Opinion | Harris Can Win on the Economy, but She Needs a Stronger Message

In Tuesday’s debate against Donald Trump, Kamala Harris emphasized her middle-class background, her admiration for small-business owners and her plans for an “opportunity economy.” She promised tax credits for young families and support for first-time homeowners. Those attempts to put meat on the bones of her economic plan will not be enough to win the presidential election.

In the latest Times/Siena poll, Ms. Harris trailed Mr. Trump by 13 points on the economy, the issue that matters most to voters. It’s why she’s merely tied with Mr. Trump in the race overall, not crushing him.

Optimistic words and some admirable proposals aren’t enough to overcome the discontent and anger that a large majority of Americans feel about the economy. Ms. Harris must speak directly to this experience and advance a strong, coherent economic program for a freer, more fair economy.

Between broad phrases like “opportunity economy” and some policy talking points, she hasn’t found her footing on the economy yet. She sounded almost populist in North Carolina in August, mixing talk about the “dignity” of homeownership with denunciation of high prescription drug prices and calls for canceling medical debt. A few weeks later, in New Hampshire, she sounded more like the former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, promising to keep taxes on investment income significantly lower than President Biden recently proposed.

Ms. Harris needs a clearer economic message, one that can build a coalition big enough to win in November and break us out of our political stalemate. There is a way for her to do that, and she is already inching toward it.

Democrats have worked to make freedom the theme of this campaign. Ms. Harris used the word “freedom” or “freedoms” 12 times in her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, calling for reproductive freedom, freedom from gun violence, freedom to love and marry and freedom from pollution. When she rattled off a list of “what we stand for,” freedom came first.

The power of this theme lies in its concreteness. Reproductive freedom, in Ms. Harris’s telling, is about saving a woman from miscarrying in a parking lot because she can’t get an abortion. For her running mate, Tim Walz, gun control means protecting your child from being shot in a school hall. Freedom is in the safety that keeps us whole so we can live our lives.

Voters fear violence, abortion bans and losing the right to vote. They feel the same about the economy. Almost 70 percent of residents of five swing states told pollsters in May that our political and economic system needs major changes or should be torn down entirely, and about the same percentage said the economy is rigged to benefit the rich and powerful.

These numbers are rooted in a grim reality: People feel powerless, ripped off by monopolies in everything from phone service to concert tickets. They can’t get ahead in an economy where real wages have fallen behind the investments that wealthier people hold, which have skyrocketed in value. They see great fortunes made from addictive drugs and addictive platforms, and the pirates of high finance bailed out when bankruptcy looms. We are right to believe we deserve better.

When almost 70 percent of the country feels betrayed by the economy, the party that speaks to this frustration has a built-in advantage. Compared to Mr. Trump’s Republicans, the Democrats remain the party of protecting the system and making it work — the small-c conservative party of the liberal but comfortable coasts and other economic hubs. Many corporate leaders and Wall Street titans have rallied to Ms. Harris, partly because some genuinely fear Mr. Trump’s authoritarian instincts and anti-constitutional tactics, but also because they see her as the candidate of stability, the leader of a party that will not rock the boat. (At the debate, she invoked Goldman Sachs in saying that top economists said that Mr. Trump’s policies would “make the economy worse.”)

The Biden administration reversed decades of flawed economic policy by attacking corporate concentration, investing in domestic industries and infrastructure and keeping and refining Trump-era tariffs on Chinese goods in strategic areas. But partly because of Mr. Biden’s limitations as a communicator, his administration never had a cohesive narrative about what it was doing. Inflation, which everyone sees every day, filled the vacuum and became the economic story.

Ms. Harris can tell a much stronger story about freedom and the economy. It’s there just waiting for her — and she has to mean it. Anyone who works for Walmart or Amazon knows that when there’s only one game in town, you don’t push back against hours that keep you from your family. Democrats are trying to stop bosses from turning themselves into feudal lords — that’s what their antitrust initiatives are all about, and why Ms. Harris supports making union membership more accessible.

Democrats rarely stress these themes on the campaign trail, but when they do, it works. Senator Sherrod Brown argues that supporting “the dignity of work” means promoting union membership, pushing back on offshoring and regulating Wall Street. He has proposed legislation to ban mandatory arbitration, which locks workers and consumers into private courts funded by the same companies they want to challenge, and to prevent housing developers from colluding to drive up prices. An unapologetic class warrior who wants to re-engineer the economy to support workers and families, Mr. Brown is running 10 to 14 points ahead of Ms. Harris in Ohio.

If Democrats presented their economic policies not as individual priorities but as part of a broader push for economic freedom, they’d be telling Americans: You deserve the freedom to live a good life. No one gets to take advantage of you to get rich. If you are growing up in West Virginia or rural North Carolina, you should be able to find a good job where you are and not have to leave seeking work. When you have kids, a big tax credit will help you to decide for yourself whether to work or stay at home. Reproductive freedom includes the chance to raise a family without choking economic stress.

If Democrats don’t offer a vision to respond to economic discontent, Republicans will be happy to keep owning the issue that matters most to voters. Although Democrats see Mr. Trump as a chaotic bad boss in chief, many supporters see him as the real defender of economic security, decent jobs and a safe and orderly world. His call for tariffs on all imported goods and his promise to beat up on companies until they lower prices may be unrealistic, but they are concrete promises to shake up the system on behalf of ordinary people. That’s the kind of dramatic change so many people seem to want. As long as voters feel threatened and aggrieved in their everyday lives, the politics that gives voice to that feeling will have the advantage, even if it is reckless or ineffective.

Ms. Harris shouldn’t adopt a politics of anger and grievance to answer Mr. Trump’s. A sunny calm and emphasis on unity have buoyed her and Mr. Walz. But she must emphasize that economic freedom, like other rights, protects what we value most against those who would take it away. She must show that her party will fight for workers and families, even at the cost of angering donors and making enemies in boardrooms. Democrats are the party of the system this year, and if they don’t show that the system can change radically, the advantage will pass to those who promise to break it.

Jedediah Britton-Purdy is a professor at Duke Law School and the author, most recently, of “Two Cheers for Politics: Why Democracy Is Flawed, Frightening — and Our Best Hope.”

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