With her presidential campaign just six weeks old, Vice President Kamala Harris has held multiple rallies and bus tours, but has made only two major policy speeches – both on the economy.

In those two speeches – one in North Carolina, the other this week in New Hampshire – Harris rolled out a number of policy priorities, including expanding the child tax credit, building more affordable housing, creating a $25,000 credit for first-time homebuyers and an expansion of tax incentives for small business startups. On Wednesday in the Granite State, Harris put forward what she assumes some "are going to call a very ambitious goal” of expanding small business opportunities in this country.

“I think we should admire ambition in each other. So I want to see 25 million new small business applications by the end of my first term. And to help achieve this, we will lower the cost of starting a new business,” she said on stage before thousands of supporters.

“My vision of an opportunity economy is one where everyone can compete and have a real chance to succeed.”

Rhett Buttle, who previously advised the 2020 Biden-Harris ticket on economic policy, says her focus on small businesses is a smart move.

“Small businesses create two out of every three new jobs in our country. They’re a critical constituency. Just about half of Americans work for a small employer,” pointed out Buttle. “The plans she laid out [Wednesday] are a strong investment in really strengthening main streets and the working class of America.”

The latest ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll from late August conducted among intended voters shows former President Donald Trump still holds a lead on Harris when it comes to the economy. But Peter Loge, a professor at the George Washington University, says it’s not too late for Harris to make gains with voters on the issue – though it may not matter.

“The economy is not the only thing people are voting on. A lot are going to vote on a woman's right to choose, for example. A lot are going to vote on immigration or trade or climate. What Vice President Harris and Governor Walz have to do is persuade enough voters she's with them enough on the economy to cut into an advantage that Trump might have,” explained Loge.

Loge, the director of the Project on Ethics in Political Communication and political appointee to the Food and Drug Administration during the Obama administration, pointed out that most people are loyal to party identification and that Harris “doesn't have to win the economy. She has to win the election. And the economy is part of it, but it's only part.”

Dem strategists think Harris' messaging is working

Harris has leaned into her middle-class upbringing on the campaign trail in the last several weeks, talking about her upbringing in California in a single-parent household and working at McDonald's during her time as an undergrad at Howard University. It’s an intentional effort to paint Harris as relatable and to show the Democratic ticket is plugged into the kitchen table issues plaguing voters, which is why Loge theorizes her two policy speeches of the campaign have focused solely on the economy.

“It's a way of distinguishing themselves as ‘we are in the middle class, we're fighting with the middle class,’ which is in contrast to Senator [JD] Vance and former President Trump, who are wealthy,” pointed out Loge. “Governor Walz, pointing out he doesn't own any stocks, so he can't have any conflicts of interest – it helps reinforce that narrative.”

The Harris-Walz campaign also released an ad attacking Trump on the economy earlier this week, the fourth economic ad the campaign has released in the weeks following the Democratic National Convention last month. The ad released this week is part of $370 million digital and TV ad reservations, set to run from Labor Day to Election Day, targeting battleground states.

Some strategists say they think the Harris campaign’s strategy to double down on the economy is working.

“She's had a set of messages on the economy that in our polling and other polling we've seen, private polling we've seen have started to move the numbers, specifically – things for 18- to 40-year-old voters, things like the first-time homebuyer tax credit, things like an increased child care tax deduction. Those things are addressing a big cohort of the electorate who really have felt kind of screwed over, kind of like their lives have been stacked against them given their generation,” said Rick Wilson, co-founder of the Lincoln Project, a political action committee made up of moderate conservatives and former Republican Party members who oppose the former president. 

The Trump campaign has hammered the Biden administration and the Harris campaign on economic issues, blaming inflation on President Joe Biden. Trump has also claimed the Harris-Walz campaign’s economic proposal to increase corporate tax rates would fall on workers, with fewer jobs and lower incomes as a result. But experts say the Trump campaign’s proposal of taxes on foreign imports would have a negative effect on businesses and consumers. Mary Eschelbach Hansen, co-director of the Institute for Macroeconomics and Policy Analysis, described tariffs as “taxes on American consumers.”

“Any tariff increases the price of the things that we import, and we import a lot of stuff. So we pay more and consume less as American consumers, that shrinks the economy,” she explained. Trump's designs on mass deportation, she said, would have a similarly stark effect on the economy. "If we have fewer workers, because we have deported large numbers of people who are here without documentation…and we don't grow the economy through immigration, then we can't produce as much, by definition, right? There are just...not a lot of other people out there waiting to take jobs that are currently being filled by the people that former President Trump proposes to deport. So that is, by definition, going to shrink how much stuff is made in any given year.”

Eschelbach Hansen pointed out that policies such as expanding the child tax credit and creating a first-time homebuyer tax credit “directly increase the discretionary incomes of middle class and poor households,” which helps expand the economy further.

“Middle class and poorer households, their spending is really sensitive to an increase in their income. Another way to think about that is this group of households is likely to spend almost all of these benefits,” Eschelbach Hansen explained. “Seventy percent of our overall economic activity comes from this kind of consumption, so since these groups are highly sensitive to the policy change, increasing their incomes will have a big effect on the macro economy.”

Trump's perceived economic competence versus Harris' perceived reliability

This week, Goldman Sachs forecasted a stronger economy under a Harris-Walz administration than a second Trump presidency, and a group of over 90 corporate leaders signed a letter endorsing Harris, writing “her election is the best way to support the continued strength, security, and reliability of our democracy and economy. With Kamala Harris in the White House, the business community can be confident that it will have a President who wants American industries to thrive.”

Wilson said Harris continues to chip away at Trump’s “illusory advantage” on the economy with her middle class policy priorities and being out front on the issue.

“Donald Trump has always had an illusion of economic competence, and a lot of voters have still…clung to that,” Wilson said. “Unemployment is down, inflation is down, gas prices are down, food prices are down. Those things are moving in the right direction. We're about to get a fed interest rate cut, which we think will continue to reset the view of the economy in the minds of a lot of voters. I think she can fight it to a draw. He has an advantage in that area – it's an illusory advantage.”

Note: This article was updated to correct Mary Eschelbach Hansen's job title.