NEW YORK — Vice President Kamala Harris managed to lure Wall Street donors off the sidelines with her vibes. Now she has to keep them interested.
Enthusiasm has been building in the weeks since Harris took over from President Joe Biden, who has lost support among major donors. It took Harris less than a month to crush former President Donald Trump’s financial advantage. And she did so without providing many details about her economic policy agenda. Business leaders from Lazard President Ray McGuire to Blackstone Group President Jonathan Gray rallied behind her as she whittled away at Trump’s lead in the polls.
Trump has powerful allies on Wall Street. His promises to cut taxes and slash regulations helped revive his relationships with GOP megadonors, who had spurned him after he tried to overturn the 2020 election.
“Trump’s pro-business policies — less extreme regulation, low corporate taxes, etc. — are undoubtedly attractive to Wall Street. But many players find other aspects of the Trump ‘package’ that have nothing to do with finance overwhelmingly negative,” former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein told POLITICO. “Like most people, people in finance are weighing various interests and concerns and may find the lesser-known Harris more appealing than the Trump they know.”
But with Harris set to deliver her first major policy speech on Friday in Raleigh, North Carolina, donors and Democratic backers will be clamoring for any indication that the California Democrat will tweak Biden-era economic policies — areas that have been dominated by allies of Wall Street foe Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). Harris’ campaign message has largely stuck to progressive versions of the White House’s current priorities — albeit with a greater focus on elements of the “care economy.”
Harris and her top campaign advisers are developing a plan that builds largely on elements of the administration’s existing agenda to create a new, sweeping vision that focuses squarely on drastically cutting the costs that Americans fixate on most, such as groceries, housing and health care.
The emerging plan, some of which Harris will lay out in her speech this week, would take a tougher stance than Biden in some areas, such as more aggressively targeting “corporate greed” as a driver of higher consumer prices. It would position Harris as someone eager to crack down on powerful industries and the wealthy, calling for higher taxes and less tolerance for bad corporate behavior — priorities Biden has sought but struggled to articulate consistently.
And it would be a nod to her broader ambitions on housing and child care, two areas that have consumed an outsized share of family budgets and attention in the run-up to the November election.
But Harris’s speech on Friday is expected to be more of a summary of her top priorities than a sweeping set of detailed policy prescriptions, advisers and allies familiar with the matter said. And while she will certainly lay out her vision in a much bolder, more forward-looking manner than Biden did during his aborted reelection bid, Harris is not expected to make a substantial break with his overarching goal of strengthening the working class.
Advisers also cautioned that the speech is not expected to be all-encompassing, stressing instead that it will focus narrowly on “lowering costs.” Harris is expected to lay out more of her economic worldview in the coming weeks, as her team gathers ideas and hammers out the details of her agenda in the weeks leading up to the election.
That leaves open specific questions about how she will handle looming fights over the tax code, banking regulation or market rules. Many corporate Democrats believe Harris will be more receptive to their feedback when it comes to policy and personnel, according to interviews with top party bundlers, industry lobbyists, Wall Street executives and CEO whisperers. Others are simply relieved that they no longer have to wonder whether Biden can win or last a second term.
“There is now a deep hope — a very deep hope — that she will at least have a diverse set of views when it comes to economic and financial services policy,” said Michael Bright, CEO of the Structured Finance Association and former acting president of Ginnie Mae.
Still, there is uncertainty about Harris’ specific policy agenda, who she will listen to and how she will solve the Rubik’s Cube of keeping different factions of her coalition together around key economic policy questions if she wins in November.
Many of her campaign’s top economic advisers, including Brian Deese and Gene Sperling, played key roles in crafting Biden’s agenda. Her list of official and unofficial advisers includes key staffers from her Senate career, such as Rohini Kosoglu and Deanne Millison.
She once proposed a tax on financial transactions and tried to tax corporate profits to close the gender pay gap. She won a $20 billion settlement from major banks for mortgage relief during the financial crisis and tried to block major health care mergers. Her campaign speech focused on banking fees and profiteering — the meat-and-potatoes Bidenomics cost — and mocked Trump’s plan to cut corporate taxes.
As a whole, it’s a platform that should send C-suites into a frenzy. For Democrats on Wall Street, it hasn’t made a damn bit of difference.
“A lot of it is just vibes. They don’t want the same anti-corporate vibes that the Biden administration had,” one Democratic venture capitalist said in an interview. Harris has family ties to the investment world. Her time as a U.S. senator and California attorney general has given her a better understanding of how Silicon Valley operates, they added. “She’s just in a different environment.”
Democratic donors, consultants, aides and CEO whisperers who spoke to POLITICO over the past three weeks shrugged off Harris’s past campaign positions. Her platform during the 2020 Democratic primary was left of center, but that “was a very different political environment,” according to one top party focal point.
Harris has been competing for airtime with Warren and Bernie Sanders, progressives who have had a hammer grip on the party’s base when it comes to economic policy. She moved more to the center when Biden selected her as his running mate, and donors have taken “cues from how she has operated nationally, in the Biden-Harris administration,” the bundler said.
As vice president, she often served as a bridge between Biden and corporate America, overseeing public-private partnerships between the government and big banks that targeted small business investments in an effort to expand federal contracts to minority-owned businesses.
Wall Street executives have been bitterly irritated by the administration’s regulatory approach over the past three and a half years. They have often complained that their positions were not taken seriously by the White House or that regulators such as FTC Commissioner Lina Khan or SEC Chairman Gary Gensler were pursuing rules and enforcement actions that were legally flawed.
Harris has largely avoided that criticism — at least from industry centrists. With Biden off the ballot, her allies have told business leaders she represents a more stable alternative to Trump. They don’t have to worry about responding to midnight policy changes posted on social media accounts or meddling in core market functions like the Federal Reserve setting interest rates. Her Rolodex helps with that.
“She has a lot of relationships here, not just on Wall Street,” said Kathy Wylde, president and CEO of the Partnership for New York City, a nonprofit that represents the city’s top business leaders. “Biden didn’t have as many deep personal connections here.”
But some have also taken that as a sign that she’s open to changes that would dramatically alter the way the administration has previously handled markets or regulation. Some Democratic megadonors like LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Expedia Chairman Barry Diller have openly called for Harris to kick Khan out if elected.
Few expect her to publicly delve into personnel plans at this point. And as for her broader policies — given the sprint between becoming the presumptive nominee and the election — many Democrats don’t expect her to get too specific about policies that would fuel more intraparty strife.
Progressives have been hounding her to take a left-wing approach to the administration’s current policies. She’s already approved rent control, a Biden administration proposal rolled out last month to industry derision, but housing advocates want her to go further. The Roosevelt Institute, a left-leaning think tank, has published a policy blueprint for how the Biden-Harris administration should tighten rules around bank mergers and capital requirements. Financial services leaders — Democrats and not — would bristle at any such policy measures.
The question now is how she is going to keep those groups together.
“I don’t see a huge leftward shift between now and November,” the bundler said. “She’s got a general election in such a short period of time. While she’ll have to talk more about the details, I don’t see it being too far off from the current Biden platform.”
