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Beating Donald Trump in November would flip the idea that the Biden years have brought nothing but pain.

Vice President Kamala Harris accepted the Democratic nomination for president in Chicago on Thursday evening, pledging that building the “middle class will be a defining goal of my presidency.”

If Harris manages to succeed in her lightning campaign to win the presidency after President Joe Biden’s stumbles, it will be seen as a kind of political miracle. But it would also go some way to repudiating the idea that the voting public is seething over economic slights. After 1968’s disrupted Chicago Democratic convention, Richard Nixon drew on the chaos to claim the silent majority was on his side. More than 50 years later, it could be a Democrat’s turn to claim that mantle.

Few economists expected that the country could avoid a recession by now, but buoyed by debt-financed support from the government, consumers have kept on spending, and businesses have continued hiring. Should Harris be elected on Nov. 5, she’ll likely see it as a mandate to extend and expand Biden’s economic agenda, rather than as a call to redirect the course of the nation—as her opponent does.

Biden’s legislative efforts focused on spending for infrastructure and green energy. While not as left-leaning as some of her former colleagues in the Senate, Harris may put a more progressive twist on Bidenomics and has signaled that she may use tax and spending powers to favor lower-income workers and disfavor the savings of the affluent.

It’s hard to know how far she will go to implement these ideas. Harris has been employing what a former Biden aide called “strategic ambiguity,” taking advantage of the rapid campaign to avoid getting pinned down on specific policy commitments. But it seems, based on what Harris has said so far on the campaign trail and in her convention speech, that her emphasis is on using government authority to ease concerns about the cost of living.

That may interfere with corporate profits. To investors, this might sound like a recipe for weaker stock market returns. But not so fast.

To implement her agenda, Harris will need the Democrats to control the Senate, and that seems unlikely at this stage. Plus, the growth of the U.S. debt will put constraints on what she, or any president, might be able to accomplish. And coming changes in interest-rate policy by the Federal Reserve are likely to be more consequential for the markets, at least in the near term.

Harris also has important allies in the investment community. “She’s always been supportive of business,” said John W. Rogers, Jr., chairman and co-CEO of Ariel Investments. He chairs the Economic Opportunity Coalition, a public-private partnership formed by Harris to help drive investments in underserved communities. “She is not off on some kind of Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders tangent,” Rogers said.

And it should be noted that Biden, too, has had his share of left-wing rhetoric, including calling in 2020 for the nation to “transition from the oil industry.” But under his presidency, oil and gas stocks have outperformed as the U.S. has become the greatest producer in the history of the world.

When markets and politics collide, the results aren’t always what you’d expect on the surface.

In her speech at the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday, former first lady Michelle Obama called Harris “one of the most qualified people ever to seek the office of the presidency.” Harris, 59, has had a lengthy career in government, serving as San Francisco’s district attorney, then California’s attorney general and a U.S. senator, and since 2021, Biden’s vice president.

Absent from that resume, however, is business experience or direct management of economic policy. Nor has it been easy to determine where Harris stands on key economic issues. In the weeks since she became the Democrats’ presidential candidate, her campaign has signaled that she has dropped some of the more progressive positions she pushed for as a candidate. She no longer supports banning fracking or endorses Medicare for All. She has dropped a plan to raise taxes on people earning above $100,000 a year, joining Biden in putting that threshold at $400,000.

Harris’ initial foray into economics as the Democratic nominee elicited mixed reactions, even from some Democrats. In a speech in Raleigh, N.C., on Aug. 16, she detailed a set of economic-policy prescriptions, which read much like what might be expected from a former prosecutor: “Believe me, as president, I will go after the bad actors,” she said, promising new laws to crack down on price gouging by retailers.

Critics immediately wrote off her idea to impose restrictions on how groceries stores set prices in emergencies as price controls, although in practice what she is proposing is more limited than the wage and price limits Nixon famously imposed, and would need to be passed into law by Congress.

Her tax-related plans may be more consequential. Key parts of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, a hallmark of the Trump era, expire next year, including lower marginal income-tax rates on most earners. Harris would extend those cuts below the $400,000 level. She would also impose new forms of wealth taxes—just as Biden had planned. Like him, she would propose to raise the corporate tax rate from 21%, where it was set in 2017, to 28%.

Harris has also proposed new benefits focused on housing and families with children. The housing plan would aim to improve regulation to spur production of new affordable homes, and would subsidize down payments for first-time home buyers. There aren’t enough details yet to fully assess that plan, though the nation urgently needs more housing supply. But handing cash to home buyers—in this case, a proposed $25,000 per home buyer—might serve to drive up prices.

The child-focused tax plan is clearer, in part because the Biden administration temporarily enacted parts of it during the height of the pandemic. The plan would establish a permanent $3,600 a year tax credit for families with children, and would create a new benefit of up to $6,000 for parents in the first year of a child’s life.

Harris describes this benefit as akin to a tax cut, but it is really something else, said Erica York, senior economist at the Tax Foundation, an independent think tank. “We’re talking about households that don’t even owe taxes in the first place. It’s providing them a net benefit from the federal government that just happens to be administered through the tax system,” she said.

How would the Harris administration pay for it? Asked that by a reporter on Aug. 18, Harris said, “I think it’s a mistake for any person who talks about public policy to not critically evaluate how you measure the return on the investment. When you are strengthening neighborhoods, strengthening communities, and, in particular, the economy of those communities and investing in a broad-based economy, everybody benefits, and it pays for itself in that way.”

For that to be remotely possible, the investment needs to be funded. The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates Harris’ new policies would cost roughly $1.7 trillion over 10 years. They would likely spur growth in the economy, although potentially at the risk of driving up inflation.

How that nets out for the deficit isn’t obvious. The deficit for fiscal 2024, ending Sept. 30, is expected to be roughly $2 trillion, or about 7% of gross domestic product. It will then stay in the 5-6% range indefinitely if nothing changes.

Biden had campaigned on a set of fiscal pledges that would in aggregate be roughly neutral for the budget, according to the CFRB. Now Harris is adding costs, which could push her further into the red. But because her campaign hasn’t said what other spending it’s committed to, it’s impossible to make a precise calculation.

Harris’ child-focused policies will be tempting for lawmakers. A version of this plan that was temporarily enacted under Biden cut child poverty in half. Still, the national debt now stands at 99% of gross domestic product. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that next president is likely to oversee a rise in the debt above its record set at the end of World War II.

Harris’ team could argue that the debt isn’t an acute crisis, and they would be right. The yield on 10-year Treasuries hit a 52-week low on Wednesday, and is 1.2 percentage points below its peak last fall. If the bond vigilantes are out there, they’re laying low.

The economy grew by 2.8% in the second quarter, and it’s conceivable that strong growth could eventually solve the debt problem—but only if political leaders make the difficult choice to stop adding to the spread between revenue and spending. At least in its early days, the Harris campaign shows little inclination to do that.

Even the commitments made thus far box her in on the deficit, said the Tax Foundation’s York. “If you’re not going to raise taxes on roughly 98% of taxpayers, and you’re limiting yourself to 28% on the corporate rate, there aren’t a lot of other places to go,” she said.

Barron’s asked the Harris campaign how it would square its commitments to reduce the deficit with the benefits and tax levels it has proposed, and it arranged an interview with Bobby Kogan, a former advisor to the director of the Office of Management and Budget under Biden-Harris who is now with the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank.

“Harris’ agenda is presumably happening through budget reconciliation,” Kogan said, referring to a legislative process that allows fiscal policy to pass the Senate with just 50 votes but puts heavy restrictions on new spending. “Through reconciliation you can’t do long-term deficit increases.”

And Biden’s spending record is better than it seems when you look at the primary deficit, which strips out interest payments on the debt. “Every single year in the Biden-Harris administration the primary deficit got better,” Kogan said.

Meanwhile Harris’ policies could have other potentially troublesome consequences for the economy and markets.

A higher corporate tax rate could hurt stock market returns, said Aniket Shah, who leads Washington research for Jefferies Group. “If you run any scenario through a financial model and you change the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28%, there’s nothing more significant that we can talk about that would impact the stock market than that,” he said.

Higher corporate taxes could also trim wage and job growth.

Harris is also signing up for controversial elements of Biden’s tax plan, notably including a plan to tax some unrealized capital gains as part of an effort to ensure that the ultrawealthy pay their “fair share.” How that policy would work isn’t clear, such as what happens if gains that have been taxed later disappear. Critics argue that it could hurt start-ups in particular, which are prone to shifting valuations.

But saying something on the campaign trail isn’t the same as passing it into law. Tobin Marcus, a former Biden aide who is now head of politics and policy at Wolfe Research, sees the Harris campaign as being engaged in “strategic ambiguity.” It wants to show voters that it cares about their issues, while not committing to many policy specifics it might regret. “This means that Harris’ campaign policy agenda will offer investors unusually poor signals about the policy outlook if she wins,” Marcus wrote in a note to clients.

Analysts expect that the party that wins the presidency will also win control of the House of Representatives, although the Senate is likely to turn Republican either way. There are no obvious opportunities based on current polling for Democrats to win seats from Republicans, and at least two races—in West Virginia and Montana—where Republicans are likely to flip a seat. Democrats now have 51 Senate seats, so losing two would flip the chamber’s majority.

The makeup of Congress matters far more for policymaking than whatever Harris says in campaign mode, said Marcus. “Harris’ Office of Management and Budget in 2025 could write down whatever they want on taxes, and it doesn’t really make a difference,” Marcus said. “The question is, what can you get Congress to agree to? I don’t think that anything she will do in terms of either prioritization or negotiation is really going to change the likelihood that the 12th-most-centrist Republican senator is going to agree to raise the corporate tax rate.”

A team at Morgan Stanley has tried to puzzle through that question, said Michael Zezas, the company’s head of U.S. public policy research. They looked at what the median Democrat and median Republican would support in terms of fiscal policies in next year’s tax debate. “The rough number that we estimate in terms of deficit expansion in a Democratic sweep scenario would be about a $600 billion spread over 10 years. Contrast that to a Republican sweep, where we do the same exercise, and it’s about a $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion spread over 10 years,” he said. In other words, both would raise the deficit.

Harris’ new policy rollout doesn’t substantially change that, he said.

In the event of a Harris victory, Zezas said, investors can expect the status quo—and that hasn’t been all bad. Despite the black mark of inflation on the Biden administration’s record, it has overseen wage growth that is now outstripping the increase in costs, along with a healthy job market and a booming stock market.

There are few obvious policies that Democrats would want to enact through presidential executive actions that Biden hasn’t already taken, Zezas said. On trade, for example, “we wouldn’t expect to see incrementally any new tariffs that would be substantially disruptive to the economy. Immigration policy choices are probably relatively consistent, as well,” he said.

In other words, in Zezas’ view, “a Democratic win mostly means that investors largely should stay focused on the debate about where we are in the economic cycle and the interaction of growth, inflation, and the Fed, less so on political choices out of D.C., at least for 2025.”

Some prominent business leaders are endorsing Harris as the candidate of continuity. “Business requires stability and certainty,” former American Express CEO Kenneth Chenault said at the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday. “Kamala Harris understands that government must work in partnership with the business community. She understands that a market-based economy needs a strong and effective government.”

Rogers, of Ariel Investments, argues that Harris will improve a regulatory push that has often stumbled under Biden. “Her key appointees, I expect, would be moderate and not susceptible to the kind of drama that has occurred,” he says. “In particular, there have been a lot of court cases that have challenged some of the regulatory decisions that have happened during this administration.”

Given Harris’ experience personally prosecuting antitrust cases as California’s attorney general, Rogers expects her to do better at avoiding regulatory overreach.

The Biden-Harris administration’s theory has been that forcing large companies to compete would unleash economic gains, but as Rogers alluded to, that effort hasn’t notched up many major successes.

“As President,” Harris pledged in Chicago, “I will bring together labor and workers and small-business owners and entrepreneurs and American companies to create jobs, to grow our economy and to lower the cost of everyday needs like healthcare and housing and groceries.”

Harris is trying to say, essentially, that she’ll be Biden but better. She’ll use the power of government to help keep down the cost of living, after the administration she joined helped ignite the inflation problem.

That might seem like another era of big government, but to be sure, her opponent is offering one too. Trump is promising an aggressive version of economic populism that would hike tariffs in an attempt to give him global leverage while cutting taxes in ways that would outstrip Harris’ conceivable contributions to the deficit.

It will be for voters to decide which of the two they prefer.