich friends. “A plutocrat married to a known equestrian,” one Republican famously summarized the Democratic caricature.

The television ad that Ms. Harris has put the most money behind so far features a narrator warning that “Donald Trump has no plan to help the middle class — just more tax cuts for billionaires.” Her most-run ad this month, which is narrated by the actor John Doman from “The Wire,” features him saying, “Kamala Harris is focused on you.”

Mr. Plouffe, the senior Harris adviser, said one of the key indicators in 2012 proved to be who voters thought cared more about people like them. “Barack Obama was able to win that question,” he said. And answers to that question are now being closely tracked in Wilmington, Del., where the Biden-turned-Harris operation has its headquarters.

One of the campaign’s internal surveys earlier this year showed that Mr. Trump was ahead of Mr. Biden by 13 percentage points on the question of who voters thought cared more about people like them, according to a campaign official not authorized to discuss the data publicly. But in the most recent head-to-head survey of Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump on that question, Ms. Harris was ahead of Mr. Trump by three percentage points.

“We’ve got an advantage,” Mr. Plouffe said. “And so the question then is how big can we make that advantage.”

Trust in Mr. Trump on the economy has been deeply ingrained. The Republican candidate’s image as a decisive business executive was forged over a decade as the star of the reality television show “The Apprentice” and, before that, as the best-selling author of “The Art of the Deal.” And during his presidency — even as Mr. Trump was personally unpopular — confidence in the country’s direction reached its highest point in more than a decade, according to Gallup, until the pandemic hit.

“Trump gets an enormous amount of credit by saying the word ‘economy’ over and over and over, and so he’s very much associated with it,” said Molly Murphy, a pollster for Ms. Harris. “But our opportunity is defining for people what Trump will do versus what the vice president will do.”

To that end, three of the four television ads that Ms. Harris’s campaign has spent the most on since she entered the race have emphasized a blend of her “middle class” background and an economic agenda that includes tackling the cost of groceries and housing, sharpening a contrast with Mr. Trump. The Harris campaign has spent about $35 million broadcasting just those three economic-themed commercials nearly 55,000 times, according to data from AdImpact, the ad-tracking service.

“It’s hard to win an election when you’re not engaged in a ferocious way on the things voters care most about,” Mr. Plouffe said of the economic focus.

Mr. Trump’s team still firmly believes the economy is a winning issue. The former president has held a number of events advertised as economically focused, including one on Wednesday where he mocked Ms. Harris ahead of her economic speech.

“Why didn’t she do it three and half years ago?” he said of her economic agenda. “If she has a plan, she should stop grandstanding and do it.”

Sarah Longwell, who founded a group called Republican Voters Against Trump and holds regular voter focus groups, said voters are not weighing Ms. Harris down with what she described as “Biden’s baggage” — so far.

“One of the most shocking things listening to swing voters talk about her is the extent to which she does not own the Biden economy,” Ms. Longwell said.

Republicans are determined to present Ms. Harris and Mr. Biden as a single package. One pro-Trump super PAC, Right for America, began to air an ad this week addressing younger voters. “Kamala Harris thinks you’re too stupid to realize she’s to blame for our record inflation,” the narrator says.

In May, Mr. Trump held a 12-point edge on the economy in a New York Times/Siena College poll of Pennsylvania. Mr. Trump’s lead was down to four percentage points this month, though his advantage was still more robust nationally and in the Sun Belt states.

Evan Roth Smith, a Democratic pollster, explained that Mr. Biden’s weakness was because voters didn’t think the president was focused on what they care most about: prices.

“Now when we test Kamala Harris, she has completely erased that disadvantage,” he said. “Voters think she is focused on prices just as much as Donald Trump. And they still think Joe Biden has his eye off the ball.”