Vice President Kamala Harris has a plan for the economy: a glossy, 82-page booklet detailing proposals on housing, taxes and health care that her campaign handed out to supporters gathered at a campaign event in Pittsburgh this week.
Former President Donald J. Trump has nothing so detailed. The issues section of his campaign website is spare. He has coughed up a string of four- or five-word slogans promising tax cuts, some of which even his advisers cannot fully explain. He has toyed with a tariff as high as 20 percent on every good imported into the United States, promised to deport millions of immigrants to reduce the demand for housing and boasted that he can halve energy prices in a year.
Even with such an improvisational, loosely defined agenda, he is still leading Ms. Harris on the economy in polls, though his advantage is shrinking in some surveys. Many economists have warned that Mr. Trump’s promises, if turned into concrete policy, could slow growth, raise consumer prices and balloon the federal deficit.
But many voters find Mr. Trump’s punchy promises easy to grasp. His basic message of lower taxes, less regulation and less trade with other countries helped carry him to the White House once before. A majority of Americans fondly remember the economy in the first three years of his administration, before the pandemic and years of elevated inflation.
A central question in the final stretch of the presidential race is if Ms. Harris’s more detailed — but in many cases still not fully formed — stack of policy proposals will cohere into an economic argument that can top that.
To a remarkable degree in a deeply polarized country, Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump have many of the same stated goals for the economy. Lower costs. Reduce regulations. Cut taxes for the middle class. Incentivize corporations to build their products in the United States.
It is on the methods for accomplishing those ends — and the best way to sell them to the public — that they diverge sharply.
In his third run for the White House, Mr. Trump has pushed a far more aggressive version of the economic policies he has previously pursued, promising a “new American industrialism.” He has also tried to connect those policies to the deep anxieties Americans continue to feel around everyday living costs.
His plan to reduce the cost of renting or buying a home is to deport all immigrants in the United States without legal documentation, immediately reducing competition for housing and most likely slowing economic growth. His plan to create millions of factory jobs centers on enacting taxes on imported products so high that manufacturers will be forced to move production — and jobs — back to the United States.
To cut the cost of groceries, he says he will ban imports of some food grown abroad, which would most likely raise food prices in the United States. To reduce gasoline and electricity costs, he says he will deregulate the energy sector and encourage a surge in new oil and gas drilling. Economists have raised doubts that those proposals would achieve what Mr. Trump says they would.
Ms. Harris’s 82-page plan goes after all those same problems, with very different tools. To cut rent and mortgage costs, she would offer new home buyers a $25,000 tax credit and commit tens of billions of dollars to rapidly increasing the nation’s housing supply. She would enact a federal ban on “price gouging” by grocery stores in a bid to tame food costs, though her aides concede that ban might not do anything in the current economy.
Ms. Harris has embraced a much more limited number of tariffs than Mr. Trump, and instead pledges tax breaks to encourage domestic manufacturing of low-carbon energy technology, biotechnology and other advanced industries. She would expand tax breaks for parents, particularly those with infants, to help them afford the costs of raising children.
Ms. Harris’s plans, while more detailed than Mr. Trump’s, remain far less specific than those of previous Democratic nominees. Her advisers are in no rush to fill in the blanks. Instead, they are trying to use her existing proposals to fuel a broader message: that Ms. Harris is a pragmatic capitalist focused on the middle class and not the communist comrade Mr. Trump caricatures her to be.
To figure out how to communicate that, Ms. Harris’s campaign has consulted closely with business titans and donors. They have pushed her, in part, to break from President Biden on a few strategic issues that have irked business leaders, like the size of proposed corporate tax increases and the ambitions of some federal regulators.
Their hope is that by taking a more moderate stance on issues like capital-gains taxes and cryptocurrency, preoccupations for the wealthy donor set, Ms. Harris will more broadly signal that she would be a responsible, pro-growth steward of the economy. Mark Cuban, a billionaire and television personality, has become a fixture of Ms. Harris’s campaign, appearing at the Pittsburgh speech. He likes a candidate with a plan.
“The vice president and her team thinks through her policies,” Mr. Cuban said on a campaign press call this week. “She doesn’t just off the top of her head say what she thinks the crowd wants to hear like the Republican nominee.”
Ms. Harris’s pivot has raised some eyebrows among Democrats who believe voters support populist ideas — and not centrist ones favored by billionaires. But many liberal policy proponents remain optimistic that Ms. Harris will still stick largely to the ideas that animated Mr. Biden’s term.
“The message here seems to be ‘pragmatism,’ which I take as a swipe at four-plus decades of G.O.P. answers of tax cuts and deregulation, regardless of the question,” said Jen Harris, a former economic official in the Biden White House. “Given the emphasis on small business and lowering costs, I was heartened to see her call out the main culprit there — abuses by big corporations and corporate middlemen.”
The risk is that Ms. Harris’s economic message, by sprinkling in a mix of progressive and moderate ideas like cutting “red tape” and also raising corporate taxes, ultimately becomes muddled. Many liberals privately worry that she has not done enough to communicate to voters what she stands for — and whom she stands with.
It is true that Mr. Trump’s economic ideas defy ideological categorization, with a deeply conservative commitment to cutting corporate taxes mixed with an opposition to free trade that was once a fringe belief on the left. But Mr. Trump has redefined the Republican Party’s economic platform over the last eight years at the center of American political life. Ms. Harris was suddenly vaulted atop the Democratic ticket this summer, giving her just a matter of weeks to define her own economic message.
She has tried to do so, in large part, through contrasts with Mr. Trump. Ms. Harris has argued that Mr. Trump’s lack of detail is a liability.
“He’s just not very serious about how he thinks about some of these issues,” she said during an interview on MSNBC. “And one must be serious and have a plan, and a real plan, that’s not just about some talking point ending in an exclamation at a political rally.”
Mr. Trump’s campaign has been eager to attack Ms. Harris on her own details, trying to label her price-gouging plan as “price controls,” for example. At the same time, Mr. Trump has reveled in keeping his own plans malleable and his speeches loose.
“I don’t often use a teleprompter because if you use a teleprompter, it gets very boring,” he said in the middle of his speech this week on the economy. “If I read every single word, I could go right down and you’d be in and out of here in 35 minutes. You’d say, ‘That was pretty boring, wasn’t it?’”
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