CNN
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At the Throwback Brewery, Kamala Harris focused on the future and distanced herself a bit more from the Bidenomics, attempting to present herself as a candidate who could bring about change in an incumbent administration that is driving Donald Trump crazy.

The vice president visited New Hampshire on Wednesday, which holds four precious electoral votes, before heading to a debate camp in Pittsburgh in preparation for her televised showdown with the former president next week that could determine the endgame of the election.

Harris’ political momentum and her chances in November depend in part on how she can position herself as a new option for voters and how she can dispel the perception that she is running for a second term for the unpopular President Joe Biden.

This underscores her efforts to appeal to Americans who are sour about high food prices and inflation and who have been shut out of the housing market, as well as moderate suburban voters and middle-class voters in swing states.

The vice president has previously pledged to crack down on supermarket giants’ overpriced food and promised to give low-income homebuyers $25,000 toward a down payment. On Wednesday, she veered toward the political center by promising to nurture 25 million new small businesses in her first term with a $50,000 tax credit for startups. And she called for a significantly smaller capital gains tax increase than Biden proposed to spur investment and innovation.

“I believe that America’s small businesses are a critical foundation for our entire economy,” Harris said at a brewery founded by two female business pioneers that uses local ingredients. “Small businesses in our country employ half of all private sector workers. Half of all private sector workers own, operate or work for a small business.”

The former president, who stoked nostalgia for the Trump economy before the crisis sparked by the Covid-19 emergency, may seek to respond to Harris’s recent economic maneuvers when he addresses the New York Economic Club on Thursday.

The politics behind Harris’s strategy are clear. On the capital gains tax measure, for example, Harris abandoned Biden’s more progressive approach when she called for a 28% rate for people making $1 million or more, down from the 39.6% rate the president included in his fiscal year 2025 budget. Her move allows her to show that she is not a hostage to her boss’s policies, as she refutes Trump’s claim that she is the heiress to a failed economic legacy. The proposal also won’t go unnoticed by Democratic donors with wealth in investment income who have helped her raise half a billion dollars in campaign cash.

Harris’ embrace of the powerful mythology of American small businesses driving broader prosperity and the broader economy also appears aimed at countering efforts by Trump and his surrogates to dismiss the California Democrat as an extreme “liberal from San Francisco,” a “communist” and a “Bolshevik.”

Her novel approaches have led economists to debate the usefulness of “Harrisomics.” Would her federal ban on profiteering simply lead to a shortage of goods, as has happened in the past? And would throwing more money into the housing market inevitably cause price inflation and make homes even more unaffordable?

These questions could be tricky in the early weeks of a potential Harris administration. But with less than nine weeks to go, Harris is more concerned with making a political statement than with the mechanics of economic policy. Given Trump’s polling advantage on economics, an all-out policy battle with her rival probably wouldn’t be wise anyway. Harris needs to turn the election into a referendum on personality, on which candidate can emerge as a new political force. Even small steps out of Biden’s shadow could be important.

Harris, for example, has done far more than Biden to show that she understands the pain of young adults who are being left out of the housing market and shoppers who dread the cost of their weekly groceries. During his campaign, the president often angrily defended the economy’s successes and downplayed the hardships that remain.

James Carville laid out a possible strategy for Harris in a New York Times column on Monday, saying the 2024 election would be defined by “who’s fresh and who’s rotten.” The veteran Democratic strategist also wrote that it wouldn’t be an insult to Biden if Harris went her own way — it was necessary to her political identity. “It shows even more clearly that she’s passionate about her own ideas and represents change rather than more of the same,” he wrote, referencing the slogan that helped former President Bill Clinton win as President George H.W. Bush’s 1992 candidate for change.

Harris’ attempt to convince voters she’s a breath of fresh air has infuriated Trump. The ex-president’s comments and campaign statements have been steeped in frustration that Harris, after four years in the Biden administration, is a fresh face and has lost his role as a change agent in the race.

Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance expressed disbelief that Harris would attempt this turn in an interview with the Hugh Hewitt radio show on Wednesday. The Ohio senator attempted to thwart Harris’ image makeover by emphasizing that she was a sitting president. “You’re the vice president of the United States. You could pursue these policies immediately, but you’re not,” Vance said. “She created this inflation crisis with her policies, and now she wants to fix it by waving a magic wand.”

Vance also rejected the vice president’s plan to cut grocery prices, even as he acknowledged that not every American company was an “angel.”

“We’ve had price controls before in this country and everywhere else. It fails every time it happens,” Vance said. “It means you can’t buy flour. You can’t buy eggs in the grocery store. That’s what price controls do.”

Trump’s campaign is also trying to undermine Harris’ economic positioning with a austerity campaign.

A recent ad that aired in Georgia spliced ​​together clips of news coverage of difficult economic headlines. One TV host lamented “the alarming rise in inflation, which has risen to its highest level in nearly 40 years.” Another said, “We’re still dealing with inflation.” In between these clips, the campaign tape shows Harris praising “Bidenomics” and cheerfully saying in speeches that “Bidenomics is working.”

The Trump campaign on Wednesday rejected Harris’ small-business plan, arguing that she would push for higher income taxes and expanded estate taxes, among other things, that would hurt small businesses and consumers. The former president has previously protested the vice president’s passage of his own proposal to end the tip tax, which was seen as a boost for hospitality workers in the swing state of Nevada.

Trump has said that if Harris wins in November, the economy will fall into a Great Depression. He said much the same about Biden in 2020, but the president has presided over strong, consistent job growth and one of the strongest post-pandemic recoveries of any advanced economy, despite an inflationary crisis that his White House initially underestimated.

Trump’s plans are often as vague as those of his Democratic rival. As he did as president, Trump promised great deals for Americans without specifying how he would make them work or pay them. He offered this jumble of words on Fox News on Sunday, for example: “We’re going to take care of Social Security, we’re not going to do anything to hurt our seniors. There’s so much cutbacks, there’s so much waste in this administration. There’s so much fat in this administration.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s plan to dramatically increase tariffs on imports, particularly from China, has many economists warning that he will dramatically increase costs for consumers and trigger a new round of inflation.

But at this critical juncture in a bitter, close campaign, both Harris and Trump appear less interested in economic policies that have been proven to work than in policies that can deliver immediate political advantage.