This is an adapted excerpt from the Sept. 25 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”
On Wednesday, Vice President Kamala Harris sat down with MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle for her first solo broadcast interview as a presidential candidate. It was a great opportunity for the vice president to speak directly to the American people and explain her economic vision for a Harris administration.
Overall, I thought she did a very solid job but there was one theme, both in that interview and in her economic address in Pittsburgh earlier in the day, that stuck out to me the most. Harris, who frequently references her experience working at McDonald’s as a student, presented herself to voters as this combo meal of “I’m a capitalist, but I also support unions and workers.” That’s a space we don’t often see a candidate occupy these days. Harris wants to bridge together two sides that people frequently try to pit against each other.
Harris is trying to create an opportunity economy around fundamental ideas — ideas that translate across party platforms. She’s not strictly appealing to or excluding specific parts of the electorate. She’s inviting voters to look at her proposals and ask themselves: How does this benefit my personal economy?
What also stuck out to me about the interview was that Harris didn’t strike an absolute populist tone. Instead, there was a modicum of populism in her message. You could hear it when she talked about the American worker, when she talked about families who don’t want their lives to be disrupted because the car broke down, and families who just want to be able to pay their bills. That’s a form of populism, but it’s not at the extremes.
She’s touching on that center space and trying to appeal to a wider range of voters. It’s what a lot of politicians on the Republican side did before the party wandered into Donald Trump’s cray-cray land. Harris is following that lead and building her economic case around a central point — one that can touch people who live in cities, in the suburbs and the exurbs and appeal to voters across the political and demographic spectrum.
