AFTER THE HONEYMOON — When the Kamala Harris honeymoon ends, it will likely be due to the economy. The vice president has enjoyed a surge of base support in recent days and seen some tightening in her head-to-head polls with Donald Trump. But the economy still remains a top-of-mind issue for voters — especially undecideds and lower income voters. And many of them aren’t feeling the love for the Biden/Harris economic policies, even if they personally benefited from them. Take the workers at Ingeteam, a Milwaukee manufacturer of wind turbines and electric vehicle chargers. The factory got a huge boost from Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act — so big that Biden himself visited last year to mark the one-year anniversary of the IRA. But talk to many of the workers there, and they’re still down on the economy. One union wind turbine repair technician said he didn’t feel that Democrats’ industrial policies had benefited him “at all” — even though he got a double-digit pay raise this year and was training a new hire to repair wind turbines that were being installed thanks to the generous tax credits in the IRA. Both he and the trainee said they were likely to vote for Trump. Is this a classic case of working class people voting against their material interests, as Beltway liberals often opine? Not when you talk to voters themselves. For those Wisconsinites, the culprit was simple: inflation. Both workers said that they still felt price increases were at an “all time high” and thought of the issue not in terms of the latest, moderating inflation figures — which Democrats like to point to — but to prices when Trump was in office. Even loyal Democratic voters at the plant admitted the economy was a weak spot, with one saying it “kind of sucks” due to inflation on food, rent and other essentials. Those perspectives are indicative of a long running issue for Biden, which Harris will now inherit as the presumptive Democratic nominee: that even while economic indicators are moving in the right direction, most voters still feel that their material conditions have worsened in the last few years. And in an election season, it’s voter sentiment — not economic statistics — that matter. “There’s this kind of wishy-washy thought on the economy,” admitted Kent Miller, the Wisconsin Laborers’ district council president, whose union members are working on another IRA-funded facility, the Paris Solar Project, south of Milwaukee. “When we connect those dots, they get it,” he said, but many members don’t realize “that it’s because of these [federal] investments that we’re securing good contract wins and … we have unemployment at a record, all-time low.” It’s a problem the Kamala vibe-shift will struggle to knock down. Though Harris wasn’t on the top of the ticket when we visited Wisconsin, those factory workers and other voters in Milwaukee were largely unmoved by the potential that she might take over, and expressed befuddlement at how her policies would differ from the Biden ones that they panned repeatedly. “I don’t even know who else they have on the Democratic side,” the turbine technician, Jake Westray, said. It’s something that Washington Democrats hope Harris can overcome by shifting both the content and context of her economic message. But they stress that it’ll take more than green-tinted memes to win over skeptical Rust Belt voters. Harris will need to speak to their actual material conditions and not just repeat the Biden-world line that, actually, if you know your stuff, the economy is good. “You can't tell people that what they're feeling isn't real,” said Democratic Rep. Dan Kildee, who represents a swing district around Flint, Michigan. “She just has to be straight with people. We know [inflation] is an issue, we know how it happened, we know the U.S. is doing better than any other industrialized country when it comes to issues of inflation and economic growth.” “If you look across countries across time, inflation is the single most demoralizing economic element in the world,” added Rep. Jake Auchincloss, a Massachusetts Democrat. “That’s the opportunity for Harris, by the way, because people don’t hold her responsible for inflation … and I would strongly encourage a message that hinges on economics on a lower cost of living going forward.” The Harris camp says they are on it. Her economic advisers worked the phones with reporters this week, saying that Harris would prioritize more elements of the “care economy” — like re-upping the Child Tax Credit — and support for small businesses, in hopes that those policies will resonate with voters more than the abstractions of industrial policy. “Debating about the theory and academic discussions on economic policy does not get her up in the morning. What she really cares about is: how does it work in practice for people?” Jill Habig, who worked under Harris when she was California’s attorney general, told POLITICO. That’s an encouraging message for lawmakers like Kildee and Auchincloss, but they still want to see more from the campaign to convince voters that their personal financial conditions – not some abstraction of the broader economy – will improve if Harris is in the White House. To do that, they both pointed to an issue that Harris has yet to address: housing. “I would place a very high priority on housing on the cost of housing, affordability of housing,” Kildee said. “It's an issue that cuts across the economic and social spectrum and I would, if I were advising them … I would lean heavily into that as the next core economic element of our agenda.” Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s author at gbade@politico.com or on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @GavinBade. | 
