Harris Energizes Low-Income Voters Dispirited by Biden Economy

Article Content

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

Those voters have lost enthusiasm as the cost of living has risen. Harris will have just three months to overcome apathy among many economically struggling Americans who don’t believe Biden has made the change that has improved their lives. Early polling of swing states suggests Harris may be turning that tide.

Article Content

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

It has already improved Biden’s performance among voters in households making less than $50,000 a year, even if it has not yet reached the same lopsided level of support that Democrats received in 2020.

In a Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll conducted July 24-28, the vice president beat Republican Donald Trump by 4 percentage points among low-income voters. Biden had lost the group to Trump by 2 points in the same poll three weeks earlier.

“We’ve seen a huge historic change, and Kamala Harris has the opportunity to reinvent herself fully to the American people,” said Sarah Longwell, a Republican political consultant who publishes the anti-Trump website The Bulwark. “If she comes out strong with an economic message that’s full of compassion, looking forward and figuring out how to help everyone, that’s a huge opportunity to turn the page.”

Article Content

The economic choice is clear. Trump campaigned on preserving and expanding his first-term tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, along with higher tariffs and a crackdown on immigration, which would boost wages for low-income workers but would also stoke inflation.

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

In her first campaign ad, Harris declared, “We have chosen a future where no child lives in poverty,” referring to the governance goal she set in her inaugural campaign speech at her headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware.

While California’s attorney general, Harris took on populist economic goals, suing big banks for foreclosure practices, for-profit colleges for loading up students with debt, and health care companies for alleged price gouging.

Harris has caught the eye of Jacob DiGilio, a 42-year-old forklift driver in the swing state of Michigan who relies on food stamps and said a month ago he wasn’t sure he would vote this year. He now plans to vote for Harris, whom he sees as a role model for his 1-year-old daughter, Angel.

Article Content

Article Content

“Biden doesn’t excite me,” said DiGilio, who lives in the Detroit suburb of Romulus. “We feel a new sense of hope. Now that I have a daughter, I want to show her that she can be president.”

Sentiment among low-income Americans has shifted dramatically during Biden’s tenure. In 2020, he won voters making less than $50,000 by 11 percentage points, according to exit polls.

The main culprit, said veteran Democratic strategist Doug Sosnick, is inflation, which hit a 40-year high of 9.1% in June 2022 and is hitting low-income people harder because they spend a larger share of their income on necessities like food, which have seen particularly steep price increases. Annual inflation had fallen to 3% by June this year.

Harris has not been a prominent economic spokesperson for the Biden administration, and her job has been to promote targeted initiatives like student loan relief and promoting minority entrepreneurship. Unlike Biden, voters don’t associate her closely with rising inflation, Longwell said, though Republicans are now working hard to pin the blame on her.

Article Content

Sosnick, who was a senior adviser to President Bill Clinton, said the vice president can’t be expected to reverse Trump’s overall advantage on the economy among American voters in the time remaining before the election, but she can narrow the gap and motivate more people to vote who were not inclined to vote for Biden as the nominee.

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

Among those in households with annual incomes of less than $50,000, Trump’s credibility on the economy has declined even more, with the former president’s lead on the issue falling to 47% to 44% over Harris.

“The Harris-Biden economic agenda has been devastating to low-income and middle-class families, depriving them of thousands of dollars each year due to record-high inflation,” said Carolyn Levitt, a Trump campaign spokeswoman, while promising that Trump would “get inflation down” and “cut taxes.”

The Biden administration came into office with big ambitions to lift millions of Americans out of poverty, and has had stunning early success.

Article Content

The $1.9 trillion Covid relief package that Biden and congressional Democrats passed shortly after he took office included a series of initiatives aimed at helping low- and middle-income Americans, most notably the expansion of the child tax credit. The expansion temporarily raised the tax credit to up to $3,600 per child and made more low-income families eligible, even paying it out monthly rather than requiring families to wait for a tax refund.

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

But that didn’t last long. Concerned about government spending as inflation rose, Biden couldn’t persuade Republicans or Senate moderates like Joe Manchin of West Virginia, now an independent, to agree to continue the expanded tax credit or other initiatives like more comprehensive child care subsidies. The child poverty rate rose again in 2022, more than doubling from the year before, to 12.4%.

Article Content

The end of the expanded tax break was “the most frustrating thing in my political life,” said Gene Sperling, a senior adviser to Biden who has been on the economic team of every Democratic president since 1993.

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

However, the strong economic recovery under Biden has boosted the earnings of low-wage workers far more than inflation and narrowed the wage gap with high earners.

According to an analysis by economist Elise Gold at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, low-wage American workers — at the 10th percentile — saw their hourly wages increase 12.1% between 2019 and 2023, after adjusting for inflation. That was more than twice the pace of middle-income workers. The analysis found that high-income earners at the 90th percentile saw real wage gains of just 0.9% over the period.

Biden’s economic initiatives like the infrastructure bill and incentives for chip manufacturing and clean energy are likely to ultimately help the working poor, but those voters don’t notice that as much as the direct welfare programs that Biden has sought but been unable to deliver, said Bobby Dorigo Jones, director of United Way’s program to help low-income workers in Michigan.

Article Content

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

Harris has made clear her commitment to precisely these goals. But if she is to mobilize the poorest Americans, she will have to overcome the ingrained skepticism of people like DeShawn Hardy, a 29-year-old sandwich shop manager and married mother of two in the largely working-class Detroit suburb of Roseville.

“I didn’t really listen to Kamala,” Hardy said. “She’s going to benefit herself and others, but not the people who really need the benefits, you know?”

Article Content