Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Peter Hamby. Tonight, a look at the next chapter in the battle to define Kamala Harris—the question of how she’ll handle the economy. Harris is already addressing concerns about her immigration record head-on, trying to neutralize her biggest vulnerability with voters and deflect slashing attacks from Donald Trump’s campaign. But Harris also has to capitalize on the goodwill she has with voters right now, and convince them that she feels their pain—and that Trump would be worse for their pocketbooks.

But first, Abby Livingston captures the mood on Capitol Hill…

• Small gains: Pollsters have been busy in the field over the past two weeks trying to make sense of the new environment, or whether there even is a new environment. Strategists tell me that they’re seeing the Harris surge—or, in Republican parlance, “sugar high”—showing up in polling. But the down-ballot races seem largely unaffected, increasing the odds of split tickets in the fall. Yes, Democrats are enjoying some Kamalamentum following the July polling dip that jolted Nancy Pelosi into action, but “it’s a nudge, not a punch,” as one Republican pollster told me.
• Survey says…: Don’t expect to see a lot of new congressional polling right away, however. As several operatives noted, there’s limited R.O.I. to these pricey surveys in such a volatile national political environment. While some campaigns will be in the field over the next week or so, they’re generally less interested in polling head-to-head matchups than in learning how to structure their messaging by asking respondents about issues. Indeed, operatives in both parties tell me they won’t feel confident about the trajectory of the race until pollsters gather more data in early- to mid-September.
• Don’t count out the G.O.P.: Despite the turmoil inside the Trump campaign, Republicans are not ready to concede anything at the presidential level, and they anticipate that Democratic polling will cool after the D.N.C. in Chicago. But if Trump does falter, it’s worth noting that G.O.P. House and Senate candidates outperformed expectations in 2016 and 2020. In both cycles, the odds were that Trump would lose, and voters seemed inclined to vote for Republican candidates as a check on a Democratic administration. Split-ticket voting will be a hot topic this fall, focusing on “Harris Republicans” who will grudgingly vote for Harris but then check the box for conservatives down the ballot.
• The counterargument: Other operatives note that Harris’s momentum could snowball into a veritable Obama-esque wave that results in Democrats winning the House and the Senate in November, as in 2008. Rally crowds don’t win elections, but they do whip up the base’s enthusiasm, which translates into eager door knockers, stronger local parties, and repeat small-dollar donations. Vibes can’t vote, but Democrats feel good about this cycle for the first time in a long time. It’s not so much swagger as a return to the “We’d rather be us than them” mentality—even if the election truly is a coin toss.

But Harris, the poll found, remains particularly vulnerable to claims that she was a feckless “border czar,” as Republicans have put it—a bleeding heart who would jeopardize American security as president by allowing drugs and criminals into the country. “The immigration argument is a strong initial attack, or at least the most successful initial attack, on Harris so far,” Smith told me. No surprise, the Trump campaign is tethering that message to accusations that Harris is soft on crime, with Trump himself making a splashy return to X on Monday by posting a campaign video calling Harris a “San Francisco radical” and “cop hater.”

Harris and her team were already onto this. She came out of the gate last week with her first issue-focused TV ad of the race, rebranding herself as a “border state prosecutor” who will hire more border patrol agents and crack down on fentanyl and drug trafficking. It’s an ad aimed squarely at the moderate middle—college and non-college voters alike who care about public safety—radical chic be damned. Harris is trying to absorb the immigration and crime attacks and bend them to her advantage, a winking return to the “Kamala Is a Cop” mudslinging that damaged her reputation with progressives when she ran for president five years ago, back when all the memes about her were negative.

On Monday, the Harris campaign sent out a press release boasting that crime and border crossings are falling, punctuated by the message: “We’re not going back to the violence, danger, and chaos of Donald Trump.” Like any politician, of course, Harris is tweaking her pitch depending on which audience she’s addressing. Voters in swing states are being fed the border security ads; the Harris press shop wants reporters to see their candidate as taking the fight directly to Trump on the issue. But Democratic partisans and lefty donors? Well, they might not be as hyped about a border crackdown. In front of a massive rally in Nevada on Saturday, Harris promised to secure the border, but she also promised to pass “comprehensive immigration reform” with an earned pathway to citizenship—not just the Republican-friendly border bill that the Biden White House tried to push last winter. The next day, Harris traveled to tony Nob Hill to headline a fundraiser with rich San Francisco progressives. In that room, Harris didn’t mention border security, immigration, or crime at all.

“Some contrast is fine. Contrast works,” Smith told me.“But the less she talks about Donald Trump, and frankly, Joe Biden, and the more she talks about herself, what she’s done, who she is, what she’s about, the better. That is the biggest, most salient unanswered question about Kamala Harris: What kind of Democrat is she when it comes to the economy? Most voters have no idea because she hasn’t been front and center for the administration on economic policy.”

The “race to define Kamala” has been the topic in the press since Harris became the de facto Democratic nominee a few weeks ago. But even as polls show her gaining on Trump, and even taking the lead in the race in key states, Democrats have mostly been running on vibes and excitement. Maybe that will be enough to win in the end—this truncated campaign season really could just come down to momentum and a collective desire to turn the page on the past. But Smith cautioned that the overall state of the economy and sustained high prices remain the most important issues for swing voters who aren’t news junkies and aren’t fluent in the latest Kamala memes. Harris has captured the country’s attention. The question is how she spends that political capital through the end of the Democratic National Convention next week.

Right now, voters are giving Harris the benefit of the doubt across the board. On almost every issue, she has erased Biden’s deficit against Trump—including on the almighty question of who would better handle the economy. A poll last week from NPR and Marist College, which has had a slight Democratic lean all year, found that Trump is more trusted on the economy, but only by three points over Harris. Biden was losing by 9 points on that question in June—and by even more in previous polls. As one Democratic campaign veteran told me when I sent him that number, “It’s almost like there was a subset of voters out there who thought Biden sucked at his job or was too old, and they applied that frame to everything else.”

Put another way: Vibes, baby! Harris has not outlined any specific economic agenda, speaking only in generic terms about corporate greed, standing with labor unions, protecting Social Security and Obamacare, and fighting for the middle class. She is framing the election simply as “the choice about what direction this country will go in”—conveying an agreeable set of center-left values against Trump rather than a 10-point plan for this or a white paper for that.

Elections are about ideas, yes, but they’re also about images and emotion. With apologies to think tank dorks out there, a lot of voters are completely fine with the idea of their candidate winning and figuring out the details later. “Harris is still in the phase of defining herself to an electorate that is hungry for a firmer sense of what she stands for and believes in,” Smith told me. “And yes, there is currently a window open for Republicans to attempt to define her before she manages it herself. But every barn burner rally, every week of eight-figure ad expenditures, every day of magazine covers and newspaper front pages closes that window.”

While Trump is making stuff up about A.I.-generated crowd sizes for Harris, his campaign is going after Tim Walz for supposedly exaggerating his military record, with J.D. Vance leading the charge. Make no mistake: That is good campaign fodder. But every second spent talking about Walz’s National Guard service is one not spent talking about the ungodly cost of rent or high interest rates or reminding voters that Harris worked for the unceremoniously discarded Biden.

For all his faults and his sourpuss public image, Vance on Sunday deployed a message that I think might have legs. CNN’s Dana Bash pressed Vance on Trump’s ridiculous comments about Harris “turning Black” and supposedly lying about her racial identity. Vance skirted over the race commentary and pivoted: “I believe whatever Kamala Harris says she is. But I believe, importantly, that President Trump is right. She is a chameleon. She pretends to be something in front of one audience, she pretends to be something else in front of another audience.”

Vance correctly noted that Harris has been dodging on-the-record interactions with reporters, has been speaking largely from a script at big rallies, and has not explained her flip-flops from past positions, especially the starting lineup of liberal issues she staked out in 2020. To be clear: Any smart modern campaign wants to limit unscripted moments and unforced errors for their candidate, which is exactly what the Harris team is doing. And Bash rightly responded that Vance himself has changed his political opinions repeatedly in recent years, making him something of a chameleon, too.

But Vance was onto something with the chameleon talk, or “Kamaleon” as the Trump campaign called her on Monday in their latest attempt to come up with a catchy put-down, after “Laffin’ Kamala,” “Lyin’ Kamala,” and the head-scratcher “Kamabla” failed to launch. Because as much as the Harris team would love to run out the clock, with early voting beginning as soon as next month in some states, the longer Harris avoids talking about her plans, the more opportunity there is for Republicans to fill in the blanks and raise questions about whether she is trustworthy. Especially on the economy.

“Independents are definitely giving Kamala Harris the benefit of the doubt right now. But she has to really seize that, and say, ‘I am who you thought I was,’” Smith told me. What’s still up in the air, he added, is whether voters will reward Harris for the popular elements of Biden’s economic achievements and her background fighting big corporations, or blame her for high costs. It’s a tough spot. Harris wants to highlight the good stuff—fighting junk fees, capping insulin prices, reducing healthcare costs—without leaning too much into the past or reminding voters that she rode shotgun with the unpopular sitting president. But Harris has to be proactive, and tell voters who she is, because they already know, ad nauseam, who Donald Trump is.

“Kamala Harris is not someone with a political track record as a barnstorming progressive on economic issues,” Smith said. “Is she a Bernie Sanders-style progressive, a soak-the-rich type? Is that who she is? Is she a corporate Democrat, a Wall Street kind of person? Voters just don’t know. So again, there is opportunity there, but there is vulnerability there if Republicans can seize it. She needs to define herself first and foremost on the economy, and particularly on prices.”

Some of that is already happening, as Smith acknowledged. “She’s talking about inflation,” he noted. “It’s in the campaign ads, this champion of working family stuff. It’s absolutely the right direction to go. But she has to acknowledge the pain that people are in. To say, ‘I do acknowledge our economy is not perfect, and I can tell you why. It’s these greedy A-holes who I have a history with. But I will be on your team again.’”