Kamalanomics: Harris's Road Map for Business

Vice President Kamala Harris hasn't done much to woo Big Business. Many executives would still rather take their chances with her than the alternative.

- Geoff Colvin

KAMALA HARRIS'S FIRST speech outlining her economic policies did not bode well for business. In Raleigh, N.C., a week before the convention where she officially became the Democrats' nominee for president, her language sounded bellicose: She boasted that as California's attorney general she "took on insurance companies and Big Pharma," that she "went after companies that illegally increased prices," and that as president she would "attack" the high cost of health care and "crackdown" on unscrupulous corporate landlords. In that speech and many to follow, "big banks," "Wall Street," "corporations," and "middlemen" were the liberal version of red meat-dirty words thrown out to elicit loud boos.

Yet while Harris's public rhetoric does little to win over businesspeople, she is attracting the support of many of them. The language in an endorsement letter signed by 90 prominent business figures shows clearly why: her predictability, compared with her erratic opponent.

The letter oozes with implied disdain of Donald Trump and asserts that electing Harris is the best way to support "reliability" and "stability." The signatories, which included tech founders and media moguls, as well as executives from the banking, investment, insurance, and pharmaceutical industries, offered a bottom-line rationale for Harris in the White House: "The business community can be confident that it will have a President who wants American industries to thrive."

Those tycoons can't be thrilled by Harris's robustious promotion of higher taxes for richly paid individuals like themselves. Her lack of private-sector employment in her career may worry them. But as one signatory - a high-level Wall Street executive - tells Fortune, "Even those whose tax bills may be increased [in a Harris administration] recognize the impact on the American economy is going to be materially negative in a Trump scenario."