Ringo H.W. Chiu/AP Photo
Then-Sen. Kamala Harris speaks at the SEIU Unions For All Summit, October 4, 2019, in Los Angeles.
Vice President Kamala Harris’s abrupt ascent to the top of the Democratic ticket is clearly a plus for Democratic prospects this November when compared to the prospects that a continued Biden candidacy presented. Unlike Biden, she’s audible and fast on her rhetorical feet. (I hasten to add that Biden was a remarkably accomplished president, considering all the landmark legislation he got through a narrowly divided Congress. He just wasn’t up to the tasks of campaigning or selling even his most popular programs.)
That said, there’s not much in Harris’s history to suggest she’s the cure for the Democrats’ growing weakness among working-class voters—most particularly, the white working-class voters who’ve been trending Republican for a very long time. In a sense, that problem is exacerbated by the fact that she’s a Californian. The political foundation underpinning California’s profoundly Democratic tilt is that it has the lowest percentage of working-class whites of any state except Hawaii (whose demographic history has virtually nothing in common with the other 49 states). During the Cold War, the state’s largest private-sector employers were aerospace giants like Lockheed, Douglas, and North American Rockwell. When the Soviet Union ceased to exist, those companies downsized themselves almost out of existence, and their white assembly-line workers, unable to find comparably paying jobs in-state, moved to other states where the cost of living was lower. Since then, white working-class voters have loomed smaller in California than just about anyplace else.
As the state’s attorney general and then senator, Harris certainly championed the interests of California workers, with a particular emphasis on workers in the caring economy (hence her particular closeness to SEIU, whose 700,000 California members largely work in hospitals and home care). Straight through her tenure as vice president, she’s been the most stalwart supporter of setting and enforcing staffing ratios in hospitals and rehab facilities, and of governmentally set pay and benefit standards for the people doing that work.
How, though, can she reach out to the working-class men who build buildings, drive trucks, and operate assembly lines (all alongside women, but it’s the men who’ve been moving en masse into Republican ranks)? Chris Hannan, who heads the California Building Trades Council (which represents virtually every union of construction workers in the state) told me that when Harris was the state’s attorney general, she worked closely with the trades to establish a prison-to-construction-union-apprenticeship pipeline, under which former felons could enter the union-run apprenticeship programs, with a guarantee of good-paying work upon completion—and a pretty fair guarantee of eschewing recidivism, too.
Hannan was clear on how unions like those represented in his council would campaign against Trump and, now, for Harris. “Trump had an ‘infrastructure week’ every year, which led to no increase in infrastructure construction, every year. Under Biden and Harris, we’re building more roads and bridges and rail lines, and electric car factories and semiconductor factories, with union members and union-scale wages, in California, in Arizona, and across the country,” he said. “Trump gave corporations a huge tax cut with no conditions on spending that money in the U.S.; Biden and Harris have prioritized investing in America.”
Will Harris’s strong environmentalism be an obstacle to winning a number of working-class votes? Most likely, particularly in places like Western Pennsylvania, where her opposition to fracking will surely be something that the Trump campaign will stress. “She may not do well in Western Pennsylvania outside Pittsburgh,” another labor leader told me, “but she’ll boost turnout in [heavily Black] Northern Philadelphia and Detroit, particularly if Obama campaigns alongside her there.” That labor leader is also confident that Harris will stick with the kind of pro-union appointees to whom Biden entrusted the Labor Department and the NLRB. “Democrats with centrist records, like Biden had, now understand this is good policy and good politics,” he added.
When Harris ran for president in 2019 (an effort so woebegone that it didn’t make it into 2020), her economic proposals were clearly progressive, like greatly expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit, as my colleague David Dayen has noted, and offering a refundable tax credit to renters making less than $100,000 who pay more than 30 percent of their income on rent.
I herewith offer a couple of suggestions myself that might win her more support, or at least more of a hearing, among working-class voters. As I’ve noted, Trump’s suggestion of making tips tax-free actually won’t affect most tipped workers because they don’t make enough money, even with the tips, to pay income taxes. (Indeed, according to a report released today by UC Berkeley’s Food Labor Research Center and the organization One Fair Wage, fully 66 percent of tipped restaurant workers have incomes falling beneath that threshold.) Nonetheless—and despite some speculation that Wall Street consultants would mislabel their fees as tips if such a change were made—I think Harris should adopt this proposal (saying she’s open to crossing the aisle when a decent, or even half-decent, proposal originates there) and go it one better, challenging Republicans to raise the national minimum wage from the $7.25 where it’s languished for the past 15 years, and the tipped minimum wage from its microscopic $2.13—positions I doubt the newly “pro-worker” Republicans will embrace.
She might also extend Biden’s student loan forgiveness program to students who’ve taken out loans to attend trade schools.
As well, she should emphasize the arguments that Hannan has made: that factory construction increased by 73 percent once the Inflation Reduction Act passed, that infrastructure construction stagnated under Trump and soared under Biden, and that, as vice president, she cast the deciding votes on much of the “Build, Baby, Build for a Clean, Prosperous Future” legislation that is Biden’s legacy.
Would a Gretchen Whitmer or a Josh Shapiro (or a Sherrod Brown were he not now running to hold his Senate seat) be better positioned than Harris to win enough working-class votes in swing states to win the presidency? Probably, but by the time Biden had decided to drop out, it was too late to have the kind of contest that the party’s smartest pol, Nancy Pelosi, could have devised. That said, Harris brings strengths to the top of the ticket that only she can bring, including a level of enthusiasm among Democratic base voters and a rhetorical ability, as she demonstrated in her talk to party workers yesterday, to both stick it to Trump and to articulate the contrast between the Americas that each party wants to build. She’ll need to keep at it, and then some.
