NEW YORK — Vice President Kamala Harris was able to put Wall Street donors on edge with her flair. Now he has to keep their interest.
The fervor rose in the weeks after Harris took over from President Joe Biden, who was hemorrhaging support from high-dollar donors. It took less than a month for Harris to crush former President Donald Trump’s cash advantage. And he did so without offering many details about his economic policy vision. Business leaders from Lazard president Ray McGuire to Blackstone CEO Jonathan Gray rallied behind him as he swept Trump’s lead in the polls.
Trump has strong allies on Wall Street. His promise to lower taxes and cut regulations helped revive his relationship with GOP megadonors who had balked at his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
“The business-friendly policies that Trump is offering — less extreme regulation, low corporate taxes, etc. — will no doubt appeal to Wall Street. But other non-financial aspects of the Trump ‘package’ are viewed by many players as overwhelmingly negative,” former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein told POLITICO. “Like most people, financial people weigh differentinterests and concerns, and they may find the lesser-known Harris more attractive than the Trump they know.”
But as Harris prepares to deliver his first major policy speech in Raleigh, North Carolina, on Friday, donors and Democratic donors are clamoring for any indication that the California Democrat will adapt Biden-era economic policies — areas that have been dominated by allies. Wall Street foe Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). Harris’ campaign messaging has largely stuck to forward-looking versions of the White House’s current priorities — albeit with a greater focus on elements of the “care economy.”
Harris and his senior campaign advisers are developing a plan that would build largely on elements of the administration’s current agenda to create a sweeping new vision focused on cutting the most fixed costs for Americans — like groceries, housing and health care.
The evolving plan, which Harris is expected to outline in a speech this week, would take a sharper line than Biden in some areas, such as more aggressively targeting “corporate greed” as a driver of higher consumer prices. That would position Harris as eager to crack down on powerful industries and the wealthy, calling for higher taxes and lower tolerance for bad corporate behavior — priorities that Biden pursued but found it difficult to articulate consistently.
And it would go toward his broader goals on housing and child care — two areas that have consumed huge chunks 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 an overview of his top priorities than a sweeping set of detailed policy instructions, advisers and allies familiar with the matter said. And while he’s sure to articulate his views in a much more forceful and forward-thinking way than Biden did during his aborted re-election bid, Harris isn’t expected to substantially abandon his overall goal of supporting the working class.
Advisers also cautioned that the speech is not expected to be comprehensive, stressing instead that it will only focus on “cutting costs”. Harris is expected to articulate more of his economic outlook in the coming weeks as his team gathers ideas and fleshes out the details of his agenda in the weeks leading up to the election.
That leaves open specific questions about how he will handle looming battles over tax law, banking rules or market rules. Many corporate Democrats believe Harris is more receptive to their input when it comes to policy and personnel, according to interviews with top party lobbyists, industry lobbyists, Wall Street executives and CEO whisperers. Others are simply relieved to no longer have to wonder about Biden’s ability to win or complete a second term.
“Right now there’s a deep hope — a very deep hope — that he will at least have some different views on financial and financial services policy,” said Michael Bright, CEO of the Structured Finance Association and a former acting president. Ginny Mae.
Still, there is uncertainty about Harris’ specific political agenda, who he will listen to, and how he will solve the Rubik’s Cube of keeping different factions in his coalition together on critical economic policy issues if he wins in November.
Many of his campaign’s top financial advisers, including Brian Deese and Gene Sperling, played key roles in crafting Biden’s agenda. His list of official and unofficial advisers includes key figures in his Senate career, such as Rohini Kosoglu and Deanne Millison.
He once proposed taxing financial transactions and sought to tax corporate profits to close the gender pay gap. He won a $20 billion settlement from major banks to ease mortgages during the financial crisis and moved to block major health care mergers. His stump speech takes aim at bank fees and price gouging — the meat and potatoes of Bidenomics — and mocks Trump’s plan to cut corporate taxes.
Taken as a whole, it’s a platform that should send C-suites scrambling. It has made no difference to Wall Street Democrats.
“A lot of it is just atmosphere. They don’t want the same anti-business vibe as the Biden administration, one Democratic venture capitalist said in an interview. Harris has family ties to the investment world. His time as a U.S. senator and California state attorney general gave him a better understanding of how Silicon Valley works, they added. “He’s just in a different environment.”
Democratic donors, consultants, staffers and CEO whisperers who spoke with POLITICO over the past three weeks have shrugged off the positions Harris has taken in previous campaigns. His platform in the 2020 Democratic primary was left-leaning, but it was a “very different political environment,” one top party insider said.
Harris competed for airtime against Warren and Bernie Sanders — progressives who had a hammerlock at the party’s base over economic policy. He inched closer to the center when Biden picked him as his running mate, and donors have taken “their cue from how he’s performed at the national level in the Biden-Harris administration,” the bundler said.
As vice president, he has often acted as a bridge between Biden and corporate America. He oversaw public-private partnerships between the administration and major banks focused on small business investments in an effort to expand federal contracts to minority-owned businesses.
Wall Street executives have chafed at the administration’s regulation over the past three and a half years, often complaining that their views were not taken seriously by the White House or that regulators such as FTC Commissioner Lina Khan or SEC Chairman Gary Gensler. followed rules and enforcement actions that were legally wrong.
Harris has largely avoided that criticism – at least from industrial centrists. With Biden off the ticket, his allies have told business leaders that he represents a more stable alternative to Trump. They don’t have to worry about midnight policy changes posted on social media accounts or meddling in key market functions like the Federal Reserve setting interest rates. His rolodex helps on this note.
“He has a lot of connections here, not just 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 it as a sign that he is open to changes that would dramatically change how the administration has previously handled markets or regulation. Some Democratic megadonors, such as LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Expedia chairman Barry Diller, have publicly called on Harris to show Khan the door if elected.
Few expect him to publicly delve into personnel plans at this point. And as for his broader policies — given the sprint between his presumptive nomination and the election — many Democrats don’t expect him to draw too much attention to policies that would fuel more infighting.
Progressives have demanded that he stick to the administration’s current policies. He has already approved capping rents, a proposal from the Biden administration that was floated to industry derision last month, but housing advocates want him to go even further. The Roosevelt Institute, a left-leaning think tank, released a policy plan on how the Biden-Harris administration should tighten rules on bank mergers and capital requirements. Financial services executives—Democrats or otherwise—brushed off all of these policies.
The question now is how he keeps these groups together.
“I don’t think there’s going to be a huge tilt to the left between now and November,” the bundler said. “He’s got a general election on such a shortened time frame. While he needs to talk more about the details, I don’t see that being too different from the current Biden platform.
