WASHINGTON — When Kamala Harris stood onstage at the Democratic National Convention for the biggest speech of her life, she tucked an economic pitch into her biography: “The middle class is where I come from,” she said.
As she fights to win over voters struggling with stubbornly high prices, Harris has been drawing on her own life story to paint herself as a champion of the middle class. It’s far from novel for a politician to do so, but what is unique on the presidential stage is Harris’s background.
It’s a story that’s very different than the ones told by President Biden, who she replaced on the Democratic ticket, and by Donald Trump, who she is facing in November — both known for their ability to appeal to working-class voters. But Harris is hoping her narrative, one that features her mother, an immigrant, working as a scientist and raising two multiracial children by herself, both reflects and gives her more credibility with Americans today.
“The middle class isn’t monolithic, and the story that she’s telling is a fantastic insight not only into her background, as she is informing voters about who she is, but it’s also a wonderful way to just highlight different aspects of middle class that maybe didn’t get the attention with ‘Scranton Joe’ [Biden],” said Gabe Horwitz of Third Way, a center-left think tank.
Still, with polls showing Trump leading with voters on questions of economic policy and Biden’s economic record as unpopular, it’s a gamble on one of the biggest factors weighing on voters leading into Election Day.
Harris has been explicit in using her multiethnic, nontraditional family’s life story as part of her economic message.
“This is personal for me,” Harris said in her DNC speech. “My mother kept a strict budget. We lived within our means, yet we wanted for little. And she expected us to make the most of the opportunities that were available to us and to be grateful for them, because, as she taught us, opportunity is not available to everyone. That’s why we will create what I call an opportunity economy.”
In plugging her hope to bring down housing costs in a new ad, Harris cites her mother’s efforts to save up to buy her first house. Another ad highlighting her family mentions her summer job at McDonald’s to earn spending money in college and has cited her upbringing as what she has in common with her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.
“Two middle-class kids,” Harris told a crowd in Milwaukee last week. “One born in Oakland, Calif., to a working mom. The other, a son of the Nebraska plains who grew up working on a farm. ... Only in America is it possible for them together to make it all the way to the White House.”
Harris has used the talking points to also draw a contrast with Trump, who built his real estate empire in large part thanks to starter money from his wealthy father, painting him as an out-of-touch billionaire. “He doesn’t actually fight for the middle class. Instead, he fights for himself and his billionaire friends,” Harris said.
But it’s not just a contrast to Trump. Biden famously cites his upbringing in selling himself as a politician, as well. His narrative of growing up in Scranton, Penn., and Delaware in the 1940s and 1950s, though, is of a different era, where his Irish-Catholic father worked to support the family on a single income.
“Our dad worked like hell,” Biden said in Ireland last spring. “We’d have dinner at six o’clock ... And then he’d go back to work until nine o’clock.”
Harris’s economic policies aren’t wildly different than Biden’s, to the extent that she has detailed them at all, but have a different emphasis. She has mainly offered goals if she were to win, including bringing down grocery prices with a light-on-detail pledge to stop price gouging. Harris has focused on housing costs by offering first-time home buyers down payment help, for example, and proposed a significantly expanded child tax credit.
Republicans have sought to portray themselves as the saviors of the middle class and Harris as its enemy. Trump recently held a news conference at his golf club surrounded by an array of groceries to highlight inflation.
“The middle class is currently suffering under Bidenomics, which Kamala Harris insists is ‘working.’” Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung said in a statement. “Kamala thinks this is ‘Men in Black’ and she can just wipe voters’ memories. She is in power and the majority of voters say they are worse off under her.”
Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the center-right American Action Forum and a former adviser to John McCain’s presidential campaign, said he understands Harris wanting to build her narrative, but doesn’t necessarily find it convincing.
“She’s starting out telling her story, which is always more effective politics than policy, but her policies are cousins of the administration’s policies,” said Holtz-Eakin. “They are big, expensive social programs that aren’t typically how the middle class got ahead. So it doesn’t hang together yet, at least not for me.”
In reality, the middle class is a nebulous, almost mythic, category. The Census Bureau has no specific definition of middle class.
Mark Hugo Lopez, a director of race and ethnicity research at the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, said the American middle class, as defined by income, has actually shrunk over time as income inequality has grown. Today, it has a median income of just over $100,000 a year, according to Pew, up from $66,000 roughly 50 years ago.
A greater share of white, Asian American, and multiracial Americans are middle class compared with Hispanic, Black, and Native Americans. But far more Americans identify themselves as middle class than qualify by income, both of upper- and lower-income groups. Hispanics are especially likely to identify as middle class despite being lower income, Lopez said, suggesting an aspirational definition, as well. But in one key way, America does reflect the shift in personal background embodied by Harris.
“The nation has changed a lot and our electorate has become more diverse, it’s more diverse on a number of dimensions,” Lopez said. “The nation’s electorate is more Black, more Hispanic, more Asian than it was just 20 years ago. ... Today about 1 in 10 potential voters are immigrants.”
At the convention last week, a number of delegates said they agreed with Harris’s expansion of the image of the middle class to include families like hers. Lisa R. Kaul is a county-level legislator from Poughkeepsie, N.Y., a swing district battleground. An Indian American like Harris, Kaul said she appreciates how Harris is featuring her own life story in the campaign.
“I think Kamala is telling us a version of a middle-class story that hasn’t been told thus far, because it centers the role of women,” Kaul said. “It’s really giving voice to a segment of society that I personally think has not had the voice, but has done the work. And it’s also the reality of people’s lives.”
Though Holtz-Eakin, of the American Action Forum, doubts the effectiveness of many of Harris’s policies, he also said it’s a smart campaign strategy. He recalls in 2008 when McCain’s campaign realized how little Americans knew of the late senator’s life story and scrambled to educate them.
“There’s a lot of issues that come down to character in presidential campaigns,” Holtz-Eakin said. “We needed to explain to the voters who John McCain was — not big accomplishments, not the proposals — who he was. They care about the candidate. She has the same problem, can she do it? Maybe.”
But, he added as a caveat, “We didn’t win.”
Tal Kopan can be reached at tal.kopan@globe.com. Follow her @talkopan.