Kamala Harris plans to sell herself as a pragmatic capitalist to business leaders in Pittsburgh on Wednesday in a speech designed to crush Donald Trump on the economy and rob him of undecided middle-class voters.
The Democratic presidential candidate will tout her middle-class roots as an asset in managing the economy when she appears before the Economic Club of Pittsburgh, according to a senior campaign official. And she’ll present herself as a pragmatist whose economic philosophy will not be “bound by ideology,” the official said.
And in the birthplace of steelmaking and labor unions, Harris plans to slam Trump as a shill for billionaires and a villain of everyday workers and entrepreneurs. “For Donald Trump, our economy works best if it works for those who own the big skyscrapers. Not those who build them. Not those who wire them. Not those who mop the floors,” Harris plans to say in a preview shared by her campaign.
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Her campaign is hyping her Pittsburgh address as a serious shot at assuaging elusive undecided voters who want more specifics from Harris on how she plans to lead the country. They say internal research shows the more voters hear directly from Harris, the more they like her—regardless of specific policy planks.
In a razor-thin close race, Harris needs all the votes she can get from a remarkably tiny group. A new CNN poll shows just 2 percent of voters haven’t yet decided which candidate to support, and another 12 percent say they’ve chosen one but could change their minds.
Harris has won the endorsement of Pennsylvania’s Teamsters, which bucked its national union days after the powerful International Brotherhood of Teamsters declined to endorse either presidential candidate.
The vice president’s visit to the biggest, most electorally rich battleground state comes as she catches up to Trump in gaining the trust of voters to manage an issue they rank as most important. Trump had a 15-point lead on President Joe Biden on the economy last fall in a Harvard/IOP Youth Poll. Harris has now almost closed the gap entirely.
Still, the presidential race is a dead heat and could break either way. The Harris campaign is doubling down on the economy to win, hoping Trump continues to get sidetracked by immigration and wild conspiracy theories.
Trump is promising both tax cuts and sweeping, punitive tariffs, which billionaire Mark Cuban on Tuesday called “insanity.” Cuban has his own agenda: advising Harris on the virtues of cryptocurrency, a cause embraced by Trump and Republicans.
