Harris to address economic issues Wednesday in 'major speech' in Pittsburgh

Vice President Kamala Harris will be visiting the Pittsburgh region for the fourth time since she became the Democrats’ pick to run for president this November — and this time, she’ll have much more to say.

Details of the visit itself were still under wraps Tuesday evening, but a senior campaign official said it would include a “major speech” focused on economic policy, in which Harris will offer proposals to secure American leadership in manufacturing.

The campaign did not provide policy specifics but said the address will build off earlier speeches Harris gave in North Carolina and New Hampshire. In those appearances, she laid out a number of proposals designed to be part of an “opportunity economy” focused on small businesses and families of modest means. Among the concepts she broached were a pledge to provide a $6,000 child tax credit through the child’s first birthday, and to offer first-time home buyers $25,000 in aid to help make a down payment. Harris has also pledged to offer larger tax deductions for small business start-ups as a means to incentivize entrepreneurs.

Pittsburgh seems poised to serve not just as a backdrop for the speech but a model for its spirit: Harris is expected to say that the rise of manufacturing here gave rise to the American labor movement and the middle class as a whole, and demonstrated a legacy of global economic leadership. (The appearance marks a bit of a call-back to the fact that in 2021 President Joe Biden laid out his own ambitious economic proposals at a union hall in Pittsburgh.)

More broadly, the campaign official said Harris will reprise some of the themes she laid out in her nomination acceptance speech at this summer’s Democratic National Convention. She’ll tout her middle-class upbringing and her history of enforcing state environmental and other regulations on corporations when she was California’s attorney general. In all, the goal will be to define herself as a “pragmatist” capable both of encouraging businesses and policing them.

By contrast, the official said, the speech will describe Republican nominee and former President Donald Trump as someone whose tax-cut proposals have largely benefited the wealthy and for whom “our economy works best if it works for those who own the big skyscrapers — not those who build them.”

Trump himself was in the Pittsburgh region on Monday, for a rally in Indiana County in which he derided reports that Harris would speak “about her plan to, quote, ‘build wealth.’ ... She’s been there four years. She hasn’t done anything but destroy our country."

Trump’s speech offered little in the way of concrete policy proposals, but he has criticized Harris’ past opposition to fracking for natural gas, maintaining that her subsequent public support of the industry can’t be trusted.

Harris has held a number of large-scale rallies of her own in other parts of the state and in other swing states around the country. But to date, her appearances in Western Pennsylvania have been retail-level “pop-up” events in which she appeared at landmark local businesses, such as Primanti’s or a Johnstown bookstore.

But Wednesday’s speech comes at a time when the campaign feels like it is picking up tailwinds, even on economic issues. Recent polling suggests that Harris has built a very slight edge in Pennsylvania and other states. Other polls suggest that as inflation pressures have eased after a post-COVID surge in inflation, Harris has eaten into Trump’s previous advantage on economic issues.