Some leading business executives say they don’t know quite what to think of Vice President Kamala Harris. In recent months, even before becoming the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, she has been trying to change that.
She has been meeting with groups of corporate executives roughly every two months at her residence in Washington, according to two executives who have met with her. When a state dinner was held for President William Ruto of Kenya in May, Ms. Harris spoke with businesspeople about economic topics including access to labor and worker training, one attendee said.
And a month earlier, she attended an event at the Colette Club on Fifth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan arranged by Charles Phillips, a business executive and a longtime backer. Before about 30 Black business leaders — a group with which she has tried to build particularly strong relationships — Ms. Harris spoke for roughly 40 minutes, without notes or a teleprompter, on economic topics including job creation, inflation and global trade, and then took questions.
“People showed up and really liked what she had to say,” Mr. Phillips said. “The feedback was great.”
Pursuing the presidential nomination in 2020, Ms. Harris would often declare to business audiences, “I’m a capitalist” — a stark contrast in tone from the Democratic Party’s progressive wing. But she remains a bit of an enigma in the business world.
She has been making regular fund-raising trips to New York and other financial havens for the better part of the decade — starting before her 2016 Senate campaign in California — but she has been a rarer presence since then, according to three prominent financiers who have met with her.
While she had a two-hour lunch in March with Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, her efforts in the business world have mostly overlooked the financial leaders who have populated administrations of both parties for decades, and who are traditionally among the heaviest donors to presidential campaigns.
At the same time, some see her circle in the business world as wider than President Biden’s. “Biden had relationships with the Democratic political donors,” said Kathryn Wylde, the president of the Partnership for New York City, an influential business group. “She has relationships with a much broader base.”
Last week, Ms. Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, who spent many years as a corporate lawyer, held a reception for Black business leaders to discuss economic investment in Black communities under the Biden administration, according to a White House official. Guests at the event — planned before the intensifying swirl of doubt over Mr. Biden’s ability to continue as the Democratic presidential candidate — included Mr. Phillips; John W. Rogers Jr., the founder of the asset manager Ariel Investments; Scott Mills, the chief executive of the BET Media Group; and Kneeland Youngblood, the founding partner of Pharos Capital Group, a private equity firm.
The vice president’s office declined to comment on the specifics of her recent conversations with executives.
In interviews, business leaders largely said they expected Ms. Harris’s economic policies to differ little from President Biden’s. Some of her backers in the business world said she was approachable and open to listening to their points of view — something they said was not always the case with Mr. Biden.
Moreover, there are no indications that reservations about Ms. Harris have driven business leaders who had planned to support Mr. Biden toward former President Donald J. Trump, whom many view as uniquely dangerous and disruptive.
“I’ve gotten a ton of email and had a lot of conversations about what, when and how to support her in the past 24 hours,” Frank Baker, a founder of the private equity firm Siris Capital who hosted fund-raising events at his Hamptons home for Ms. Harris and Mr. Biden in 2020, said in an interview on Monday. “It’s a mad rush.”
Ms. Harris will have to assuage uncertainty in some quarters, however, about her position on the Israel-Hamas war, according to donors. Wall Street donors of both parties are generally sympathetic to Israel, and Ms. Harris, who has been more critical of the war in Gaza than Mr. Biden, will be closely watched to see how her policies compare with the president’s.
Businesses with exposure to the Chinese economy will also look for signals about her approach to trade barriers and foreign investment. According to a financier who spoke with her in recent days, Ms. Harris looks at China as a country she must be tough with but also recognizes that it is part of the global economy. Mr. Trump and his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, have been withering toward China, with the former president favoring tariffs to clamp down on global trade.
One of Ms. Harris’s biggest challenges will be to overcome the business world’s dissatisfaction with some of the Biden administration’s policies, as well as his references to “corporate greed,” which many have perceived as off-putting.
“This is someone who you really don’t know who is inheriting the policies of someone you did know and perhaps were uncomfortable with,” said Charles Elson, the founding director of the John L. Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware. “It makes a very tough sell.”
Corporate executives have chafed at Mr. Biden’s regulatory agenda and his proposals to raise corporate tax rates and eliminate certain industry-specific tax breaks. Business leaders have also bristled at the actions of the Federal Trade Commission’s chair, Lina Khan, who has tried to crack down on corporate mergers.
As vice president, Ms. Harris has voiced support for regulating artificial intelligence. But she has expressed skepticism of Ms. Khan’s expansive view of antitrust powers, according to a donor who has spoken privately with the vice president.
Among the biggest differences between her financial policies and Mr. Biden’s in their 2020 presidential campaigns was that Ms. Harris proposed raising the corporate tax rate to 35 percent from 21 percent, while Mr. Biden’s proposed to raise it to 28 percent. The rate remains 21 percent, and Democrats will almost certainly seek to increase it next year when pieces of the Trump administration’s tax legislation expire.
Mark Chorazak, a partner at the law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom and a Biden donor, said he did not view Ms. Harris as “a continuation of every Biden policy.” But, he added, “I don’t see significant differences between what President Biden has fought for and what Vice President Harris will fight for.”