What Kamala should do now

It finally happened. After weeks of waiting, Joe Biden has stepped down and made way for a younger candidate, most likely to be his vice-president Kamala Harris, whom he has endorsed for the nomination. Harris is a known quantity, having previously run for president and served in the Senate.

While Harris, like Biden, has lagged Donald Trump in polling, her numbers have improved in recent weeks. What’s more, few Democrats want the chaos and potential legal battles that might ensue with an open convention. For these and other reasons, the party seems to be quickly aligning to back her as the new Democratic presidential candidate.

Assuming she is the candidate, what should her next moves be? Here are my top three thoughts:

First, she should quickly reaffirm and own the post-neoliberal economic policy transition under way in the party.

One of the many reasons that Democrats wrangled for so long about whether Biden should step down is that he has become synonymous with that shift, away from the market-knows-best ideas espoused by Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and towards a greater role for the state. This is where the country as a whole is going, on both sides of the aisle.

But what is Bidenomics without Biden? That’s something Democrats need to figure out quickly. While Biden the candidate may be problematic, the policies he has put in place have been working well. Indeed, they’ve created the most robust economic recovery in the rich world over the past few years.

That said, there are big, short-term perception issues here because of inflation and the toll it has taken on more vulnerable Americans. That brings me to recommendation number two, which is that Harris must burnish her standing among working people. She’s known as being a shiny Californian beloved by Wall Street, not a woman of the people.

And it’s important for her to acknowledge that just 18 per cent of registered voters say they feel better off since Biden became president, according to the latest FT-Michigan Ross poll. That feeling is largely about working people being unable to cope with the cost of living crisis, despite wage increases.

It’s also important to say that none of these things are the fault of Biden, or Harris. Supply chain issues, geopolitics and price gouging are largely behind the food and fuel inflation that hit working people hard over the past few years. Meanwhile, the cost of living crisis in housing, healthcare and education has been building for decades.

But of course, whoever is in the White House gets both unfair credit and blame for everything that happens economically. And many working people simply haven’t felt enough upside yet from Bidenomics.

As I wrote in my column today, working people are increasingly playing both sides of the aisle, and can’t be counted on to vote the straight Democratic ticket (witness Trump’s selection of Hillbilly Elegy author JD Vance as his running mate and the barn-burning pro-union speech that Teamsters president Sean O’Brien gave at the Republican National Convention). Kamala needs to find a way to quickly connect to working-class voters, particularly in swing states such as Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where the election will be won or lost.

That gets me to my third recommendation: assuming Harris is the candidate, she should pick a vice-presidential nominee that really fills out her weak spots. That probably means choosing someone who has strong union backing, and comes from a Midwestern or southern state.

Once these pieces are in place, I think it’s crucial that Democrats keep supporting — and improve their messaging on — the long-term shift towards a post-neoliberal world. This is a winning strategy, particularly with younger voters.

What’s more, they should do that at both a local and a global level, which would separate them from the Maga crowd. On that score, there’s some low-hanging fruit to be grabbed ahead of the G20 finance ministers and central bank governors meeting this week.

The issue is the billionaire tax. Brazil has come up with a proposal to tax the world’s wealthiest, which my colleague Martin Sandbu wrote about here and also discussed in the Unhedged podcast with colleague Rob Armstrong. It’s an idea that gets at the crucial problem of how governments can raise revenue, avoid a global race to the bottom on tax arbitrage and do so in a way that is popular enough to pass through legislatures.

Consider that not only in the US but in 16 other G20 countries surveyed, a majority of adults (68 per cent) support a policy in which wealthy people pay higher taxes as a means of funding major changes to our economy and lifestyles.

Amazingly, even the wealthy themselves don’t seem to mind. In the US, 62 per cent of 800 millionaires surveyed are supportive of international action to set standards for how we tax the super-rich.

The US has yet to signal support for the idea. But this week would be a good time to do so, and it would be a great idea to let Kamala come out and make that announcement. It would help position her deepen her connection to average working Americans and position her as someone who is pushing a truly progressive economic agenda. It would put a major line in the sand between how Democrats and Republicans, who are looking to go back to a 19th-century world of no income tax and tariffs of 100 per cent, actually deal with the super-rich. It would showcase US leadership abroad. And it would create a continued tailwind behind nascent work to rethink laissez-faire economics, which must have a future beyond Biden.

Peter is away this week. When he’s back, I’m sure he’ll have more to say on the possibility of a Harris candidacy.

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And now a word from our Swampians . . .

In response to “Why techies are going for Trump”:
“The parallels with the fall of the Roman Republic are manifest. A broken system in which political corruption, vote buying and influence peddling by the wealthy is endemic (Crassus, Thiel, Musk); enormous wealth disparity giving fertile opportunity for populists (Clodius, Caesar, Trump); political violence and thuggery against anyone who stands in the way of populists (Bibulus, Pence); a conviction that the best days of Rome/US are behind us; total disillusionment with democracy and a belief that any form of government (even dictatorship) can only be better. Unfortunately, we only miss Cato and Cicero from the contemporary dramatis personae.” — Chris Millerchip