The most surprising aspect of Kamala Harris' big surge

The vibes around Vice President Kamala Harris are very good. There are the memes, the surge in fundraising, and the general improvement in swing-state polling since she took over the Democratic presidential ticket. In fact, the vibes are so good that she seems to have even been able to shake off President Joe Biden's terrible economic reputation.

Despite being part of the administration, it seems like Harris is unburdened by what has been. A recent poll even found that Americans trusted her with handling the economy more than the Republican ticket, a surprising feat for a Democratic candidate. Kamala does not entirely exist in the context that came before her. She looks around, laughs, and says, "What vibecession?"

I'm being a little hyperbolic here, but it really is the case that Harris has a serious opportunity to reshape her economic narrative. People may not be sold on her solving all their money woes, but enough voters appear willing to consider the idea that she might be better for their pocketbooks than former President Donald Trump.

Much of the conventional wisdom on elections — as epitomized by Bill Clinton's strategist Jim Carville during Clinton's campaign in 1992 — is, "It's the economy, stupid." It's an accurate sentiment; the economy typically ranks at or near the top of voters' most pressing issues. But it's also more complicated than meets the eye. When people say they're concerned about "the economy," it can mean a lot of things — grocery prices, gas prices, housing prices, healthcare. This year, for some people, it was a proxy way of saying that Biden was old.

Regardless of the underlying cause of their agitation, before Biden's exit from the 2024 race, voters' opinions of his economic track record represented one of the president's biggest hurdles to reelection. People were mad at prices, they hated inflation, and they blamed Biden for all these woes. The White House tried to put a positive spin on it and dub it all "Bidenomics," but people were not picking up what it was putting down.

Now, with Harris atop the ticket, the ground is shifting.

A new poll conducted in early August by the Financial Times and the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business found that more Americans trusted Harris to handle the economy than they did Trump, 42% to 41%. That's a notable jump from July, when Biden was still in the race. At that point, just 35% of voters said they trusted the president more on the economy, while 41% picked Trump. Not everything in the poll was roses for Harris — Trump still has an edge on trade issues with China and who people believe will leave them better off financially — but the results are a marked improvement.

"Harris is being judged remarkably independent of the Biden-Harris record," said Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster and the president of Lake Research Partners. "They were blaming Biden a lot as kind of the man in charge. But I think it's a new leaf now, and people are interested in future-forward."

And while it is only one poll, the trust that Americans are putting in Harris is relatively unique for a Democrat. Historically, voters have tended to perceive Republicans as better stewards of the economy. Biden did edge ahead of Trump in some polls in 2020 as the pandemic caused unprecedented economic chaos, but as a general rule, the American people think the GOP will do better on the economy — especially when the candidate is a businessman, like Trump.

But Harris has managed to upend the narrative. A late-July poll from Blueprint, a Democratic polling firm, found that Harris and Trump were tied on who voters trusted more to bring down prices and create jobs for everyone who needs one. Harris has an edge on keeping rent and housing costs affordable but trails Trump on lowering gas prices and interest rates. Blueprint also found Harris did much better than Biden on a variety of economic measures, including passing economic policies that people thought would benefit them and getting prices down.

"In relationship to Donald Trump, the economic policies of the Biden administration are not strongly associated with Kamala Harris in the minds of voters," Evan Roth Smith, the lead pollster at Blueprint, said. On balance, Smith told me, voters are in wait-and-see mode.

"Voters instinctively are ready to give her a chance," he said. "They trust her to at least be as good as Trump on most of these economic things they care about, but she does have to help voters connect the dots on what she thinks."

This change in perception is not because the economy transformed overnight — alas, we have not erased the past few years of inflation and reverted to 2019 prices. It's because people's impressions and outlooks are different. With Biden out of the race, a lot of voters simply feel better.

"At some point, elections are about vibes, right?" Eli Yokley, a US policy analyst at Morning Consult, said. "And if you're a voter, and you think the vibes are bad — be it on the economy, be it because of the former Democratic presumptive nominee's age weighing on your thoughts — all of these things sort of build on themselves and shift perceptions of a lot of these issues. We saw sentiment declining about Biden's handling of climate change or LGBT rights, the No. 1 things where Democrats always are ahead, and it was moving at a similar pace about the economy."

The Penta-CivicScience Economic Sentiment Index, which measures Americans' expectations of the economy moving forward, saw a big jump in the last two weeks of July, about the time Biden dropped out and Harris stepped in. When the vibes start shifting, they shift on everything.

Whether people feel it, much of the economy is good on paper. Economic growth is strong. Inflation is coming down, even if prices remain elevated. Gas prices are lower. Wages are up. Mortgage rates have been falling. The Federal Reserve is likely to slash interest rates in September, which will be a welcome relief to consumers and businesses alike. The labor market has remained resilient, though some cracks are starting to show. Over time, inflation should start to sting less as people get used to prices and pay catches up.

"People are still up in arms about how much they're paying for things compared to a few years ago, but I think increasingly less so," Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody's Analytics, said.

But Biden was limited in his ability to make this case. Democrats can't reason or argue or scream their way to convincing people the economy is good or getting them less riled up about the very real annoyance that is high prices. But maybe, with Harris as the nominee and Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota beside her, they won't have to, at least not as much.

For one thing, it's not clear that voters think Harris, as vice president, has had much involvement in Biden's economic policies. A recent swing-state poll from Morning Consult asked voters what impact they thought Harris had on the economy and inflation in the Biden administration. About one-third said she had a positive impact, one-third said she had a negative impact, and one-third said she had no impact at all or they didn't know.

"Voters don't quite know exactly how to blame her or how to fit her into that conversation," Yokley said. "Just like her favorability numbers that we've seen improvements on, she starts with a much blanker slate than folks might expect the sitting vice president to."

That blank slate can be used as an advantage. Harris can talk about a distinct vision and more-popular policies, whether it be tackling housing costs or supporting wealth building or fostering entrepreneurship or creating jobs or supporting the middle class. And she doesn't have to utter the words "inflation" or "Bidenomics."

"She has an opening because people are like, 'OK, let's take a new look,'" Lake said. "It's a race to define what her economic perspective is."

Even with this opportunity, Harris does have to compete with some history. There's a deep partisan divide in the way people say they feel about the economy. When a Democrat is in the White House, Democratic voters say everything is awesome, and Republicans say everything is terrible. When a Republican gets elected, it flips. As mentioned, voters often trust Republicans over Democrats on the economy, and many polls indicate Trump still has an advantage over Harris. People remember the Trump economy as a better time — interest rates were lower, prices were lower, houses seemed more affordable.

"Most people don't even know what the policies are, but they sure know how much their groceries cost," Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster and political consultant, said. Still, that's one factor of many. "You can't say that inflation is more important than Donald Trump's character or inflation is more important than Kamala Harris' capabilities," he said. "It's apples and oranges. It's two different sets of concerns."

The task for Harris now is to lay out an economic identity and agenda before others beat her to it. She ran on a quite progressive agenda in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, but she's shifted some of her positions, so it's not clear to what extent that's much of a guidepost for what she'd do as POTUS. In the Senate representing California, Harris proposed legislation to get tax credits to lower- and middle-income families. On the 2024 campaign trail, she's also likely to tout her prosecutorial record as California's attorney general in going after pharmaceutical companies and big banks, including securing a $20 billion settlement from financial institutions during the foreclosure crisis. At a rally in Las Vegas early this month, Harris said she would fight for raising the minimum wage and endorsed eliminating taxes on tips for service workers. The latter is a proposal Trump has already made.

Harris likely does have to put forward a positive message on the economy, though given the excitement around her, she may not want to get too in the weeds on it. She could also probably make some hits on Trump. He's proposing a suite of tariffs that many economists say would increase prices even more, and he would push to extend the 2017 tax cuts that disproportionately benefit the wealthy.

"I just think that Democrats have a pretty good theory of the case on the economy, and I think the more that people learn about the Trump approach on the economy, the more concerned they'll get about it," said Bharat Ramamurti, formerly the deputy director of the National Economic Council under Biden.

None of this is to say that this is all smooth sailing for the Harris campaign, on the economy or any other front. The problem with being a blank canvas is that anyone can paint on it, including her rivals. The Trump campaign and the GOP are trying to tie her to the negative feelings around the Biden economy, to affordability and inflation.

But for now, voters are giving Harris the benefit of the doubt on the economy, or at least an opportunity to chart her own path. Luckily for her, she has some distance from some of the context that came before her. On the economy, it's almost as if Harris fell out of a coconut tree.

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.