Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris campaigns with President Joe Biden at the IBEW Local Union #5 union hall in Pittsburgh on Labor Day, Monday, Sept. 2, 2024. WASHINGTON — Vice President Kamala Harris is using a New Hampshire campaign stop on Wednesday to propose an expansion of tax incentives for small businesses — presenting a pro-entrepreneur plan that may soften her previous calls for wealthy Americans and large corporations to pay higher taxes.
Since President Joe Biden dropped his reelection bid and endorsed Harris, the vice president has focused on the “ blue wall ” states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania that have been the centerpiece of successful Democratic campaigns. Trump has called for lowering the corporate tax rate to 15% — a break with Biden who in his budget proposal in March suggested setting the corporate tax rate at 28%. Harris has released relatively few major policy proposals in the roughly six weeks since taking over the top of the Democratic ticket, but has not suggested she’s planning to deviate greatly from his administration on tax policy.
Biden, who similarly built his campaign around promoting the middle class, won New Hampshire by 7 percentage points in 2020, but Trump came much closer to winning it against Hillary Clinton in 2016. Still, the Harris campaign notes that it has 17 field offices operating in coordination with the state Democratic party across New Hampshire, compared to one for Trump’s campaign.
Trump is nonetheless hoping to use what happened to his advantage, posting on his social media account that Harris “sees there are problems for her campaign in New Hampshire because of the fact that they disrespected it in their primary and never showed up.”