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When two of Vice President Kamala Harris’s closest advisers arrived in New York last month, they were seeking advice. The Democratic nominee was preparing to give her most far-reaching economic speech, and Tony West, Ms. Harris’s brother-in-law, and Brian Nelson, a longtime confidant, wanted to know how the city’s powerful financiers thought she should approach it.
Over two days, the pair held meetings across Wall Street, including at the offices of Lazard, an investment bank, and the elite law firm Paul, Weiss. Among the ideas the attendees pitched was to provide more lucrative tax breaks for companies that allowed their workers to become part owners, according to two people at the meetings. The campaign had already been discussing such an idea with an executive at KKR, the private equity firm.
A few days later, Ms. Harris endorsed the idea during her speech in Pittsburgh. “We will reform our tax laws to make it easier for businesses to let workers share in their company’s success,” she said.
The line, while just a piece of a much broader speech, was emblematic of Ms. Harris’s approach to economic policy since she took the helm of the Democratic Party in July. As part of a bid to cut into former President Donald J. Trump’s polling lead on the economy, her campaign has carefully courted business leaders, organizing a steady stream of meetings and calls in which corporate executives and donors offer their thoughts on tax policy, financial regulation and other issues.
The private feedback has, in sometimes subtle ways, shaped Ms. Harris’s economic agenda over the course of her accelerated campaign. At several points, she has sprinkled language into broader speeches that business executives say reflects their views. And, in at least one instance, Ms. Harris made a specific policy commitment — to pare back a tax increase on capital gains — after extended talks with her corporate allies.
This article is based on interviews with more than two dozen campaign officials, policy experts, donors, lobbyists and business leaders.
They describe a Democratic campaign that is far more open to corporate input than the one President Biden had led for much of the election cycle. Ms. Harris’s team does not take all of the advice it is given. Some pleas for a more robust endorsement of big business have been ignored, for example, while some of the meetings have devolved into executives’ raising specific tax problems their companies face.
The friendlier corporate ties have nevertheless raised questions about whether Ms. Harris’s overtures are campaign-season coalition building — or a sign that she will take a more centrist tack if she wins the White House. On some issues, like a proposed tax on the ultrawealthy, her campaign has been studiously ambiguous, fueling uncertainty about what kind of an economic leader she would be.
“The campaign is definitely giving large corporations a seat at the table and giving them a voice,” said Roger Hochschild, a former chief executive of Discover Financial Services, who speaks regularly with Ms. Harris’s aides. “That doesn’t mean you’re going to get everything you want. But it is resulting in more centrist policies, and it is a significant difference from the Biden administration.”
Charles Kretchmer Lutvak, a spokesman for the Harris campaign, said that if she won, Ms. Harris would continue to listen to the business community as she pursued a “bold, capitalist vision” for the economy. “As president, Kamala Harris will continue to be open and pragmatic about how to deliver that vision for the American people,” he said.
‘Rules of the Road’
Ms. Harris’s first economic policy proposal, made just a few weeks after Mr. Biden dropped out of the race, immediately raised concerns on Wall Street. In response to elevated inflation in the last few years, the vice president announced in August that she would ban “price gouging” for groceries.
Some of Ms. Harris’s donors warned campaign advisers against such a ban, arguing that it would amount to counterproductive price controls. In the days after, Ms. Harris’s team clarified that the plan would apply only during emergencies and would mirror laws already in place in many states — a narrower concept that would not immediately address rising grocery prices.
The price-gouging touched on a broader anxiety among Ms. Harris’s corporate allies, who were worried that her economic policies might cater to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.
While Ms. Harris has walked back several left-leaning pledges she made during her presidential run in 2019, many corporate executives have had deep concerns about the Biden administration’s economic policies. Mr. Biden embraced significant tax increases on the rich and appointed ambitious regulators like Lina Khan, the Federal Trade Commission chair, who has made investors feel that deal-making on Wall Street has become increasingly unpredictable by taking a more aggressive approach to challenging mergers.
But the extent of the outreach from Ms. Harris’s team has left many on Wall Street viewing her as a more moderate economic leader than Mr. Biden. Many of the entreaties have been made by Mr. West, who was a top Justice Department official under President Barack Obama and has taken leave from his job as the chief legal officer at Uber to help the campaign.
While Ms. Harris has not criticized Ms. Khan, a popular figure on the left, she has made remarks that indicate a less zealous approach to antitrust enforcement, endorsing “consistent and transparent rules of the road to create a stable business environment.” It was the signal that some of her allies on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley, which Ms. Harris represented as a senator from California, had been asking for.
“This is the kind of philosophy we want to hear,” said Jon Henes, the founder of C Street Advisory Group, a communications consulting firm, and Ms. Harris’s finance chief from her last presidential run. “We need to make sure we are not constrained by regulation when we are trying to expand economic opportunity.”
The friendlier approach comes as Ms. Harris tries to blunt attacks from Mr. Trump that she is a far-left radical who would destroy the economy, an issue that voters regularly put at the top of their list in the election. Some wealthy supporters have started a website and podcast called “Business Leaders for Harris.”
“You have people who are very successful, very credible out there, saying she’s business friendly,” said Rebecca Patterson, formerly the chief investment strategist at Bridgewater Associates, a hedge fund. “Having them speak on her behalf goes a long way toward gaining trust with that community that she would be centrist or at least not extreme left.”
To be sure, Ms. Harris has endorsed policies that run counter to her business allies’ pecuniary interests, including raising the corporate tax rate to 28 percent from 21 percent. And Mr. Trump, himself a billionaire, has endorsed tax cuts that could provide big benefits for the wealthy and corporations.
But Ms. Harris’s campaign has taken it a step further than friendly rhetoric. Under Mr. Biden, the White House prepared plans that chipped away at two dearly held tax preferences for high-income Americans: a lower tax rate on capital gains and the assessment of taxes on investments only after they are sold, or realized.
Ms. Harris appeared to endorse the White House plans early in the campaign by saying she supported Mr. Biden’s budget, creating a panic among her wealthy supporters. Many of them called Ms. Harris’s policy advisers to challenge the White House proposals, according to people familiar with the calls. One proposal would tax capital gains at the same rate as wages for Americans making more than $1 million a year, while the other, called the billionaire minimum tax, would tax unrealized gains for Americans worth more than $100 million.
Ms. Harris has publicly called for billionaires to pay more in taxes, a politically popular idea, and her campaign did not want to explicitly walk back the tax on unrealized gains. But while Ms. Harris has continued to publicly call for a “billionaire minimum tax,” her advisers say the phrase does not necessarily mean she supports Mr. Biden’s version of the idea. People close to the campaign are looking at other ways to raise taxes on the ultrawealthy without taxing unrealized gains.
Ms. Harris was less shy about the other capital gains proposal. In a speech in New Hampshire, she said she would raise the top capital gains rate to 28 percent, an increase from the current top rate of 20 percent, but below Mr. Biden’s proposed increase to 39.6 percent.
That statement, a single line in a longer speech on the economy, has helped fuel support from big-money donors. At an event at the ritzy Cipriani Wall Street in late September, Ms. Harris raised $27 million. Among the event’s attendees were Mike Novogratz, the chief executive of Galaxy Digital; H. Rodgin Cohen, the senior chair of the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell; and Andy Cohen, the media executive behind the “Real Housewives” franchise. Her campaign has raised $1 billion in just a few months.
On the other hand, the tax change raised eyebrows on the left. “We all noticed it,” said Felicia Wong, the president of the Roosevelt Forward, a progressive group. “I also would note that in the exact same set of policy proposals, she continued to propose tax reforms that would raise rates on the wealthy.”
Ms. Wong said she expected Ms. Harris to take a more case-by-case approach to economic ideas. “You see a range of different kind of policies from her.”
‘I Am a Capitalist’
The night before Ms. Harris was set to deliver her economic speech in Pittsburgh, her campaign gathered roughly two dozen donors and supporters to brief them on the outlines of her remarks and preview the 82 pages of economic plans that were being released the next day.
The speech and plans toured through many of Ms. Harris’s existing proposals, including expanding tax breaks for start-up businesses and offering a subsidy to first-time home buyers. It also included new commitments to offer subsidies to a wide range of technology industries. More broadly, she laid out an overall economic philosophy that tried to nullify Mr. Trump’s criticism.
“Look, I am a capitalist. I believe in free and fair markets,” Ms. Harris said. Later on in the speech, she added: “I believe that most companies are working hard to do right by their customers and the employees who depend on them. And we must work with them to grow our economy.”
Sitting in the crowd was Mark Cuban, the celebrity billionaire, who has become an avid supporter and surrogate for Ms. Harris. Since she took over the top of the ticket, Mr. Cuban said, he had been sending her team “a never-ending stream of texts and calls and emails” with ideas on a wide range of public policy issues. Before she took the stage in Pittsburgh, Mr. Cuban said, he spent about 15 minutes with the vice president, a discussion that she said was largely “niceties.”
Among the issues that Mr. Cuban said he had been pushing was support for artificial intelligence, which Ms. Harris in turn pledged to support with tax subsidies and funding for a research center.
“The list is endless, and in all those areas I’ve seen something pop into her speech at some level,” he said. Mr. Cuban said he had not donated money to the Harris campaign.
Ms. Harris also said during the speech that she would support cryptocurrency, saying the United States should remain “dominant” in the blockchain.
Paul Grewal, the chief legal officer at Coinbase, a crypto exchange, said he had spoken several times with top aides to Ms. Harris. He, along with other crypto executives, sat down with Mr. Nelson, Ms. Harris’s confidant, on the sidelines of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August.
The Harris aides have largely listened as Mr. Grewal and others have complained about what they see as regulatory overreach by financial regulators in the Biden administration. While she has not committed to any specific policy steps, Ms. Harris has made several public remarks supportive of digital assets.
“To get the attention of Kamala’s inner circle relatively early, relatively soon after she took over the top of the ticket, I thought was, in and of itself, a win,” Mr. Grewal said. “In so many other industries, they give their right arm to be mentioned even once by a major-party nominee. We’ve now heard from the vice president multiple times.”
For now, Democrats in the progressive wing of the party have largely stayed quiet as Ms. Harris has catered to industries with her campaign talk. If she wins in November, though, they are likely to push her to continue what they see as crucial victories under Mr. Biden on taxes and financial regulation. In a social media post last week, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York, said there would be an “an out and out brawl” if Ms. Khan’s leadership of the F.T.C. was put into doubt.
Mr. Cuban, for his part, sees Ms. Harris as a total break from Mr. Biden’s Democratic Party.
“She says she’s open to inputs from independents and Republicans, she means it. She truly is open minded. I’ve put some wild things in her direction that they don’t laugh at,” he said. “People are trying to say, ‘Here are the progressive and liberal principles that have always been the principles of the Democratic Party.’ Those are gone. It’s Kamala Harris’s party now.”
Kate Kelly contributed reporting.
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