WASHINGTON — Vice-Chairman Kamala Harris used a campaign rally in New Hampshire on Wednesday to make a proposal expanding tax benefits for small businesses — present a pro-business plan that could soften her previous calls for wealthy Americans and big corporations to pay higher taxes.
She wants to expand tax credits for small business startup costs from $5,000 to $50,000, with the goal of eventually generating 25 million new small business applications within four years. Harris made the announcement during a visit to the Portsmouth area, across the Piscataqua River from Maine.
New Hampshire has been reliably blue in recent presidential elections, but the trip could also have some benefit across state lines, since Maine splits its electoral votes, allowing candidates to win some without winning the entire state. Still, it’s a rare departure from Harris, who is spending most of her time visiting a tight-knit group of battlegrounds in the Midwest and Sun Belt that will likely decide Elections in November.
Since the president Joe Biden let his be re-election bid and supported Harristhe vice president has focused on the “ blue wall “states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania that have been the focus of successful Democratic campaigns.
She has also made frequent visits to Arizona, Nevada and Georgia, all of which Biden narrowly won in 2020, and North Carolina, which she still hopes to capture from the former Republican president Donald Trump.
Wednesday’s stop comes after Harris celebrated Labor Day on Monday meetings in Detroit and Pittsburgh and before returning to Pittsburgh on Friday, marking her 10th visit to Pennsylvania in 2024. Wednesday, on the other hand, marks her first visit to New Hampshire in years.
Trump has called for cutting the corporate tax rate to 15% — a break from Biden, who proposed capping the corporate tax rate at 28% in his March budget proposal. Harris has offered relatively few major policy proposals in the roughly six weeks since she took the lead on the Democratic ticket, but has stopped short of suggesting she plans to diverge significantly from his administration on tax policy.
The small business plan Harris presented Wednesday has many facets that many in the business community would like. But that contrasts with another proposal Harris unveiled last month, where she pledged to help combat inflation by working to tackle “expensive pricing” by food producers, which she said had unnecessarily driven up prices in supermarkets.
Harris has built her campaign on calls to grow and strengthen the country’s middle class, proposing that wealthy Americans and big corporations pay “their fair share” in the form of higher taxes.
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, Harris’ campaign notes that it has 17 field offices working with the state Democratic Party across New Hampshire, compared to one for Trump’s campaign.
Some Democrats in the state were angry that Biden Democratic National Committee Unpleasant Make South Carolina the first state to vote for the party in this year’s presidential primary —which supplanted the Iowa caucuses and made New Hampshire the first in the nation to hold a primary in more than a century.
Despite that, New Hampshire went ahead with a non-sanctioned primary. Although Biden did not campaign in or appear on the ballot, he still won easily via a write-in drive.
Trump nevertheless hopes to use what happened to his advantage. On his social media account, he writes that Harris “sees that there are problems for her campaign in New Hampshire because they disrespected the campaign in their primaries and never showed up.”
“Furthermore, New Hampshire has an extremely high cost of living, some of the highest energy bills in the country, and the most unaffordable housing market in history,” the former president wrote. “I have protected New Hampshire’s First-In-The-Nation Primary and ALWAYS will.”