Vice President Kamala Harris on Wednesday laid out a broad vision for her economic plan, seeking to bridge the political gap between the progressive senator who ran for president in 2019 and the pragmatic, pro-business candidate she is now pitching herself as.
“I’m a capitalist,” Harris declared in a speech in Pittsburgh, promising to protect and expand American manufacturing and trying to persuade voters that she would protect and lift the middle class.
“From our founding, America’s economic strength has been linked to our industrial might,” she said, “and that’s no different today. So I recommit myself to our nation’s global leadership in areas that will define the next century.”
Instead of wearing the trappings of a loud rally, Ms. Harris spoke in front of a modest sign at the Economic Club of Pittsburgh as if she was addressing voters sitting in wood-paneled offices reading print copies of The Wall Street Journal. These voters may have supported John McCain or Mitt Romney and believe the economy was better four years ago, but her campaign seems to hope that many of them now can’t bear the idea of voting for former President Donald J. Trump.
Harris revealed little new about her economic plans in her 39-minute speech, but repeated many of her populist economic themes: She promised tax increases on big corporations while offering tax cuts for small businesses and homebuilders.
She also pledged to invest in some of the 21st century’s most promising industries, including biomanufacturing, aerospace, artificial intelligence, blockchain technology and clean energy.
The goal, she said, should be to ensure that “the next generation of breakthrough technologies, from advanced batteries to geothermal to advanced nuclear, are not just invented, but built right here in America, by American workers.”
Harris made her case in what was once the industrial heartland of the U.S. and a Democratic stronghold that could determine the outcome of the presidential election. She has previously spoken in economic speeches about her plans to cut costs and help small businesses. Her focus on manufacturing on Wednesday was a return to a more traditional Democratic platform that Biden often emphasized before dropping out of the race in July.
Her speech sought to wrap economic themes in a broad vision. She said she was “not bound by ideology,” an apparent response to polls showing some voters consider her too liberal. And to Harris supporter Mark Cuban, the billionaire Pittsburgh native who was listening in the fifth row of the audience, she quoted investor Warren E. Buffett. But she also noted his work as California’s attorney general to hold corporate bad actors accountable.
Ms. Harris suggested she would join the ranks of presidents who left the country with a legacy of major infrastructure improvements. She cited Abraham Lincoln and the transcontinental railroad, Franklin D. Roosevelt and his “bold and persistent experiments,” Dwight D. Eisenhower and the interstate highway system and John F. Kennedy and the space program.
She never mentioned Biden.
Harris spoke about her own economic policies and delivered a scathing critique of Trump’s. She said Trump’s proposed tariffs would cost the average American family about $4,000 a year. Cuban, who endorsed Nikki Haley in the Republican primary and served as a surrogate for Harris’ campaign in the general election, repeated the estimate on MSNBC shortly after Harris finished speaking, declaring her “better for business” than Trump.
Harris also called Trump “one of the biggest losers in manufacturing history” and accused him of allowing American manufacturing jobs to be moved to other countries, saying the country was “taken advantage of by China.”
And she attempted a new tack in a long-running effort to define her opponent as an ally of billionaires and corporations rather than the working class.
“For Donald Trump, our economy works best for the people who own the skyscrapers,” she said, “not for the people who actually build them. Not for the people who wire them. Not for the people who mop the floors.”
The Trump campaign was not impressed, calling her statements “full of lies.”
“Every time Kamala speaks, it becomes more and more clear that only President Trump can make America prosperous again,” said Caroline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for the former president’s campaign.
Trump has eroded Democratic support among union members in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, long known as the Democratic Party’s Blue Wall, key northern battleground states. After years of high inflation under Biden, many voters say they trust Trump more than Harris to manage the economy, though some polls show the gap between the two candidates on economic issues is narrowing. Americans typically rank the economy as a top priority in this election.
At one point on Wednesday, Harris addressed both the rank-and-file members of the labor movement that traditionally support her party and the city where she spoke, promising that as president she would provide tax credits to “expand good union jobs in steel, iron and manufacturing communities like here in the Mon Valley,” short for the Monongahela Valley, an industrial region south of Pittsburgh that has suffered from America’s deindustrialization.
She added that she “will always be a strong supporter of workers and unions,” and that companies must “respect worker and union rights” or risk retaliation from the Harris administration.
Her remarks in Pittsburgh marked Harris’ third time since becoming the Democratic presidential nominee that she has delivered what she billed as a key campaign speech on the economy. Last month in North Carolina, she framed her campaign as a choice between her own forward-looking vision and Trump’s backward-looking one, a theme she returned to in Pittsburgh.
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it,” she said Wednesday.
