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ANALYSIS: KAMALA HARRIS TURNED AWAY FROM ECONOMIC POPULISM  
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Milan Loewer and Jared Abbott
November 27, 2024
Jacobin
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_ Pressed by influential corporate advisors, Kamala Harris ran away
from a winning economic populist message and ended up losing a
campaign. We have the proof. _

Kamala Harris campaigning in Romulus, Michigan on August 7th., Erin
Schaff/The New York Times

 

his year’s presidential election hinged on a few hundred thousand
voters across a handful of key swing states, and no one can claim to
have known the outcome in advance. Yet the tectonic shift
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working-class voters away from Democrats was all too predictable. In
fact, the Harris campaign seemed deliberately designed to accelerate
trends in working-class dealignment.

The vice president’s bid was premised on the risky bet that catering
to moderate, college-educated voters would win more support than it
would lose in working-class defections. That gamble backfired
massively. Instead of expanding the Democratic coalition to bring in a
larger share of the working-class vote in critical swing states where
working-class voters make up a large majority of the electorate,
Kamala Harris saw her only gains
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college-educated white voters, and for the first time,
Democrats received
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higher share of votes from high- compared to low-income Americans.

Battle lines have already been drawn between factions of the
Democratic coalition to explain Harris’s loss. On the one hand, some
have admonished Democrats for failing to connect with the real
economic anxieties and sense of cultural alienation from the
Democratic Party felt by many working-class voters. This was
forcefully expressed by Bernie Sanders, who railed
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“it should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which
has abandoned working class people would find that the working class
has abandoned them.”

Similar critiques were proffered by Thomas Frank
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Senator Chris Murphy
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and even _New York Times_ columnist _David Brooks_, who conceded
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I’m a moderate who really did not like the policies that Bernie
Sanders proposes. And yet . . . it could be that in order to win
working-class votes in an era of high distrust, the Democrats have to
do a lot of things that Bernie Sanders said they should do.

On the other side, a consensus among mainstream Democrats seems to be
emerging that Harris ran the most effective campaign possible, but
that obstacles out of her control — such as sexism and racism —
were ultimately too great to overcome. Democratic strategist David
Axelrod, for instance, argued “there is racial bias
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this country, and there is sexism in this country. Anybody who thinks
that that did not in any way impact on the outcome of this race is
wrong.” For his part, progressive journalist Aaron Rupar chalked up
Trump’s victory to “the desire to dominate
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inflict cruelty on outgroups.” Since Harris talked very little about
her identity as a black woman on the campaign trail, and went out of
her way to avoid contentious cultural issues, the argument goes, there
is simply nothing more she could have done to improve her odds with
working-class voters alienated by the excesses of progressive
“woke” branding and suspicious of a black, female candidate. Jon
Stewart, for instance, argued that
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far from doing “the woke thing,” Democrats in fact “acted like
Republicans for the last four months.”

And, many Harris apologists would ask, is it fair to say she was not
campaigning as an economic populist? After all, an analysis
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Harris’s media spending by _Politico_ found that “the economy
has been by far the largest theme in the Harris campaign’s paid
media campaign.” Further, as the _Washington Post_’s Dan Balz
has noted
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Harris made up significant ground with voters on the economy relative
to Trump after rolling out her economic policy agenda in early
September. According to reporter Jeff Stein
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Harris’s agenda was a “nod to the party’s populist mood . . .
[calling] for a ban on price-gouging in the food and grocery sectors,
a prohibition on corporate landlords using rent-setting algorithms and
a $25,000 federal subsidy for first-time home buyers.” Nor is it
difficult to find excellent ads made by or on behalf of the campaign
that focused on corporate greed
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working-class voters about Donald Trump being a spoiled rich kid who
wants to hurt working people.

So who’s right here? Was Harris a populist or not? To determine
whether Harris’s critics have a point or are blowing things out of
proportion, we took a look at everything Harris actually said on the
campaign trail, how it stacked up with other recent presidential
candidates, and how it changed over time.

What Did the Harris Campaign Actually Focus On?

_Jacobin_ looked at hundreds of speeches, rallies, press gaggles, and
interview transcripts to trace Harris’s messaging over the course of
the campaign and the relative emphasis she placed on a variety of
issues and policies. We looked at how frequently Harris used certain
phrases in campaign messaging as a proxy for her emphasis on various
issue areas or policy sets. Our analysis reveals that the Harris
campaign pivoted away from the economy starting around mid-September,
de-emphasizing policies that she had previously advocated and moving
away from an adversarial stance toward elites. This parallels
investigative reporting
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which finds that the last weeks of the campaign were increasingly
directed by the very same corporate interests that she abstained from
criticizing.

Over the course of the whole campaign, Harris spoke less about
economic issues and progressive economic policy priorities than Joe
Biden had in 2020, and far less than Sanders had in the Democratic
primaries that year. In this cycle, Trump addressed perhaps the most
important issue for voters — prices and the cost of living — more
than twice as often as Harris.

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But at the outset of the campaign — during and immediately after the
Democratic National Convention (DNC) — Harris appeared to be heading
in the right direction. Progressive Democrats were pushing Harris to
emphasize a bold economic vision, and as the campaign began to take
shape, Harris chose her “issues
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cracking down on price gouging, an expanded child tax credit, and
subsidies for homebuyers and small business owners. In August, Harris
even hinted at
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for price controls, a wealth tax, and higher taxes on corporations and
capital gains. In these early weeks, Harris was able to give something
to everyone, without committing herself to concrete policies.

But after the initial euphoria surrounding the DNC had faded by
mid-September, the national Democratic Party took a back seat to the
group of advisors who had gathered around Harris’s campaign. The
looming fear of a second Trump presidency prompted party members to
get in line and focus on their roles as surrogates and in
get-out-the-vote efforts — keeping any criticisms of the campaign to
themselves and giving Harris’s team more freedom to act
independently. According to reports from the _New York Times_
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this team was built around a core group of former Uber executives and
corporate PR managers.

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Typical left-wing economic agenda items like “living wage,”
“affordable housing,” “paid family leave,” or “union jobs”
dropped out of Harris’s vocabulary in the weeks after Labor Day.
Tracking the use of more neutral terms relating to the economy —
like “wages,” “jobs,” and “workers” — we see a trend
line that slopes upward into early September before declining over the
following weeks. By October, Harris was spending less of her time
campaigning with Shawn Fain and Bernie Sanders than she was with
Republican Liz Cheney and billionaire Mark Cuban, unlikely candidates
to push any kind of progressive economic message, let alone a populist
one. Cuban was gleeful enough to declare
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the “progressive principles . . . of the Democratic Party . . . are
gone. It’s Kamala Harris’s party now.”

This pivot wasn’t merely rhetorical: donors, consultants, and
business-connected campaign staff pushed Harris to “clarify
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or de-emphasize previous statements indicating support for a slate of
popular policies on price controls; capital gains, corporate, and
wealth taxes; and a host of other issues. Harris’s vague suggestions
that she would engage in price controls to bring down inflation were
watered down into a policy that already exists in most states that
prevents businesses from profiteering on natural disasters. Her
gestures toward taxing the wealthy became a capital gains tax proposal
of 28 percent, far lower than the Biden administration’s proposed 40
percent; and she never took a position on Biden’s proposal to tax
unrealized capital gains. And as time went on, the candidate spoke
less and less frequently about her watered-down price-gouging proposal
or her commitment to taxing the rich.

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Harris even de-emphasized supposedly central elements of her platform
like the child tax credit and small business deduction. The only
centerpiece economic policy that Harris continued to emphasize down
the stretch was her plan to subsidize first-time homebuyers.

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Some of Harris’s defenders point to the campaign’s paid media and
advertising strategy as evidence that she was actually pushing a
disciplined, economics-focused campaign message. This side of the
campaign was run primarily by Harris’s super PAC, Future Forward,
which tested
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of messages, social media posts and ads in the 2024 race, ranking them
in order of effectiveness.” The “wonkish Obama campaign veterans
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running Future Forward found that the top-performing messages combined
a focus on pocketbook issues with a critique of the economic elites
that rigged the system against ordinary people.

Though the Future Forward folks were hardly left-wing radicals, by
mid-October even they were frustrated with the campaign’s messaging.
In a tellingly exasperated internal memo
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the group complained that the campaign was not spending enough money
on their top performing ads. A spot that acknowledged
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the “cost of rent, groceries, and utilities is too high” and
promised to “crack down on landlords” and “go after price
gougers” was the “most effective” of the ads Future Forward
tested but received barely any backing from the Harris team. Perhaps
criticism of landlords and price gougers proved uncomfortable for
Harris’s big-money backers and top advisors
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like her brother-in-law Tony West or former Obama campaign manager
David Plouffe, who have occupied roles as Uber’s senior vice
president of policy and chief legal counsel, respectively.

And consistent with the Harris campaign’s cozy relationship to many
of the billionaires and plutocrats insurgent Democrats like Bernie
Sanders have railed against for years, the vice president also
increasingly shied away from populist jabs at economic elites and
establishment forces as the campaign wore on.

If Harris’s rhetoric wasn’t focused on the economy, a specific
economic policy platform, or an anti-elite message, what was she
talking about in the campaign’s final weeks? As the race drew to a
close, Harris highlighted her stance on abortion and her
rightward-moving immigration policy. But the campaign’s closing
message centered more than anything on one of the few issues that
posed no threat to her donor base: the defense of democracy and the
danger Trump posed to it.

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Would Economic Populism Have Mattered Anyway?

Sadly, there is little evidence that Harris’s rhetorical pivot to
defending democracy was wise from an electoral perspective — however
much it may have pleased her relieved corporate advisors. Indeed,
a preelection poll
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Pennsylvania voters conducted by the Center for Working-Class Politics
and _Jacobin_ found that voters were much more favorable toward
Harris when they were shown hypothetical sound bites where she focused
on economic populism compared to messaging that centered Trump as a
threat to democracy.

By contrast, the poll found that the most effective messaging was the
same economic populist appeal that Future Forward unsuccessfully urged
the campaign to prioritize in October. The fact that the Harris team
decided to take the exact opposite approach in the homestretch of the
campaign — ramping down its focus on economic elites and leaning
into Trump as a threat to democracy — suggests that they failed to
take advantage of a potentially critical tool for stopping a second
Trump presidency.

“Fine,” Harris’s defenders might concede, “the candidate could
have talked more about economic populism and spent less time harping
on Trump as a threat to democracy, but it wouldn’t have mattered
anyway — the headwinds were just too strong.” Summarizing his
postelection interviews with Harris campaign staff, Dan Balz writes
that
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officials with Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign
say her defeat stemmed primarily from dissatisfaction among voters
about the overall direction of the country and discontent over
inflation and the economy. . . . In the end, Harris was unsuccessful
in overcoming the kind of public sentiment that has knocked incumbent
parties out of power elsewhere in the world.”

We don’t doubt that the Harris campaign was seriously constrained by
these and other factors — including her ties
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an unpopular incumbent. But it’s also true that _all _Democratic
candidates in tight races were tainted by voters’ dissatisfaction
with the status quo, yet many of them substantially outperformed
Harris, especially those like Gabe Vasquez (New Mexico’s 2nd
Congressional District) and Marcy Kaptur (Ohio’s 9th Congressional
District) who doubled down
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economic populism during the campaign.

Ultimately, Harris was a candidate appointed without a primary, whose
main pitch to voters was that unless they were comfortable with saying
goodbye to democracy, they had no choice but to vote for her. She cast
herself as a defender of — rather than an antagonist to — the
establishment and status quo. Her policy platform felt like a
throwback to Clintonism; she gestured toward “opportunity,” but
without a robust policy platform or set of ideological commitments,
she couldn’t articulate to voters what she would do for them, here
and now. If the Harris campaign really was the avatar of
“democracy,” it’s not surprising that voters rejected it at the
ballot box.

We need a real alternative if we’re ever going to stop right-wing
populism. We don’t know if Bernie would’ve won in 2016 and 2020,
but after 2024 it seems increasingly likely that only someone like him
can break the MAGA spell.

_Milan Loewer is a researcher at the Center for Working-Class Politics
and lives in New York City._

_Jared Abbott is a researcher at the Center for Working-Class Politics
and a contributor to Jacobin and Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and
Strategy._

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* Kamala Harris
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* 2024 Elections
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* corporate power
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* populism
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