Before the Debate: Could There Be a Harris Doctrine?

Kamala Harris’s campaign has been impressively disciplined at saying very little about her potential policies as president. This has left commentators scrambling to discover what her intentions might be. In foreign policy, for example, analysts have been reduced to sifting the published writings of two senior advisors, Philip Gordon and  Rebecca Lissner. But writing a book and making policy are radically different activities. Harris’s economic policies, as outlined this week, are much more articulated, but they are essentially continuations of Biden policies or, in the case of keeping tips free from income tax, borrowed from Trump. Her social policies are also continuous with Biden’s. Her biggest departures from Biden have been in her refusal to participate in “identity politics” or to position Trump as an imminent danger to democracy. At the same time, she has made it clear that she is running against Trump and not against Republican voters.  The lack of discipline in her first presidential campaign has been overturned. How does that happen?

First, it would be very difficult for a sitting vice president to run against the policies of her own administration. Second, depriving the Trump campaign of policy specifics to criticize could provoke it into making more personal attacks, which Harris seems to parry much more easily than Biden did. (She is unlikely to be baited into an argument about golf handicaps, for example, as Biden was.) Third, Harris did relatively little as vice president, as compared to recent holders of the office such as Al Gore or Dick Cheney. The one policy she was associated with was not really a policy so much as a hopeless errand: to address the ”root causes” of migration to the U.S. on a two-day trip to Central America.

Fourth, Harris’s four years as a junior senator from California were not strong on policy innovation. Rather, she was noted mainly for her ferocious attacks on the Trump administration, its policies and its nominees for office. She demonstrated a composed fearlessness, and a precision, that made her stand out. These qualities led her famously to attack Biden on the second night of the first Democratic debate in June 2019 after distinguishing herself by attacks on Trump. It was focused confrontation that built her national-level political career.

That might be expected from someone whose earlier career, from 1990 (when she was 26) to 2017, was almost entirely that of a prosecutor. As San Francisco district attorney and then California attorney general, both elected positions, Harris was innovative as well as forceful. But that was in the context of the legal profession, where there are many guardrails on innovation, and where a prosecutorial manner is a valued skill rather than a personal characteristic. It can be turned off as well as on.

This may help explain how Harris was able to go from being very forceful as a senator to being a loyal lieutenant as vice president.

Now she is having to shift again, potentially to a position of profound leadership that has to be creative as well as confrontational, and emollient as well as combative.

The debate on September 10 will be an opportunity to see whether Harris is able to hit these different registers.

From an investment point of view, the key thing to bear in mind is that Harris, while demonstrably unafraid of the power of the private sector when she was a prosecutor, does not have any known radical views or declared positions on reorganizing the existing distribution of economic power. Her declared policies are directed at expanding the middle class in the sense of providing a stronger floor for working people (especially with health care and child care) and increasing opportunities for small businesses, to be paid for with moderately higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy, and to a modest degree on capital gains. These are essentially small-c conservative policy positions aimed at the aspirational working and middle classes, understood to be the core of the American economy and polity.  

In many ways the candidate Harris most resembles is Bill Clinton. Clinton used to refer to “doctrine” as “the D word.” Over eight years as president he resisted developing anything that could be called a Clinton Doctrine. Commentators are now searching for a Harris Doctrine. There is not likely to be one.

Vance Notice

This post was published on Friday, 21 June, two days before President Biden renounced his candidacy for reelection.

The current high level of partisanship in the media, even the business press, has made it difficult at best to find objective analysis that favors neither party. For example, former President Donald Trump’s announcement of J.D. Vance as his running mate was generally met with a certain dismissiveness. The Economist’s midweek newsletter read: “Mr Vance will not swing many votes. A 39-year-old articulate anti-globalist, anti-big business, anti-immigration, pro-worker, MAGA enthusiast, he does little to broaden Mr Trump’s electoral appeal.” SIG’s analytical view is that Vance will indeed broaden Trump’s appeal to working-class, lower-middle-class, and non-white voters. Trump has been steadily taking these formerly core Democratic constituencies into his column since the 2016 campaign. And in a number of states they could very well make the difference between a Trump presidency and a Biden (or Harris) one.

Trump’s remarks at the convention Thursday night included an appeal to “every citizen, whether you are young or old, man or woman, Democrat, Republican, or independent, Black or White, Asian or Hispanic,” and in the previous days convention-goers had heard from a Muslim woman offering a prayer in Arabic, a black pastor, and a variety of non-white lawmakers and officials. The Republicans’ big-tent approach began in the campaign of the younger George Bush but Trump has steadily extended it. He did better in 2016 with nonwhite voters than Mitt Romney had four years before, and somewhat worse with white voters as a whole. Trump also could not have won without taking some Obama voters away from Hillary Clinton. Trump did noticeably well with working-class and less-educated voters. Those two groups, of course, contain a great many non-white voters. Given the national white majority and the realities of racial discrimination, working-class politics and non-white politics have often been treated as highly distinct and even antagonistic. Trump seemed to be following a different path.

Biden and the Democrats, meanwhile, were losing their once solid hold on the non-white vote. In 2012, Barack Obama carried the non-white working class (non-college-educated) by 67 points over Romney. In 2020, running against Trump, Biden carried the same demographic by just 48 points. By February 2024, one reputable poll was finding that Biden’s margin had slipped to 6 points: 47 percent to 41 for Trump. The same poll found that white and non-white voters without college degrees were converging in their views on the respective qualities of Biden and Trump and on the state of the economy. Indeed, non-white voters in this category were slightly less likely than their white counterparts to feel that Biden’s policies had benefitted them.

The Democratic party has long prioritized the non-white vote as such. What seems to be happening is not that Biden and the Democrats are losing non-white voters so much as losing working class-voters, among whom non-whites are disproportionately represented. (A 2024 poll found that 55 percent of non-whites identified themselves as in the lower or working classes, compared to 36 percent of non-Hispanic whites. The white-non-white ratio in the US is roughly 60-40.) At the same time, Democrats’ association with prioritizing the non-white, and particularly the black, vote might also have led some less-educated whites to back Trump. Both lines point in the same direction.

Trump’s working-class support is a principal reason why he is doing well against Biden in polls. In Virginia, for example, Biden has gone from a 10-point margin in 2020 to 3 points in recent polls, and possibly less. Trump, meanwhile has seen his margin of the Virginia working-class vote grow from 6 points in 2020 to 24. In the battleground state of Pennsylvania, Trump’s lead among likely working-class voters has doubled over the same period. Nationally, Trump carried the working-class vote by 4 points in 2020 and now is polling at a 17-point margin or above.

Trump and Republican officials know all this, and the party platform, which Trump had a decisive hand in shaping, reflected it. The platform was noticeably less strong than in the past on fiscal rectitude, more supportive of Social Security and Medicare, more emphatic about creating jobs (particularly in manufacturing) and less emphatic about abortion. These new positions are all in line with data about working-class policy preferences.

This waxing working-class and non-white Republican constituency is the large target at which J.D. Vance is aimed. His convention speech on Wednesday was preceded by an introduction from his nonwhite, Hindu wife, Usha Chilukuri Vance, a child of immigrants, who went on to take a seat next to Trump. Vance then gave a speech squarely focused on promoting Trump and the party as ardent defenders of the American working class against their enemies foreign and domestic. His biography enabled him to do this with a believable passion that Trump has not been able to reach. But more than that, Vance brought to bear the skills of a correspondent and public-affairs specialist (his position in the Marines), an undergraduate student of political science and philosophy, and a successful author (Hillbilly Elegy). (Usha Vance studied history as an undergraduate at Yale then went on to get a history MPhil from Cambridge as a Gates scholar.) Vance was able to position his working-class story within a 250-year narrative of patriotic struggle. He referred repeatedly to his family’s graves on a hillside in Kentucky, generations of poor ancestors whom he expected to join, and whom he expected his family — the Vances have two sons, Ewan and Vivek, and a daughter, Mirabel — to one day join as well.

Vance brings a distinctive and potentially quite powerful kind of patriotic narrative in support of the years-long trend of growing working-class and non-white support for Trump and his party. That trend in turn is likely to be decisive in this year’s contest. Among the many implications for investors are the solidification of industrial policy and protectionism in the world’s most important economy, government prioritization of onshoring and the preservation of the existing social safety net.