Would Mark Cuban Please Shut Up?

If the number one issue is economy and the way to solve people and make people feel good about what she’s doing is to talk business and talk economy and talk opportunity, and that’s what she’s talked about. And I think you have to be in the middle to do that.

These words may soothe corporate donors (Cuban helped found a group called VCs for Kamala, which now has 866 signatories, as well as another group called Business Leaders for Harris). But they won’t win Harris new voters. The electorate wants higher taxes on the wealthy (79 percent favor tax hikes for the rich, including 63 percent of Republicans, according to a February poll by Navigator Research) and stricter regulation of industry (clear majorities nationwide favor stepped-up regulation of artificial intelligence, firearms, pharmaceuticals, and nine other industry sectors, according to a September YouGov poll).

You may have heard me say once or twice before that to win this election Harris needs to win the working class—or at least not lose it by very much. To win over these voters, Harris can’t hug the center on economic issues, because the center isn’t where the working class resides. On economic matters, the working class is situated well to the left of what most Democrats (though not Biden) still regard as the political middle.

If Harris really is tacking toward Cuban’s economic positions and away from Sanders’s, then she needs to come about, because it’s Sanders’s economic policies that align most closely these days with working class voters. Polling further suggests that you don’t run much risk of losing more affluent voters by saying what Sanders says about the economy. The only people you risk offending are billionaires like, well, Mark Cuban. And now that Harris has well over $1 billion of her own in the bank, she can leave that worry behind.