Vice President Kamala Harris has been hammering Donald Trump over how his agenda could drive up the cost of living and cause the economy to contract. Before she takes the debate stage tonight, her campaign has also been teeing up attacks to go after the former president over how his policies would add trillions to the national debt. Recent estimates from the Penn Wharton Budget Model suggest that Harris’s policy plans would add considerably less to primary deficits over the next 10 years than what Trump has proposed. Her campaign has been playing up how Trump’s policies would create, in its words, a “debt explosion that would be put squarely on the backs of the middle class” Polls taken by the Democratic polling firm Blueprint found evidence that a deficit hawk message could resonate with Republicans who supported former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley during the primary. Those voters are much more likely to blame Trump-era tax cuts for driving up the national debt. Haley voters, in particular, “have a real problem with how Donald Trump managed government spending, and it drove their voter behavior in the Republican primaries,” Evan Roth Smith, a founding partner at the political consulting firm Slingshot Strategies and Blueprint’s lead pollster, told MM. Democratic messaging for much of the presidential campaign sought to attract Haley voters by framing the case against Trump “on matters of character,” Smith said. “Being serious about fiscal responsibility and serious about responsible tax policy is actually really important to winning them over. And you're probably not going to win them over if you don't speak to them about one of the leading issues they have with Donald Trump.” While most polls suggest inflation, or the overall state of the economy, remains the top concern for voters, a recent survey taken by the Peterson Foundation found considerable appetite for both Harris and Trump to offer more specifics on their plans to address the country’s $35 trillion debt load during the debate. “President Trump's agenda, as he's laid it out, would put us further into the red,” Marc Goldwein, senior policy director at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, told MM. But there are still questions around whether the tax plans laid out in Harris’s stated policies would raise enough revenue to fund some of her other proposals, he said. “I'm not positive that actually Harris will end up better.” The Biden and Trump administrations both added trillions of dollars to the national debt. Trump approved $8.8 trillion of gross new borrowing and $443 billion of deficit reduction while in office, according to CRFB estimates. President Joe Biden approved $6.2 trillion of new borrowing and $1.9 trillion of deficit reduction. Harris will also have to weigh the risks of triangulating too far to the right in an effort to sway voters who — before Trump — would never consider supporting a Democrat for president. The Haley voters that Blueprint identified are conservative Republicans with “strong views on fiscal policy,” according to Smith. That’d be tough sledding for any Democrat, much less someone who cut their teeth in San Francisco city politics. The challenge Harris has faced — and will continue to face on tonight’s debate stage — is to make an affirmative case for a policy agenda that could be palatable to a coalition that now includes both Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and former Vice President Dick Cheney. Any policy adjustment that Harris makes to placate moderate or hard-right Republicans could muddle her appeal to the party’s base. To wit: David Stein, a fellow at the progressive think tank the Roosevelt Institute, published an analysis last week arguing that Democrats need to shed Clinton-era hawkishness if the party is to meaningfully address looming challenges related to cost-of-living and climate. "The Democratic Party is holding so much because of the lack of any functioning Republican Party right now,” one former Biden administration official told MM. “I worry that it will tear apart if every policy decision becomes an attempt [to] balance this Jenga tower, issue by issue.” IT’S TUESDAY — Be sure to visit POLITICO.com this evening as your host, and several of his talented colleagues, will be live blogging the debate. And if you’ve got thoughts on how Harris and Trump perform, send them my way to ssutton@politico.com.
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