President Biden has signed more major economic legislation than any other president has this century. He presided over record job growth and a recovery from pandemic recession that was the envy of the wealthy world. He crafted an ambitious, multinational industrial policy meant to help America and its allies rebuild strategic manufacturing capacity to counter China.
But voters gave Mr. Biden little credit, focusing instead on the inflation surge that plagued much of Mr. Biden’s term.
That shortcoming was jeopardizing Mr. Biden’s re-election chances well before he fumbled through a televised debate last month and re-inflamed questions about his age. Polls showed that the economy and prices topped voters’ issue concerns, and that they roundly preferred former President Donald J. Trump to Mr. Biden on the issue.
As Mr. Biden steps away from the 2024 campaign and Vice President Kamala Harris tries to rally support for the presidential nomination, economic questions loom large over her candidacy.
Will Ms. Harris, 59 and unburdened by the age questions that dogged Mr. Biden, fare any better at selling the Biden-Harris economic record — including its investments in low-emission energy, advanced manufacturing and other industries? Can she maintain Mr. Biden’s connection to certain blue-collar voters in pivotal states like Michigan and Pennsylvania, while re-engaging economically disaffected young voters who had grown disillusioned with the president?
And can she overcome voter anger over inflation, which peaked at 9 percent in 2022 but has since fallen closer to the Federal Reserve’s target rate of 2 percent?
The answers could heavily sway her chances of defeating Mr. Trump this fall.
Some analysts were quick to predict that Ms. Harris would struggle to break free of voters’ unflattering economic views of the administration. “She’d pick up all of Biden’s economic negatives,” Mike Murphy, a Republican strategist who opposes Mr. Trump, wrote on the social media platform X on Sunday.
Polls have made those vulnerabilities repeatedly clear, including one this month by The Economist/YouGov showing that voters disapprove of Mr. Biden’s handling of jobs and the economy, 51 percent to 39 percent. They disapproved of his handling of inflation by an even wider margin.
Republicans have sought to tie Ms. Harris to Mr. Biden’s record. “Every single failure we’ve seen from Joe Biden — the Afghanistan withdrawal, a border crisis, crushing inflation and America weakened abroad — has been delivered hand-in-hand with Kamala Harris,” Michael Whatley, chairman of the Republican National Committee, and his co-chair, Lara Trump, Mr. Trump’s daughter-in-law, said in a statement on Sunday.
But many Democrats, including veterans of Mr. Biden’s administration and former aides to liberal lawmakers, say that Ms. Harris has the opportunity to distance herself from Mr. Biden’s biggest economic liabilities and to refocus voters on the contrast between her economic policy vision and Mr. Trump’s.
That optimism in part reflects the belief that Mr. Biden’s poor economic approval ratings were wrapped up in his low personal approval from voters. Many of Mr. Biden’s policies poll significantly better with voters than his economic approval ratings would indicate. Even as the president struggled to improve such ratings, he continued to pound familiar themes — and to repeat familiar lines and stories, like “a job is more than a paycheck” — in public appearances.
Some Democrats are hopeful that a fresh voice, even one closely tied to Mr. Biden, will have a new opportunity to sell voters on the benefits of what the president and his aides have come to call “Bidenomics.”
“This is really a time where she can lay out her vision for the country,” Elizabeth Pancotti, the director of special initiatives at the progressive group Roosevelt Forward in Washington, said of Ms. Harris. “Some of it works in her favor, mechanically. She wasn’t the head of the inflation Biden is getting the flak for. She wasn’t the face of those things. She gets to choose what she’s the face of.”
“We don’t say ‘Harris-flation,’” Ms. Pancotti added, referring to the derisive moniker Republicans attached to price growth on the president’s watch. “It’s ‘Bidenflation.’”
Ms. Harris previewed her brand of economic messaging in a brief address to campaign staff in Delaware on Monday, leaning heavily into policies to support parents, caregivers and the middle class.
“We believe in a future where every person has the opportunity not just to get by but to get ahead,” she said. “That’s why we believe in a future where no child has to grow up in poverty, where every person can buy a home, start a family and build wealth, and where every person has access to paid family leave and affordable child care.”
Ms. Harris has been neither a leading architect of Mr. Biden’s economic agenda, nor a leading voice on inflation and prices. Other administration officials, like the Treasury secretary, Janet L. Yellen, and the Commerce secretary, Gina Raimondo, have publicized and led the implementation of Mr. Biden’s signature economic legislation.
That includes a bipartisan infrastructure law Mr. Biden signed in 2021, along with laws that leverage government spending and tax credits to encourage domestic manufacturing of semiconductors and clean-energy technologies meant to fight climate change.
But Ms. Harris has frequently promoted other administration economic initiatives, like student-loan forgiveness and medical-debt relief. She was an early supporter of including a temporary expanded tax credit for parents in the $1.9 trillion economic stimulus bill Mr. Biden signed soon after taking office in 2021, a move that helped cut child poverty in half for a year.
Ms. Harris championed efforts to extend that credit after it expired, said Bharat Ramamurti, a former deputy director of Mr. Biden’s National Economic Council.
“The nuts and bolts, pocketbook issues are the ones she really cares about,” Mr. Ramamurti said.
Polls suggest that Ms. Harris has both a challenge and an opportunity in communicating her administration’s policy record to voters. Surveys by the polling group Blueprint, which supports Democrats, suggest that many of the Biden administration’s policies enjoy widespread support from voters nationally.
Nearly nine in 10 voters support allowing Medicare to negotiate the cost of prescription drugs, and capping the price of insulin for seniors. Versions of both those policies were included in the Inflation Reduction Act, which Mr. Biden signed in 2022. About eight in 10 voters support bipartisan infrastructure and semiconductor manufacturing laws, like the ones Mr. Biden signed in 2022.
But the polling also shows that, in many cases, large swaths of the electorate were not aware that Mr. Biden had taken those actions. About a third of respondents had not heard of the infrastructure law, Blueprint reported. About half had not heard of the semiconductor law known as the CHIPS Act.
While that lack of recognition has frustrated Mr. Biden, Ms. Harris now has an opening: to reintroduce policies that are directly affecting communities around the country, including in red and swing states.