A WOMAN FIRST, FIRST WOMAN: As vice president, Kamala Harris has largely embraced President Joe Biden’s international economic policies, which have eschewed traditional trade negotiations while emphasizing government-led investments in the developing world. And, if she were to officially secure the Democratic nomination and win in November, experts largely expect the former California senator and attorney general to continue Biden’s agenda — despite some pro-trade rhetoric years ago. Wiggle room on tariffs? Harris, observers point out, declared in 2019, “I’m not a protectionist Democrat.” And she’s repeatedly slammed Trump’s China tariffs, most recently at a North Carolina campaign stop where she assailed his 10 percent across-the-board tariff plan, saying it would raise costs for American families. “Theoretically, there’s some wiggle room there” to divert from Biden’s own tariff policies, which have preserved Trump’s duties on consumer goods and raised tariffs on clean energy tech, said Anna Ashton, a China analyst and founder of Ashton Analytics. But, when the rubber hits the road, Harris has shown herself to be at least as trade-skeptical as her outgoing boss. Case in point: opposing the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement when she was in the Senate. Biden, before he was elected president, decided to support the USMCA after Democrats got enhanced labor and environmental provisions inserted into the pact. But that still wasn’t enough for Harris, who wanted to see the deal cover climate change and eventually became one of only 10 senators to oppose the pact. That could indicate that any new trade negotiations under a Harris administration will have to encompass an even wider swath of environmental issues than the USMCA, which was seen as a path-breaking deal in its own right, currently does. And outside of full-on trade negotiations, her climate focus could also inject new momentum into initiatives that sought to limit greenhouse gas emissions from specific sectors — like the green steel deal that Biden had been trying to strike with the European Union, before those talks ran aground last year. “I can tell you that in a Harris administration, there would be no trade deal that would be signed unless it protected American workers and it protected our environment,” she said in 2019 as she ran for the Democratic nomination. Sharing staff: Observers see further continuity in how Harris would approach trade and diplomacy with China, largely through cross-pollination in staff members. Mike Pyle, Biden’s former international economics chief on the National Security Council, was Harris’s chief economic adviser before he joined the White House. At the NSC, he was one of the primary architects of Biden’s shift from trade to international investment. And Mira Rapp-Hooper, the East Asia director on Biden’s National Security Council, was an early adviser to Harris in 2020 and wrote a book on reforming the international order with Rebecca Lissner, Harris’s current deputy national security adviser. Hope for the WTO? Some trade watchers see a potential benefit for the moribund World Trade Organization in Harris’ candidacy. The vice president had a positive meeting in 2021 with WTO Director Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, in which they discussed leveraging trade to improve living standards. Ashton, the China analyst, said although that meeting was early in Harris’ tenure, there’s some hope that her background as a prosecutor would mean that “she’s generally pretty big on upholding the international rules-based order and international law, so maybe she would see value in getting the WTO appellate body back up and running.” What are her stances? The vice president’s biggest challenge may be defining her policies. And many industrial workers, who will be key to her chances across the Midwest, have already expressed dismay with the economy — even if they’ve been beneficiaries of the Biden-Harris industrial policy push. Read more on the economic conundrum Harris inherits from Biden in our dispatch last week from Milwaukee.
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