Last week, a little-noticed fight broke out among Democrats that could upend the 2024 election. Speaking on CNN, billionaire LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman said he supports Kamala Harris but wants major policy shifts if she becomes president: changes that would see the party ditch central elements of the Biden agenda on trade and corporate power. If Harris doesn’t resist such pressure forcefully, she could attract huge business support and bask in media favor—but also lose important battlegrounds and end up as Hillary Clinton 2.0.
Hoffman is a Democratic mega-donor, having splurged $7 million on a Biden-Harris super PAC and encouraged his powerful network of Silicon Valley allies to donate millions more. After his appearance, word got out, likely through a Hoffman leak, that Harris would be joining him on a fundraising tour of the valley. These are power moves, intended to assert ownership over the Harris candidacy and the Democratic Party going forward.
Hoffman asked for two specific policy changes. The first was removing Federal Trade Commission Chairwoman Lina Khan from her position, the goal being to put an end to the interventionist posture against Big Tech and corporate consolidation that the agency has adopted under her leadership. The second was ending the Trump-Biden tariffs. Hoffman’s comments reflect Wall Street’s and Silicon Valley’s revulsion for populist Bidenites: not just Khan, but also the likes of Jonathan Kanter, the antitrust chief at the Department of Justice, and Rohit Chopra, the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
As one senior labor leader told me, how Harris responds will determine whether she leads a broad coalition for economic reform—or a Hillary rerun.
Harris is still sketching out her views. She has emphasized standard Democratic policies like paid family leave, abortion rights, and protecting the Affordable Care Act. Beyond that, her main message echoes Biden’s: namely, that this election is about “protecting democracy.” She has adopted a somewhat populist narrative, attacking Donald Trump for soliciting donations from oil executives and offering policy favors in return. So far, the Trump campaign’s attempts to paint her as “dangerously liberal” aren’t landing.
Yet political-economic tensions, underscored by Hoffman’s remarks, could fracture the Democratic coalition.
Hoffman’s comments raised eyebrows for a few reasons. First, the LinkedIn founder also sits on the board of Microsoft, which is being sued and investigated by the FTC over a spree of acquisitions. It’s brazen to attempt to fire the cop who is on your trail, but Hoffman’s position isn’t unusual among billionaires: Former Ticketmaster boss Barry Diller has echoed the call to fire Khan on CNBC, and dealmakers on Wall Street are excited about ending scrutiny of their mergers and the potential to offshore production more easily again.
These demands invited pushback, because Khan is a well-known regulator with deep allies in the Democratic Party. Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren reacted angrily, and the American Federation of Teachers offered a message of support for Khan, as did independent pharmacists and Harris’s closest allies in organized labor, the Service Employees International Union.
Far more important than what Hoffman said about Khan, however, are his remarks on trade. “Trump wants tariffs,” he said, “which are bad for business. It makes it a very strange election, indeed, because I actually think Vice President Harris is much more the pro-business candidate than Trump and Vance.” Most people assume Trump is the pro-tariff candidate, but Biden has kept and expanded Trump’s tariffs to such areas as electric vehicles, where China threatens to wreck the US auto industry. In other words, this billionaire wants to upend the trade framework shaped by Trump and then adopted by Biden.
My senior labor source, who knows both Harris and Khan, found the fight over the latter disturbing. But when I mentioned the tariff bit, his reaction was visceral. “If Harris doesn’t push back,” he said, “she’s going to lose the election.” Indeed, I couldn’t keep track of the number of times he said “lose”: “Every labor official knows about tariffs in their bones. Harris will raise $100 million from Silicon Valley, she will spend it running up popular vote totals in blue areas, and she will lose the election.”
“Today, the workers in industrialized and de-industrialized areas that you need to win the election want tariffs,” he said. “Biden neutralized that with his pro-tariff agenda. But the problem isn’t gone. It’s far worse, especially with Chinese EVs on deck. Harris needs to understand that money doesn’t vote. And Silicon Valley votes don’t matter. Votes in Kenosha do.”
When Clinton accepted speaking honorariums from Wall Street banks and Barack Obama promoted the Trans-Pacific Partnership, they created a vulnerability that Trump skillfully exploited. “Trump ran on the idea that the Democratic Party is fake, that it pretends to have these worker-friendly policies but is operating on behalf of the wealthy. He essentially said, ‘I’m real. I’m a mess, but I’m real.’” Harris is inviting a similar risk by associating with Hoffman.
In a broad sense, Hoffman, though ostensibly an ally of Harris, is being decidedly unhelpful, demanding that she fracture her electoral coalition right off the bat to get his money. How has Harris addressed this problem so far?
“Her response on the Lina Khan question hasn’t been impressive.”
While she hasn’t sketched out an argument on trade, her response on the Lina Khan question hasn’t been impressive. The New York Times reported that Harris is telling donors that she is privately skeptical of Khan, though the sourcing is suspect. CNN got the campaign on the record, with an aide telling the outlet that there were “no policy discussions” about replacing Khan at the moment, which is hardly a ringing endorsement. And “outside campaign advisers” are regularly talking to the business media about rolling back antitrust enforcement. There are other reasons to worry: Some of her advisers include Google lawyer Karen Dunn and Uber lawyer Tony West; another Uber lawyer, former Attorney General Eric Holder, is vetting her veep pick.
So far, Harris has been lucky. Taking large sums of money from a Silicon Valley oligarch who demands a removal of tariffs and an end to antitrust cases against Big Tech should normally invite a response from Trump and Vance. But what is striking is that Team Trump doesn’t seem to have noticed.
In 2016, Trump regularly bashed big business, attacking Ford, Nabisco, Apple, Amazon, and Merck, among others, for offshoring, monopolization, refusing to pay taxes or help the police, or for being culturally left-wing. His closing ad in 2016 was a stark economically populist attack against Wall Street, the Federal Reserve, and China, associating all three with Hillary Clinton.
Today, Trump can too often sound like a standard-issue GOP politician, arguing that Harris is a radical left-winger, trying to attach a slew of unpopular culture-war baggage to her, with the only potent hit being assertions about the border. The old Trump is there in pieces, but the thematic unity that Steve Bannon brought to the campaign is gone. Trump’s scattered arguments may work, but they are nothing like 2016; Trump, too, seems to be off his populist kilter.
As New York Times columnist David Leonhardt notes, neither candidate is where the voters are, with economic questions far more important than winning the culture war or saving democracy. The race is still early. Nevertheless, Hoffman and his billionaire circle are making an aggressive play to set the tone of the 2024 race, demanding that she turn the clock back on the pre-Trump consensus Democrats left behind under Biden. Harris should decline their invitation.