Vice President Kamala Harris threw her support behind a federal ban on price-gouging in the food and grocery industries last week. It was the first official economic policy proposal of her presidential campaign, and it was pitched as a direct response to the high price of putting food on the table in America today.
“To combat high grocery costs, VP Harris to call for first-ever federal ban on corporate price-gouging,” the Harris campaign proclaimed in the subject line of a news release last week, ahead of a speech laying out the first planks of her economic agenda.
It is still impossible to say, from publicly available details, what exactly the ban would do. Republicans have denounced the proposal as “communist,” warning that it would lead to the federal government setting prices in the marketplace. Former President Donald J. Trump has mocked the plan on social media as “SOVIET Style Price Controls.”
Progressives have cheered the announcement as a crucial check on corporate greed, saying it could immediately benefit shoppers who have been stunned by a 20 percent rise in food costs since President Biden took office.
But people familiar with Ms. Harris’s thinking on the ban now say it might not resemble either of those characterizations. The ban, they also suggest, might actually not do anything to bring down grocery prices right now. Those who spoke about the strategy behind the emerging policy did so on the condition of anonymity.
Ms. Harris’s campaign has created the space for multiple interpretations, by declining to specify how that ban would work, when it would apply or what behaviors it would prohibit.
In the process, the vice president and her team are discovering the double-edged reality of releasing a policy proposal that is thin on detail: Anyone is free to imagine what those details might be.
Ms. Harris’s strategic vagueness on certain policy details has allowed her to emphasize broad themes that resonate with voters. Polling this summer by the Democratic firm Blueprint, for example, found four out of five voters supported prosecuting companies for price-gouging and price-fixing, as a means to combat inflation. Ms. Harris emphasized her record as a former prosecutor in rolling out the plan.
Her proposal was more specific than the extremely detail-light economic plans that Mr. Trump has floated, such as tariffs on all imports. But it left many blanks unfilled — an omission that some veterans of campaign policymaking say could eventually work to Ms. Harris’s advantage.
“Campaigns are typically about big ideas and grand visions, not the nitty-gritty details of legislation,” said Ben Harris, a vice president at the Brookings Institution in Washington, who coordinated economic policy for Mr. Biden’s 2020 campaign. “Kamala Harris has only been the candidate for a matter of weeks, so it’s fair that she might lead with her core policy values and then fill in the details later — after her advisers have seen the public reaction and consulted with experts.”
The initial public reaction has included sharp criticism, from Republicans and other commentators. “Kamala Harris is a Trojan horse for nation-destroying spending, communist price controls and open borders,” the Trump campaign said in a release this week.
“It’s hard to exaggerate how bad this policy is,” the Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell wrote last week, referring to the price-gouging ban. “It is, in all but name, a sweeping set of government-enforced price controls across every industry, not only food.”
But it has also put big retailers on the defensive in a way that delights progressive groups.
Target’s chief executive, Brian Cornell, told CNBC on Wednesday that groceries are too competitive to allow for price gouging. “We’re in a penny business,” he said.
People familiar with Ms. Harris’s plans say the ban she envisions is nothing like price controls. Her plan, they say, would be modeled on dozens of existing state laws prohibiting price gouging, the sort of laws that prevent stores from quadrupling the price of snow shovels right after a blizzard hits.
Ms. Harris’s plan would be narrowly tailored to the food and grocery industries, the people say. It would not rely on numerical targets — like automatically triggering action if prices rise by a certain amount. Crucially, it would likely be reserved for emergency situations, like the immediate aftermath of a natural disaster or the thick of a pandemic.
The United States is not experiencing any such crisis right now. That almost certainly means the ban Ms. Harris is envisioning would likely not affect the prices Americans are currently paying in the grocery aisle.
Allies of Ms. Harris have sought to tamp down criticisms of her plan in recent days. “She’s not for price-fixing; that’s a distortion — that’s a Republican talking point,” Gina Raimondo, the commerce secretary, told CNBC this week after appearing at the Democratic National Convention in her personal capacity.
Pressed about the price-gouging ban specifically, Ms. Raimondo cited state bans, including in her native Rhode Island, as a model. “She’s not saying broad price controls,” Ms. Raimondo said. “She’s saying, go after companies in a narrow way, if there’s evidence.”
There’s a tension in the strategy: It seems almost impossible for Ms. Harris to claim her proposed ban would help bring down the grocery prices Americans remain upset about, while allies play down its effects and people familiar with the plan say it might not apply to prices today at all.
A campaign official tried to thread that needle this week by claiming Ms. Harris never said the ban itself would immediately bring down grocery prices. The official said immediate progress on prices would instead come from related policies Ms. Harris also announced last Friday, including building on the Biden administration’s efforts to support small businesses in the grocery, meat and farming industries to foster competition and drive down prices.
Ms. Harris only briefly mentioned the ban in her Friday speech, and she did not directly link it to bringing down current grocery bills. But she made clear she planned to take action to punish companies that are keeping food prices artificially high.
“Many of the big food companies are seeing their highest profits in two decades,” Ms. Harris said. “And while many grocery chains pass along these savings, others still aren’t. Look, I know most businesses are creating jobs, contributing to our economy and playing by the rules, but some are not, and that’s just not right. And we need to take action when that is the case.”
She did not specify what that action might be.