Vice President Kamala Harris’s sudden ascent to the top of the Democratic ticket has generated a host of questions about her economic agenda, including how much she will stick to the details of President Biden’s positions, tweak them, or chart entirely new ones.
When she begins to roll out her policy vision this week, Ms. Harris is likely to answer only some of those questions.
During an economy-focused speech on Friday in Raleigh, N.C., Ms. Harris will outline a sort of reboot of the administration’s economic agenda, according to four people familiar with Ms. Harris’s plans.
She will lay out an approach relatively light on details, they said. It will shift emphasis from Mr. Biden’s focus on job creation and made-in-America manufacturing, and toward efforts to rein in the cost of living. But it will rarely break from Mr. Biden on substance.
That strategy reflects the advice economic aides have given Ms. Harris: to be clear and bold in talking about the economy, but not overly specific.
Her ability to do that has been effectively enabled by the unusual circumstances of Mr. Biden’s abrupt departure from the presidential race, which allowed Ms. Harris to secure the Democratic nomination without enduring a long primary campaign.
Ben Harris, a former Treasury official who formulated economic policy for Mr. Biden’s 2020 campaign, said the compressed timeline meant Ms. Harris wouldn’t be able to develop a full policy agenda as candidates did in 2020.
“It’s probably unrealistic and ill-advised to run that same playbook,” he said. “My guess is that the vice president is going to look at this massive collection of Biden administration policies and emphasize the ones that are most important to her.”
The Harris campaign declined to comment on what she would propose this week.
But Ms. Harris’s team, and many of the liberal policy groups that support her, have championed the idea that her best bet is to hammer poll-tested, overarching economic themes that reflect core values and reinforce her political biography — and mostly leave the white papers until after the election.
The resulting plan, devised by Ms. Harris with a group of advisers that includes prominent alumni of Mr. Biden’s administration, is likely to go further than Mr. Biden has in office to attack large corporations for using their market power to raise prices. That argument polls well with swing voters and is a partly an attempt to divert blame for the high inflation Americans experienced early in Mr. Biden’s term.
Aides say it also fits with Ms. Harris’s efforts to emphasize her career as a prosecutor who supports business but has cracked down on corporate lawbreakers.
In her speech, according to those familiar with her plans, Ms. Harris will call for expanding the child tax credit, along with higher taxes on corporations and high earners, in line with Mr. Biden’s budget proposals in office. She will also push for more affordable housing, among other measures.
In her campaign, Ms. Harris has already called for raising the minimum wage and providing paid leave for workers. She has defended the independence of the Federal Reserve.
While those goals align with established Democratic positions, Ms. Harris is not expected anytime soon to say how high the minimum wage should be raised, for example, or offer a detailed plan addressing the raft of individual tax cuts that are set to expire next year.
The strategic vagueness is an important, if subtle, shift from Mr. Biden, who as president has released reams of detailed policy plans. Some of Ms. Harris’s advisers believe that appearing as a relative blank slate on key issues — like trade and taxes — could help attract support from business groups put off by some of Mr. Biden’s policies.
Such an approach could also provide fewer targets for attack on policy particulars, the reasoning goes.
It’s a fine line for someone serving as Mr. Biden’s No. 2. Many of the formal and informal economic advisers to Ms. Harris’s campaign, including Mike Pyle, Gene Sperling, Bharat Ramamurti and Brian Deese, previously held senior posts in the Biden administration. Mr. Deese was Mr. Biden’s first director of the National Economic Council and helped develop much of his vast legislative agenda. Mr. Pyle was chief economist to Ms. Harris as vice president and later a top economic aide on Mr. Biden’s National Security Council.
Ms. Harris has disavowed some of her positions from her short-lived bid for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. Aides say she no longer supports a fracking ban, Medicare for All and other measures she proposed in that campaign that were meant to win progressive votes.
Campaign officials have pointed reporters instead to Mr. Biden’s most recent budget as a blueprint of sorts for Ms. Harris’s eventual positions. Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, said on Monday that Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris were “on the same page” on policy.
“I don’t think we should overstate the mystery here — she’s been part of these policy proposals for the last four years,” said Michael Linden, a former staff member in the White House budget office under Mr. Biden.
Former President Donald J. Trump and other Republicans have repeatedly tied Ms. Harris to Mr. Biden’s agenda, which they attack as a failure. In surveys, Americans give consistently poor reviews to Mr. Biden’s handling of the economy, and Mr. Trump regularly outpaced Mr. Biden in polls asking voters whom they trusted more to handle the economy.
Without Mr. Biden at the top of the ticket, though, Ms. Harris may have more appeal, even if she makes few substantive changes to the policies he was running on.
Many veterans of Democratic policymaking say Ms. Harris should use her speech on Friday, and the Democratic National Convention next week, to turn economic issues to her advantage and embrace policies meant to attract struggling middle-class voters.
“When she leaves the convention on Friday morning, voters should have greater confidence in her ability to manage the economy,” said Jim Kessler, executive vice president for policy at the centrist Democratic group Third Way. He said he hoped Ms. Harris would lean into messages on energy independence, deficit reduction and help for rural America, among others.
Ms. Harris has selectively detailed some policy positions. Her campaign has said she supports Mr. Biden’s pledge not to raise taxes on any household making less than $400,000 a year, and she also recently endorsed a plan first floated by Mr. Trump to stop collecting taxes on tips. While both major party candidates are behind this idea, tax experts have panned it, arguing that it would unfairly give one type of earnings an advantage over others.
Mr. Trump has skimped on policy specifics, as he did in previous campaigns. He has promised a wide range of tax cuts as the core of his economic agenda, but has not put forth a detailed tax proposal. Some of his plans build on his policies in office, like further reducing a corporate tax rate he cut in 2017, and others are new, like exempting Social Security benefits from taxation.
Much of what Ms. Harris is expected to outline in broad strokes this week — which includes expanding the child tax credit — failed in Congress when Democrats last controlled it. Moderate Democrats balked at the cost of many of those programs, while other slices of Mr. Biden’s agenda, like subsidies for clean-energy technology, became law.
Many in the party are eager to revisit what they see as unfinished business from Mr. Biden’s term. That eagerness, along with the truncated nature of Ms. Harris’s campaign, appears to have relieved the pressure that progressive groups put on Democratic candidates in recent presidential primaries — which often featured long-running debates on the details of how best to tax the rich or provide health care for all Americans.
Felicia Wong, president of Roosevelt Forward, a progressive advocacy group, said she didn’t necessarily expect detailed proposals from Ms. Harris — or see that lack of detail as a problem.
And even if Ms. Harris was elected, Ms. Wong said, policy details were going to depend heavily on the makeup of Congress — Ms. Harris’s approach to child care, for example, might look quite different if Democrats controlled both houses.
“If you’re going to have a policy design conversation — which I think we should — I don’t know that that has to happen at the campaign level,” Ms. Wong said. “So I’m not that worried about it.”
Ben Casselman contributed reporting from New York.