Wall Street weighs Harris’ agenda as her momentum surges

NEW YORK — Vice President Kamala Harris was able to bring Wall Street donors off the sidelines on the strength of her vibes. Now she has to keep them interested.

Enthusiasm surged in the weeks since Harris took over from President Joe Biden, who was hemorrhaging support with high-dollar donors. It took less than a month for Harris to smash former President Donald Trump’s cash advantage . And she did it without offering many details on her economic policy vision. Business leaders, from Lazard President Ray McGuire to Blackstone Group President Jonathan Gray, lined up behind her as she erased Trump’s lead in the polls.

Trump has powerful allies on Wall Street. His pledges to reduce taxes and slash regulations helped revive his relationships with GOP megadonors who had repudiated him after he attempted to overturn the 2020 election.

“The business-friendly policies offered by Trump — less extreme regulation, low corporate tax, etc. — are attractive to Wall Street, no doubt. But many players find other aspects of the Trump ‘package’ unrelated to finance overwhelmingly negative,” former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein told POLITICO. “Like most people, folks in finance weigh a variety of interests and concerns and may find the lesser-known Harris more attractive than the Trump they know.”

But with Harris poised to give her first major policy address in Raleigh, North Carolina, on Friday, donors and Democratic financiers will be clamoring for any indication that the California Democrat would adjust Biden-era economic policies — areas that have been dominated by allies of Wall Street foe Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). Harris' campaign messaging has largely stuck to forward-looking versions of current White House priorities — albeit with a greater focus on elements of the “care economy.”

Harris and her senior campaign advisers are developing a plan that would largely build on elements of the administration’s existing agenda to fashion a sweeping new vision focused intently on slashing the costs Americans are most fixated on — such as groceries, housing and health care.

The emerging plan, some of which Harris is due to lay out in her speech this week, would take a sharper 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 eager to crack down on powerful industries and the wealthy, calling for higher taxes and lower tolerance for poor corporate behavior — priorities that Biden pursued but struggled to consistently articulate.

And it would nod toward her more expansive ambitions on housing and child care — two areas that have consumed an outsize portion of families’ budgets and attention in the run-up to the November election.

But Harris’ speech on Friday is expected to be more of an overview of her top priorities than a comprehensive series of detailed policy prescriptions, advisers and allies familiar with the matter said. And while she’s certain to frame her vision far more forcefully and forward-looking than Biden did during his aborted reelection bid, Harris isn’t expected to break substantially from his overarching goal of bolstering the working class.

Advisers also cautioned that the speech is not expected to be comprehensive, emphasizing instead that it will be narrowly focused on “lowering costs.” Harris is expected to articulate more of her economic worldview in the coming weeks, as her team compiles ideas and hammers out the specifics of her agenda in the weeks ahead of the election.

That will leave open specific questions on how she’ll address looming battles over the tax code, bank regulation or market rules. Many corporate Democrats believe that 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 about Biden’s ability to win or carry out a second term.

“There's a deep hope right now — a very deep hope — that she will at least have a diverse set of views as it relates to economic and financial services policy,” said Michael Bright, CEO of the Structured Finance Association and former acting president of Ginnie Mae.

Still, there's a lack of clarity around Harris’ specific policy agenda, who she will listen to and how she will solve the Rubik’s Cube of holding different factions of her coalition together on critical economic policy questions if she wins in November.

Many of the top economic advisers to her campaign, including Brian Deese and Gene Sperling, played key roles in crafting Biden’s agenda. Her roster of official and unofficial advisers includes key staffers from her Senate career, such as Rohini Kosoglu and Deanne Millison.

She once proposed taxing financial transactions and sought to tax corporate profits to remedy gender pay disparities. She extracted a $20 billion settlement from big banks for mortgage relief during the financial crisis and moved to block major health care mergers. Her stump speech takes aim at bank fees and price gouging — meat-and-potatoes Bidenomics fare — and derides Trump’s plan to slash corporate taxes.

Taken collectively, it’s a platform that should be sending C-suites into a tizzy. To Democrats on Wall Street, it hasn’t mattered a bit.

“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 state attorney general provided her with a greater understanding of how Silicon Valley operates, they added. “She's just in a different milieu.”

Democratic donors, consultants, staffers and CEO whisperers who spoke with POLITICO over the last three weeks have shrugged at the positions Harris took in prior campaigns. Her platform during the 2020 Democratic primary was left-of-center, but that “was a very different political environment,” one top party bundler said.

Harris was competing for air time against Warren and Bernie Sanders — progressives who had a hammerlock on the party’s base when it comes to economic policy. She tacked closer to the center when Biden selected her as his running mate and donors have taken their “cues from how she’s operated on the national level, in the Biden-Harris administration,” the bundler said.

As vice president, she has frequently served as a bridge between Biden and corporate America. She oversaw public-private partnerships between the administration and major banks focused on small business investment as efforts to extend federal contracts to minority-owned businesses .

Wall Street executives bristled at the administration’s regulatory approach over the last three-and-a-half years, often griping that their views weren’t being taken seriously by the White House, or that regulators like FTC Commissioner Lina Khan or SEC Chair Gary Gensler were pursuing rules and enforcement actions that were legally spurious.

Harris has largely avoided that criticism — at least from industry centrists. With Biden gone from the ticket, her allies have been telling business leaders that she represents a more stable alternative to Trump. They won’t have to worry about responding to midnight policy shifts published on social media accounts, or interference in core market functions like Federal Reserve rate-setting. Her rolodex is aiding that pitch.

“She has a lot of relationships here, not just Wall Street,” said Kathy Wylde, president and CEO of the Partnership for New York City, a nonprofit organization that represents the city’s top business leaders. “Biden did not have as many deep personal connections here.”

But some have also taken that as a sign that she’ll be open to changes that would dramatically shift how the administration has previously addressed markets or regulation. Some Democratic megadonors like LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Expedia Chair Barry Diller have publicly called for Harris to show Khan the door if elected.

Few expect her to publicly delve into personnel plans at this stage. And as for her broader policies — given the sprint between when she became the presumptive nominee and the election — many Democrats don’t expect her to get too specific on policies that would ignite more intraparty fights.

Progressives have been gunning for her to tack left on the administration’s existing policies. She has already endorsed capping rents, a Biden administration proposal that was rolled out to industry derision last month, but housing advocates want her to go even further. The Roosevelt Institute, a left-leaning think tank, released a policy blueprint for how the Biden-Harris administration should tighten rules around bank mergers and capital requirements. Financial services leaders — Democrat or otherwise — would bristle at all of those policies.

The question now is how she’ll hold those groups together.

“I don’t foresee there being a huge leftward tilt between now and November,” the bundler said. “She’s got a general election in such a truncated period of time. While she’ll have to speak to the specifics more, I don’t see it being too divergent from the current Biden platform.”