Julia Nikhinson/AP Photo
Kamala Harris speaks in Las Vegas on August 10, 2024.
LAS VEGAS – It was the kind of hot that you don’t realize until you’re in it for a few minutes and actually begin to faint. The thermometer hit 109 at one point. Yet roughly 16,000 people snaked through Secret Service security lines on the campus of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, with tents offering meager respite from the heat. About a quarter of the crowd was turned away because the waiting started to become a health hazard; ultimately, more than 12,000 got into the Thomas & Mack Center to see Kamala Harris speak.
I first encountered Harris 17 years ago. It was the 2007 California Democratic Party convention, and the party was deciding whether to endorse in the following year’s presidential primary. California had moved up their primary that year to March, so it was a delegate-rich priority for the campaigns. But while a few candidates showed up, for the most part the pitch was left to surrogates. Hillary Clinton had her husband; Barack Obama had Kamala Harris. It didn’t seem like a fair fight to pit a former two-term president against the district attorney of San Francisco, but Harris was extremely impressive.
Let this be an antidote to the idea that Harris somehow only figured out how to speak purposefully from a podium in the last month. The vice presidency mostly doesn’t allow for soaring, self-assured rhetoric. But now, Harris has millions of Democrats who are enthusiastic, joyful, and pumped up to vanquish Donald Trump. In this euphoric environment, Harris is thriving.
Yet one half-sentence at Saturday’s rally, the final of a raucous battleground state tour with her vice-presidential nominee, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, reinforced the fact that after the rallies and the bunting, Harris’s job will come down to a series of policy decisions. And one of the first that she’s articulated publicly, while perhaps politically necessary, is quite simply a bad idea.
Contrary to popular belief, those in the crowd I talked to on Saturday did have thoughts on policy, a lot of them. I heard from people who cited reproductive rights, immigration, Israel’s war on Gaza, education, and more. I heard from a guy from Atlanta who had come over to the rally from DefCon, an annual hacker convention in Vegas, who wanted her to prioritize cybersecurity enforcement. But the general sentiment was that the details needed to take a back seat, at least for now.
“It’s hard for me to focus on the things that really matter just because it’s so important to stop the opposition right now,” said Andrea Shimmel of Las Vegas. “I wish that wasn’t the case so that we could focus more on policy. But I think that right now it’s kind of a do-or-die thing.”
The event, which was delayed close to an hour because of a technical problem with the teleprompter, had more of a club vibe than a political rally. DJ D-Nice ended up doing two long sets, seemingly running out of records (he’d dug into AC/DC remixes when they finally cut him off). The energy matched the hype, even if it waned a bit during that second set; at one point, the lights dimmed and cellphone flashlights popped on, a wave of light filling the arena. Meanwhile, staffers frantically tested the prompter at the podium while holding phones close to their ear to communicate over the hip-hop beats.
David Dayen
The Thomas & Mack Center, Saturday, August 10, 2024
Once that was sorted, the business of shouting along with political speeches commenced. Rep. Dina Titus (D-NV), self-described as “one of those miserable childless cat ladies,” drew howls by saying, “I’ve got a word for JD Vance, you better hide behind that sofa because we’re coming for you.” The biggest applause lines in Walz’s broadly familiar stump speech were when he talked about gun safety laws, something that fires up the Democratic base.
Harris, by contrast, tweaked a few lines. Throughout her nascent campaign, Harris had emphasized that she was the underdog; but before her remarks, the influential New York Times/Siena poll showed her up four on Donald Trump in all the Midwestern swing states she’d need to win. News travels at internet speed and everyone in the crowd was well aware of those numbers, so the line was amended: “We know this will be a tight race until the very end. Let’s not pay attention to the polls.”
The other bit that was altered reflected the fact that the Culinary Workers Union Local 226, a powerhouse in Nevada politics, had just endorsed Harris the day before. They had given some approving nods to Trump’s newly-arrived-at position that federal taxes should be eliminated on tips, a policy first instituted by Ronald Reagan in 1982. Fox News was able to find one self-described Democrat willing to support Trump over this. (The idea that there are billboards “all over Vegas” about this idea, based on my own travels, is simply untrue. There are billboards of Criss Angel all over Vegas, not politics.)
The combination of needing that endorsement and not wanting to have Trump outflank her on something that sounds vaguely populist led Harris to say these words on Saturday: “When I am president, we will continue our fight for working families of America, including to raise the minimum wage, and eliminate taxes on tips for service and hospitality workers.” A campaign official said these two concepts, which would need congressional approval, would travel together.
No taxes on tips is generally a poor idea where there are other good ones available. It would somewhat unfairly segregate people who make the same income by virtue of how that income is technically collected. It invites gaming of the system, where real estate and stock brokers, lawyers, or even hedge fund managers can recharacterize their income as tips and get a huge tax break. (The Harris aide said they would put income limits and “strict requirements” to prevent such gaming.)
No taxes on tips is generally a poor idea where there are other good ones available.
It would nullify efforts to improve reporting compliance on tips. And if this affected payroll as well as income taxes—which businesses would certainly push for on the employer side as well—it could catastrophically reduce what tipped workers pay into and get out of Social Security. Worker retirement income would be based only on their meager base wages, while Social Security and Medicare would lose something like $250 billion over a decade, hastening the insolvency of the trust funds.
A great number of workers don’t qualify to pay much, if any, federal income taxes, particularly in the service and hospitality sector. That means this tax break may not do much for current workers while potentially hurting them in retirement. If you do owe income taxes as a service worker, you’re on a higher end of the income scale, so the break is generally regressive.
There is certainly a problem with service workers not taking home enough money, but it has to do with their reliance on tips to begin with. The subminimum wage for tipped workers can be as low as $2.13 per hour. Seven states, including Nevada, Harris’s California, and Walz’s Minnesota, have eliminated the subminimum wage, guaranteeing workers a much higher minimum. Over one million workers are paid less than the federal minimum of $7.25. Paying workers a livable wage eliminates the reliance on what has become an aggressive tipping culture, forcing consumers to step in where businesses don’t. Harris in her speech cited raising the minimum wage generally, but that does nothing for the subminimum wage.
Of course, endorsing an end to the subminimum wage wouldn’t have offered much to the Culinary Union in Nevada, because they’ve already secured that. So Harris’s team made a move to co-opt an idea from Trump, who responded with his usual fury. That’s a reasonable political maneuver, but as a policy idea it kind of stinks. Because so much federal policy in 2025 is tied to the tax code, this now becomes something that will need to be addressed, potentially blunting the impact of revenue-raising policies.
David Dayen
Las Vegas schoolteacher Tilly Torres introduces Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
This demonstrates an instinct for gimmickry over what might actually work well. Harris said earlier Saturday that she would roll out a policy platform focused on the economy and lowering costs this coming week. We do need to understand what she would do in office. But I’d hope it gets better than faux populism endorsed by restaurant trade groups.
But policy ultimately doesn’t only come from campaign white papers. The woman who introduced the Democratic ticket on Saturday was Tilly Torres, a schoolteacher in Las Vegas who told the crowd about how she was the first member of her family to go to college, on student loans. As she began to pay them off, she contracted cancer while also caring for her injured husband. The $40,000 in loans she took out, after 30 years of paying, had ballooned to $87,000. (Which is a good thing to remember when you hear arguments against “canceling” student debt; many borrowers have already paid many times over.) But when President Biden fixed the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, she saw all that debt wiped away. “For the first time, I have financial freedom,” she said to cheers.
The popularity of student debt relief was hard-earned. As a candidate, Biden said he wouldn’t do it, and Nancy Pelosi said he couldn’t. But a coalition of activists turned the tide, and now nearly five million borrowers have seen debt forgiveness. That policy is now in the mainstream of Democratic politics. It’s an applause line at a rally, along with reproductive freedom and gay rights, ending gun violence, and saving the planet.
Harris, like her predecessor, will feel the need to adapt to these new realities. She may have the crowd dancing with speeches, and basking in the delight of leaving the Trump era behind. But in governing, she’ll be part of a coalition, one that wants, as Harris said last night, to “put the middle class and working families first.”
