| Welcome to Bw Reads, our weekend newsletter featuring one great magazine story from Bloomberg Businessweek. Today we feature October's cover story, by Josh Wingrove, Karen Breslau and Akayla Gardner. It takes on one of the country's biggest questions since President Joe Biden stepped aside and let the vice president take the Democrats' mantle in the Nov. 5 election: What would a Kamala Harris presidency mean for Americans, the economy and the world? You can find the whole story online here. If you like what you see, tell your friends! Sign up here. As she finished laying her trap for Donald Trump on the night of Sept. 10, Kamala Harris turned to offer her pitch to Americans for why she, not he, would be the best person to hold the office of president of the United States. At Trump's rallies, she told viewers, people leave "early out of boredom and exhaustion." But while you're there, "The one thing you will not hear him talk about is you. You will not hear him talk about your needs, your dreams and your desires," she said. "You deserve a president who actually puts you first, and I pledge to you that I will." When the debate ended, talk centered on how she'd provoked Trump into attacking her over crowd sizes instead of the question's subject, immigration. How it had led him to invoke a racist hoax that immigrants in Ohio were eating pets. And how it had all presaged a night on which she'd gotten under his skin. Harris spent much of the debate making the case that the election is fundamentally about character and temperament and that she represents an opportunity to turn the page from Trump, now in his third consecutive presidential race. The sentiment has great appeal for Democratic loyalists, who aren't overly burdened by questions of what she'd do in office. For many of them, she's simply the woman who's standing between Trump and another term and who could shatter the ultimate American glass ceiling in the process. But for swing voters who don't reflexively hate the former president or are just tuning in to the race now, Harris' policy agenda, and especially her economic agenda—on inflation, taxes, tariffs, China—may resonate more. A Sept. 8 New York Times/Siena College poll showed that almost 30% of likely voters wanted to know more about her—and that 66% of those people wanted to learn about her policies, eight times the share who wanted to know about her character. Harris describes herself as an underdog, but she's campaigning like a front-runner. She's given only a handful of interviews since becoming the nominee, betting that being pinned down on policy may not be to her advantage. (Her campaign didn't agree to interview requests for this story.) But she's been in public life for decades, and her history offers some indication of how a Harris term might play out. For additional insight, Bloomberg Businessweek spoke with people who've worked with or opposed her over the years, and dug into several interviews dating to 2005 that Bloomberg News' Karen Breslau conducted with Harris, her mother and other family members.  Illustration: PS Spencer for Bloomberg Businessweek On the economy, Harris has veered to the middle, reversing some of her positions, and signaled she's pro-growth. She pitches her deliberateness and predictability as superior to Trump's fixation on tariffs and his brazen transactionalism, which could remake the rules for American business. She's floated an expanded tax break for new small businesses and a softer stance on cryptocurrency. Her rise in the San Francisco Bay Area familiarized her with the giants that power Silicon Valley's growth, but she also flexed her watchdog muscles as California's attorney general, targeting banks and for-profit colleges for predatory lending practices. She's pledged to raise taxes on corporations and high earners and to increase the capital-gains tax, albeit to a lower rate than Biden's target. Her track record suggests she'd push for stronger regulation of companies and stoke an antitrust agenda that's riled even some prominent Democratic donors. So which version of Harris would Americans get? The liberal or the moderate? The idealist or the pragmatist? The innovator or the incrementalist? Current and former aides contend that, while Harris wants to hold bad actors accountable, she's all of the above—guided by values but pragmatic and open to compromise. She has precious little time left to tell voters who she is and what she'd do as president. The campaign's final weeks will pit her assertion that she's a middle-class champion against Trump's effort to paint her as a coastal liberal and an incumbent responsible for inflation and a porous border. And even if she succeeds in the seven battleground states she needs to win the presidency, her legislative agenda almost surely depends on helping hold a key Senate seat in Montana, too. Harris says she's building a movement. If it's to become a revolution, she's got important voters left to convince. Keep reading: What a Kamala Harris Win Would Mean for Wall Street and Main Street | 
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