Harris Makes Middle-Income Voters Spoiled by Biden’s Economy

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(Bloomberg) — Kamala Harris’s sudden rise to the top of the Democratic ticket shows signs of reviving the party’s support among low-income Americans, the linchpin constituency that helped Joe Biden to the White House four years ago.

Those voters are losing steam as the cost of living rises. Harris has just over three months to overcome indifference among many economically struggling Americans who do not believe that Biden offers better change. Early polls of the warring states suggest Harris may be swinging.

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The 59-year-old vice president offers her a fresh, energetic woman who can deliver a sharper economic message without being bogged down by concerns about age and mental acuity that plague Biden, political strategists and pollsters say.

They have improved Biden’s performance among voters in households making less than $50,000 a year, although he has yet to match the lopsided support the Democrats won in 2020.

The vice president beat Republican Donald Trump by 4 percentage points among low-income voters in a Bloomberg News/Morning Consult swing-state poll taken from July 24 to 28. Biden lost to Trump by 2 points in the same poll three weeks earlier. .

“We’ve had a historic shakeup, and Kamala Harris has an opportunity to reintroduce herself to the American people,” said Sarah Longwell, a Republican political consultant who publishes the anti-Trump website The Bulwark. “If they come out with an economic message filled with empathy and hope and know how to help everyone, this is a great opportunity to turn the page.”

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Economic choices are tough. Trump has campaigned to maintain and expand first-term tax cuts that are skewed toward corporations and the wealthy along with tariff hikes and immigration measures that could boost wages for low-income workers but would also stoke inflation.

Harris began the campaign by pledging to fight for direct aid to middle-class and poor families through initiatives such as more support for child care, paid family leave and housing assistance.

“We choose a future where no child is poor,” Harris said in his debut campaign ad, aiming to set him up in his inaugural campaign speech at his headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware.

As California’s attorney general, Harris took aim at the populist economy, suing big banks over mortgage foreclosure practices, for-profit colleges for harassing student borrowers and health care companies for alleged price gouging.

Harris has roused the interest of Jacob Degillio, a 42-year-old forklift operator in the swing state of Michigan who gets help from food aid and last month said he was not sure he would vote this year. He now plans to turn to Harris, which he sees as a potential role model for his one-year-old daughter, Angel.

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“Biden doesn’t make me happy. We have new hope,” said Degillio, who lives in the Detroit suburb of Romulus. “Now that I have a daughter, I’m happy to show that she can be president.”

Sentiment among low-income Americans has changed dramatically during Biden’s term. In 2020, he won over voters making less than $50,000 a year by 11 percentage points, according to the poll.

The main reason is inflation, which reached a 40-year high of 9.1% in June 2022 and is making it harder for people with low incomes to spend more of their income on necessities such as food that are hit by price increases in particular, the veteran Democrat said. strategist Doug Sosnik. Annual inflation fell to 3% this June.

Harris was not a prominent economic spokesperson for the Biden administration and was largely tasked with crafting targeted initiatives such as student loan relief and promoting minority entrepreneurship. Unlike Biden, voters don’t associate him with a spike in inflation, Longwell said, though Republicans are now working hard to hold him accountable.

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The vice president cannot be expected to reverse Trump’s overall advantage in the economy with US voters in the remaining time before the election, but he can close the gap and motivate more people to vote who do not like to vote. with Biden as the nominee, said Sosnik, who is one of President Bill Clinton’s senior advisers.

In early July, swing state voters said they trusted Trump over Biden on the economy 51% to 37%, but narrowed his advantage to 50% to 42% over Harris by the end of the month, according to a Bloomberg poll.

Among those in households earning less than $50,000 a year, Trump’s credibility on the economy has declined, with the former president’s lead on the issue falling to 47% to 44% over Harris.

Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said that “the Harris-Biden economic agenda has been devastating for middle-class and low-income families, robbing them of thousands of dollars a year due to record high inflation” while promising that Trump would “reduce inflation”. and “tax cuts”.

The Biden administration came into office with big ambitions to lift millions of Americans out of poverty and achieved impressive early success.

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The $1.9 trillion Covid aid package Biden and congressional Democrats passed shortly after taking office included several initiatives aimed at helping low- and middle-income Americans, the most important of which was an expanded child tax credit. The expansion temporarily raised the tax bill to $3,600 per child and made it more affordable for low-income households to pay monthly instead of requiring families to wait for their tax returns.

The expanded credit lifted 2.1 million children out of poverty by 2021, according to the Census Bureau. The child poverty rate, under an additional measure that takes away government support for low-income families, fell to 5.2% that year, the lowest rate in unofficial records since 1967, according to Columbia University.

Not for long. Amid concerns about government spending due to rising inflation, Biden has been unable to get Republicans or moderates in the Senate such as Joe Manchin of West Virginia to continue increasing tax credits or other initiatives such as more child care subsidies. Child poverty will increase again in 2022, more than doubling from the previous year, to 12.4%.

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Gene Sperling, a senior adviser to Biden who has been on the economic team of every Democratic president going back to 1993, called the extended tax credit delay “the most disappointing thing in my policy.”

In the administration, Harris was an early and strong supporter of including tax credits in the early pandemic relief package and later maintaining the benefits, said Bharat Ramamurti, former deputy director of Biden’s National Economic Council.

Still, the strong economic rebound under Biden has increased the incomes of low-paid workers more than inflation and narrowed the wage gap with higher incomes.

Adjusted for inflation, low-wage US workers — in the 10th percentile — see a 12.1% increase in hourly wages between 2019 and 2023, according to an analysis by economist Elise Gould at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. That’s more than double the pace of middle-income workers. High earners in the 90th percentile saw real gains of just 0.9% over that period, the analysis found.

Biden’s signature economic initiatives such as infrastructure legislation and incentives for chip manufacturing and clean-energy may help the working poor, but those voters don’t understand that the direct social welfare programs that Biden is seeking have yet to deliver, Bobby said. Dorigo Jones, director of United Way’s program to help low-income workers in Michigan.

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“They need to show how to make housing, transportation, child care — those things are expensive and hard to find — more affordable, more accessible,” Jones said.

Harris has emphasized his commitment to just that goal. But if he’s going to mobilize poorer Americans, he’ll have to overcome the skepticism of people like DeShone Hardy, a 29-year-old sandwich shop manager and mother of two in the working-class Detroit suburb of Roseville.

“I haven’t listened to Kamala,” Hardy said. “He’ll benefit himself and others, but he’s not the one who needs the benefit, you know?”

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