She’s not Joe Biden. Nobody disputes that.
But how is she different, actually?
This is the question dogging Vice President Kamala Harris in the closing weeks of the 2024 presidential campaign. She has accomplished something remarkable by elevating the Democratic presidential ticket from a flailing mess, when Joe Biden was still the candidate, to a possible winner, since she officially became the nominee in August. Most polls show Harris deadlocked with Republican nominee Donald Trump in key swing states, and in some cases slightly ahead.
Yet doubts remain among small groups of undecided Americans whose votes could be decisive. Their main questions seem to center on Harris’s political identity. Is she a liberal masquerading as a centrist? Is she a political clone of Joe Biden? Or something new and different?
An informal survey of Yahoo Finance users reinforces the same problem Harris seems to be having in other forums. We asked more than 2,000 Yahoo Finance users their overall opinions of Harris’s economic plans. Since we polled Yahoo Finance users rather than the general public, our survey is more like a large focus group than a scientific poll, with respondents who are wealthier, better educated, and older than the typical American.
As in other instances, there were huge gaps in the viewpoints of people who identify as Harris voters and those who say they’re Trumpers, as the charts below convey. No surprise there.
The warning signs for Harris come from undecided voters, who represent about 9% of our sample. Of those voters, 62% think Harris is more liberal than Biden. That’s the opposite of the message she’s trying to send. Only 6% of those respondents think Harris is more moderate than Biden.
We also asked what people think of important changes to Harris’s views on healthcare and energy since she first ran as president in 2019. Back then, she favored big government programs such as Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, that were popular among the left. She has since backed away from those ideas, which moderate voters don’t like.
We asked our respondents how they viewed those policy shifts. Harris voters generally think she has become more pragmatic, while Trump voters think she has flip-flopped just to win votes. Again, that’s on script.
Undecided voters are pretty close to the Trumpers. Of the undecideds, 77% say Harris has flip-flopped for political reasons, while just 14% say she has become more pragmatic. A majority of those undecideds also blame Harris and Biden alike for the elevated inflation of the past few years, which has been Biden’s biggest economic liability. Those voters consider it a Harris liability too.
Harris, in fact, is sending mixed messages. When asked on The View on Oct. 8 if there’s anything she would have done differently than her boss Biden, she answered “there is not a thing that comes to mind.” Later in the program, she actually came up with something — hiring a Republican as a Cabinet member. But that didn’t make the meme cut.
Later the same day, on the Late Show, Stephen Colbert asked Harris how her administration might be different from Biden’s. She said, “obviously I’m not Joe Biden, so that would be one change.” But then she offered no others.
Campaign aides say Harris doesn’t want to publicly break with Biden, out of loyalty to her boss. The risk is that she’ll leave key voting blocs with a mushy impression. In an ongoing New York Times focus group, swing voters asked to describe Harris in a word or phrase offered unflattering takes such as “flip-flopper,” “absent,” “uninspired,” “phony,” and “unclear.”
The perplexing part of Harris’s Biden-hugging is that some of her policies are, in fact, different from Biden’s, which gives her plenty of material to work with to craft her own image. Harris is more willing than Biden to acknowledge the need for fossil fuels, for example. She wants to expand Obamacare subsidies, as Biden does, while going further by adding new benefits to Medicare. And she’s more outspoken on abortion rights than Biden, a pro-choice Catholic.
No one will really know until Election Day whether Harris’s calibrations turn out to be just right or not quite enough. In its nationwide polling, the New York Times has found that voters increasingly view Harris as the “change” candidate, which is considered a good thing, given that Americans are generally unhappy with the direction of the country. Yet she’s ahead of Trump on that score by just two percentage points.
Harris’s main differentiator, of course, is that she’s not Donald Trump, and that could be the thing that puts her over the top. When asked to describe Trump in a word or phrase, the Times focus group participants summoned descriptors such as “exhausting,” “falling apart,” “infuriating,” “stressful,” and “self-destructive.” Compared with that, "uninspired" isn't so bad.
Rick Newman is a senior columnist for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on X at @rickjnewman.
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