Harris Energizes Low-Income Voters Dispirited by Biden Economy

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(Bloomberg) — Kamala Harris’s sudden ascent to the top of the Democratic ticket is showing signs of reinvigorating the party’s flagging support among low-income Americans, a linchpin constituency that helped propel Joe Biden to the White House four years ago.

Those voters lost their enthusiasm as the cost of living surged. Harris will have just over three months to overcome indifference among many economically struggling Americans who don’t believe Biden delivered change that bettered their lives. An early poll of battleground states suggests Harris may be turning that around.

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The 59-year-old vice president offers them a fresh, energetic woman of color who can deliver a sharper economic message without being drowned out by the concerns about age and mental acuity that dogged Biden, political strategists and pollsters said. 

She’s already improved on Biden’s performance among voters in households making less than $50,000 a year, even if she isn’t yet matching the lopsided support Democrats won in 2020. 

The vice president beat Republican Donald Trump by 4 percentage points among low-income voters in a Bloomberg News/Morning Consult swing-state poll taken July 24 to 28. Biden was losing the group to Trump by 2 points in the same poll three weeks earlier.

“We’ve had a historic, massive shakeup, and Kamala Harris has the opportunity to completely reintroduce herself to the American people,” said Sarah Longwell, a Republican political consultant who publishes the anti-Trump website The Bulwark. “If she comes out hard with an economic message that is filled with empathy and looking forward and figuring out how to help everybody, it’s a huge opportunity to turn the page.”

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The economic choice is stark. Trump has campaigned on maintaining and expanding his first-term tax cuts tilted toward corporations and the wealthy along with tariff increases and an immigration crackdown that might raise wages for low-income workers but also would stoke inflation.

Harris kicked off her campaign promising to fight for more direct help to middle-class and poor families through initiatives such as greater support for child care, paid family leave and housing assistance.

“We choose a future where no child lives in poverty,” Harris declared in her debut campaign ad, playing up a goal for governing she set in her opening campaign speech at her headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware. 

While California attorney general, Harris took on populist economic targets, suing big banks over mortgage foreclosure practices, for-profit colleges for saddling students with debt and health care companies for alleged price-gouging.

Harris has roused the interest of Jacob Degillio, a 42-year-old forklift operator in the swing state of Michigan who gets by with help from food assistance and a month ago said he wasn’t sure he would vote this year. He now plans to turn out for Harris, who he sees as a potential role model for his one-year-old daughter, Angel. 

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“Biden did not excite me. We kind of feel new hope,” said Degillio, who lives in the blue-collar Detroit suburb of Romulus. “Now that I have a daughter, I would love to show her that she could be president.”

Sentiment among lower-income Americans shifted dramatically during Biden’s term. In 2020, he won voters earning less than $50,000 a year by 11 percentage points, according to exit polls. 

The main reason is inflation, which reached a 40-year high of 9.1% in June 2022 and hits people with low incomes harder because they spend a greater share of income on necessities such as food that have had especially large price increases, said veteran Democratic strategist Doug Sosnik. Annual inflation dropped to 3% by this June.

Harris wasn’t a prominent economic spokesperson for the Biden administration and was mostly deployed to pitch targeted initiatives such as student loan relief and promoting minority entrepreneurship. Unlike Biden, voters don’t associate her closely with the inflation surge, Longwell said, though Republicans now are working vigorously to tag her with responsibility.

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The vice president can’t be expected to reverse Trump’s overall advantage on the economy with US voters in the time left before the election, but she can narrow the gap and motivate more people to cast ballots who weren’t inclined to turn out to vote with Biden as the nominee, said Sosnik, who was one of President Bill Clinton’s senior advisers.

In early July, swing-state voters said they trusted Trump over Biden on the economy 51% to 37%, but that narrowed to a 50% to 42% advantage over Harris at the end of the month, according to the Bloomberg poll. 

Among those in households earning less than $50,000 a year, Trump’s credibility on the economy slipped more, with the former president’s lead on the issue down to 47% to 44% over Harris.

Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said the “Harris-Biden economic agenda has been devastating for low-income andmiddle-class families, robbing them of thousands of dollars every year due to record-high inflation” while promising that Trump would “bring down inflation” and “cut taxes.”

The Biden administration came into office with grand ambitions to lift millions of Americans out of poverty and achieved startling early success.

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The $1.9 trillion Covid relief package Biden and congressional Democrats passed shortly after he took office included a slew of initiatives aimed at helping low- and middle-income Americans, most significantly an expanded child tax credit. The expansion temporarily raised the tax break’s value to as much as $3,600 per child and made more low-income households eligible, even paying it out monthly rather than requiring families to wait for a tax refund. 

The expanded credit lifted 2.1 million children out of poverty in 2021, according to the Census Bureau. The child poverty rate, according to a supplemental measure that takes into account government support aimed at low-income families, fell to 5.2% that year, the lowest level ever in unofficial records going back to 1967, according to Columbia University.

It didn’t last. Amid concern about government spending as inflation surged, Biden couldn’t get Republicans or moderates in the Senate such as now-independent Joe Manchin of West Virginia to go along with continuing the enlarged tax credit or other initiatives such as more extensive child care subsidies. Child poverty shot back up in 2022, more than doubling from the previous year, to 12.4%.

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Gene Sperling, a senior adviser to Biden who has been on the economic team of every Democratic president going back to 1993, called the expanded tax credit’s lapse “the most disappointing thing in my policy life.”

Within the administration, Harris was an early and strong supporter of including the tax credit in the initial pandemic relief package and later of maintaining the benefit, Bharat Ramamurti, the former deputy director of Biden’s National Economic Council said.

Still, the strong economic rebound under Biden boosted earnings of lower-paid workers significantly more than inflation and narrowed the wage gap with higher earners. 

Adjusted for inflation, US workers with low wages — at the 10th percentile — saw their hourly pay increase by 12.1% between 2019 and 2023, according to an analysis by economist Elise Gould at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. That was more than double the pace of middle-income workers. High earners at the 90th percentile saw real pay gains of just 0.9% over the period, the analysis found.

Signature Biden economic initiatives such as his infrastructure law and incentives for chip and clean-energy manufacturing likely ultimately help the working poor but those voters don’t notice that as much as the direct social welfare programs Biden sought yet couldn’t deliver, said Bobby Dorigo Jones, director of a United Way program to help low-income workers in Michigan.

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“They have to show how they are making housing, transportation, childcare — these things that are both expensive and hard to find — more affordable, more accessible,” Jones said.

Harris has stressed her commitment to just those aims. But if she is to mobilize poorer Americans, she will have to overcome the ingrained skepticism of people like DeShone Hardy, a 29-year-old sandwich shop manager and married mother of two in the working-class Detroit suburb of Roseville.

“I haven’t really listened to Kamala,” Hardy said. “She’s going  to benefit herself and others, but not those that really need benefits, you know?”

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