Shortly after the Biden administration took office in 2021, Vice President Kamala Harris started calling the chief executives of large banks, including JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America.
The federal government was making hundreds of billions of dollars available for banks to lend to small businesses to keep them afloat during the pandemic recession. Ms. Harris told the executives they needed to be lending more, faster, particularly to minority-owned businesses that data suggested were struggling to gain access to the money.
The calls represented one of the earliest and most visible forays Ms. Harris made in devising and carrying out the Biden administration’s economic agenda, and illustrated the sort of economic policy niche that she has filled as vice president.
Current and former administration officials, progressive leaders outside the White House and allies of Ms. Harris roundly agree that the vice president, who is now the leading candidate to secure the Democratic presidential nomination, did not play a major role in the creation of the sweeping economic legislation that has defined President Biden’s time in office.
Ms. Harris was rarely a loud voice in major economic debates, like the ones over how to counter soaring inflation in 2021 and 2022. She did sometimes attend economic briefings, but was not always a big contributor in them. One attendee recalled her coming to an economic briefing, but simply listening to the presentation while Mr. Biden asked questions.
Other officials say Ms. Harris largely focuses her questions for economists on how certain policies affect workers and families at a personal level — a trait she shares with the president.
Mr. Biden has asked Ms. Harris to take on other issues central to his agenda, like protecting reproductive rights as well as tackling the root causes of a surge of migrants from Central America at the border. But unlike the role that Mr. Biden carved out for himself during his vice presidency, Ms. Harris has not been a key player in the administration’s expansive economic portfolio.
Instead, the officials say, Ms. Harris has gravitated toward a few select economic issues, which have evolved over the last several years. She was an early champion of an expanded tax credit for parents, along with a suite of proposals for child care, paid leave and other so-called care economy policies that did not make it into the economic bills Mr. Biden signed into law because they could not attract enough Democratic support in the Senate.
Ms. Harris’s areas of focus also included access to capital for small businesses and place-based policies to help revitalize rural and urban communities that have fared poorly in recent decades, even in times when the economy grew.
She has led the creation of a public-private group called the Economic Opportunity Coalition, which seeks to drive tens of billions of dollars in investment capital to communities of color across the nation. Businesses participating in the effort include large financial firms like Capital One and Goldman Sachs, along with companies like Netflix and PayPal.
“She feels very strongly about entrepreneurship, small-business access to capital and particularly that businesses that may not have straightforward access to capital have methods to do that,” said Bharat Ramamurti, a former deputy director of Mr. Biden’s National Economic Council who worked with Ms. Harris on those issues.
People who have worked with Ms. Harris in the administration describe her as having been largely shoulder to shoulder with Mr. Biden on economic policy questions, with few notable dissents from his choices. Her record from the Senate and her short-lived presidential campaign in the 2020 cycle suggest a few areas where she is more liberal than Mr. Biden or otherwise differs from him on economic issues.
Ms. Harris earned an economics degree from Howard University, and her father is an emeritus economics professor at Stanford University. She has not clearly defined an economic policy philosophy as vice president — but her economic policy views will be critical in an election where economic issues, including inflation, rank as the top concern for voters.
Felicia Wong, the president of the Roosevelt Institute, a progressive think tank, said Ms. Harris was focused on economic opportunity and was “close to labor.”
Some of Ms. Harris’s core allies in the labor movement are concentrated among service workers, rather than the blue-collar unions that have formed the basis of Mr. Biden’s support.
The vice president spoke at a convention held by the Service Employees International Union in May, highlighting the price cap on insulin and a higher minimum wage for federal contractors as Biden administration victories. Ms. Harris said the administration wanted to make sure that medical debt “cannot impact a person’s ability to get a car loan, an apartment lease or a home loan,” and explained its efforts to cancel student loan debt.
April Verrett, the union’s president, said Ms. Harris’s record as a champion for labor extended back to her time in California as attorney general. She has “shown up as a true ally and champion,” Ms. Verrett said.
The S.E.I.U. endorsed Ms. Harris shortly after Mr. Biden dropped out of the race on Sunday, and it is among a group of labor unions sponsoring an ad highlighting Ms. Harris’s record on paid family leave.
While Ms. Harris has less of a track record on more macroeconomic issues — she is rarely asked about topics like inflation or the overall state of the job market — in 2022 she pointed to corporate profit-taking among oil companies as a driver of price increases.
While many more progressive Democrats say corporate profits are a big reason for rapid inflation, more moderate economists argue that companies always want to raise prices and maximize profits. What has enabled companies to lift prices so rapidly since 2021 is a combination of strong consumer demand and limited supply.
The White House has begun to use the talking point, but at times reluctantly. Progressive groups pushed the Harris campaign this week to lean into the idea that corporate greed has pushed prices up.
“I do think she will be able to make a more nuanced argument about the drivers of inflation,” Ms. Wong said.
Where Ms. Harris would land on some pressing issues is still not totally clear — for instance trade, where her record suggests even more skepticism toward new free-trade deals than Mr. Biden has shown.
The Biden administration has been using tariffs to protect industries important to national security and other targeted priorities, and Ms. Harris herself worked on securing supply chains and on immigration-related issues as vice president.
She traveled to Central America to promote manufacturing businesses there that would provide employment and try to stem the flow of migrants to the United States. Ms. Harris also traveled to Asia several times. There, she discussed supply chain issues, like the global shortage of semiconductors that occurred after the pandemic, and took a more critical stance toward China.
In the Senate and on the campaign trail, Ms. Harris positioned herself as slightly more progressive than Mr. Biden on trade-related issues. She said in 2019 that she would not have voted for the North American Free Trade Agreement, for instance.
She was one of only 10 senators to oppose a renegotiated NAFTA, known as the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, under President Donald J. Trump. Ms. Harris concluded that the deal fell short because it did not contain any measures to address climate change.
In general, people close to the White House said they did not expect Ms. Harris to break dramatically with the administration’s approach to economic policy, though they thought she might shift the emphasis.
“I think she is personally much more passionate about the care side of the agenda,” said Ernie Tedeschi, who is now the director of economics at the Yale Budget Lab and who was until this year the chief economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers.
At least during her time in the Senate, Ms. Harris did not appear to subscribe to any particular economic philosophy, said Yasmin Nelson, who was Ms. Harris’s policy adviser there.
“I don’t think you’ll see her referencing some bookish theory,” said Ms. Nelson, who now works at Holland & Knight, a law and lobbying firm. “But at heart she’s a capitalist with liberal views.”
Andrew Duehren contributed reporting.