The headline on the financial advice website was just slightly macabre: “Are Parent PLUS Loans Forgiven If the Parent Dies?”

The answer, you will be relieved to know, is yes. If you are a parent desperate enough to take out one of these predatory loans to put your kid through college because normal student loans aren’t enough - and, trust me, they’re not - your kid won’t be on the hook to pay it off after you die.

We've all seen the stories about Americans hopelessly in debt because of student loans, which can't be discharged in bankruptcy. The Parent PLUS loans aren't even eligible for the income-based repayment that is giving former students relief.

So it might sound reassuring that the relentless commodification of American life has an end point. But apparently it’s death, hardly the reassurance we need. And I fear the Harris campaign isn’t addressing these sort of bleak economic realities.

Wait a minute. Isn’t the economy good? What’s the problem with these ignorant folks who think it’s not? Are they drinking the Trump Kool-Aid? Don't they have money in the stock market?

In a word: No. The word “economy” means different things to different people. When Clinton political consultant James Carville memorably said “It’s the economy, stupid” he didn’t mean economy in the formal sense. By those indications, that U.S. economy is so good it's having a knock-on effect on economies around the world. Low unemployment, rising GDP, and, of course, the stock market.

But In a 2023 survey reported by Forbes, 78 percent of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, meaning they can’t save money and they’re not prepared for a crisis; 29 percent of those Americans reported that their income didn’t cover their expenses. Hello, Visa card. It’s the American way of life. A way of life that's often demeaning, sometimes hopeless, and at its worst, terrifying.

The anger that fueled Trump’s rise is real, and it is justified. This shouldn’t be news. In 2017, French economist Thomas Piketty’s blockbuster book Capital revealed that since the 1970s wages remained essentially flat while the cost of living rose dramatically. This was a global phenomenon but here in the U.S. the trend was a direct result of President Ronald Reagan’s policies. By busting unions, "deinstitutionalizing" public mental health facilities, and deregulating multinational corporations in the 1980s, Reagan created a dystopia where mentally ill people roamed the streets and semi-educated sociopaths rose to levels of power, culminating in the overgrown boys we now see on Twitter.

Wall Street, of course, did very well.

The full catastrophe is not yet upon us, but many students and parents already are collapsing under the weight of college costs. Baby Boomers are outliving their retirement savings, and as more of them age out of the job market, it will get uglier. If you aren’t in that bottom half (or even three-quarters) of the electorate, you probably have no idea of what others are facing. You’re planning a vacation. Taking a Pilates class. Buying an electric car. Waiting for the rates to go down so you can pull the trigger on that beach house. You don’t know the stress, the fear, the sense of powerlessness.

I worry that Kamala Harris doesn’t either. Not completely, not at gut level. It's not because she doesn't understand economics. The New York Times recently ran a fascinating article about the relationship between Kamala Harris and her father, Stanford University economist Donald J. Harris. (He is not a Marxist, if one needs to debunk the Republican talking points.)

The post-divorce relationship between a brilliant father and a promising daughter with deep loyalty to her mother has been difficult, and yet one of Dr. Harris’s colleagues said: “A big part of the difficulties between them is that they’re so much alike.” That’s quite a compliment. First, imagine what it took to be the first black scholar to gain tenure at Stanford. Second, consider that Donald Harris took early retirement to rebuild Jamaica’s economy, which he succeeded in doing.

Distant and difficult as Dr. Harris might have been, Kamala Harris nonetheless connected with his life’s work, choosing a double major in economics and political science at Howard University. There is no question that Harris understands the economy in formal terms. What she needs to convince the electorate is that she understands it in Carville terms.

With so many voters saying they don't know enough about Harris, the campaign is working hard to introduce her. Her frequent refrain: “I grew up in a middle class family” does a good job of placing her in a context, but when it comes to policy, the campaign offers thin gruel.

The country is in the midst of a deep housing crisis, not just for prospective homebuyers but for renters. Some of the Harris proposals are specific, and some are an attempt to address the larger economic forces driving the crisis. For example, in her stump speeches, Harris talks about $25,000 in assistance to first-time homebuyers. (The website qualifies this as “up to” $25,000.) It's not clear that this message lands with frustrated would-be homeowners. For one thing, no ordinary mortal knows if that $25,000 is actual cash or tax breaks. For another, it doesn't address mortgage rates or the high cost of housing. A down payment is nice, but not if you can't afford your monthly mortgage payment and your income means you're not even close to being able to buy a house.

Another proposal, partnering with private industry to build more housing, polls well with some voters, but seems unlikely to cut costs quickly or dramatically. Partnerships with real estate developers tend to result in “affordable” apartments that still cost more than the 78 percent can afford. That’s how it worked in San Francisco when Gavin Newsom did it. As we know from the Real Estate Developer-in-Chief, real estate development is not a profession that generally attracts altruists.

Harris is doing well with female voters, and a proposal to restore the child tax credit would provide dramatic help to families. But cracking down on grocery store price gouging? This is an arcane issue irrelevant to most Americans. Why is Harris talking about it so much? Maybe it’s a Trumpian move, trying to find bad guys, but I’m not sure it’s working. Mostly it’s confusing.

I have read the Harris economic plan. There’s nothing objectionable about it, and it goes without saying that it is far superior to anything the Grifter-in-Chief jabbers on about. But perhaps because of the relentless focus on positivity, the Harris-Walz campaign has not taken on the bedrock problem: Americans’ profound sense of getting fucked over. What we're not hearing is: "I want to keep you in your home. If you don't have secure housing or can't afford your rent, my administration will make that our number one priority. Because if you don't have a home, everything else in life becomes that much harder."

Anthony Scaramucci aka The Mooch, and BBC veteran Katty Kay interviewing Doug Emhoff recently on The Rest is Politics U.S.

It wouldn’t be that hard for Harris to reassure Americans that she feels our pain. Yet ironically, it’s not a Democrat, but a Republican who’s talking about this: Anthony Scaramucci, aka The Mooch. If you recall, he’s the guy with the Long Island accent who was Donald Trump’s director of communications for about two seconds. (Actually 10 days.) As it turns out, the Italian-American crane operator’s son who made it to Harvard Law School, Goldman, Sachs, and started his own hedge fund, is hella smart. He’s also an incisive political commentator on an odd couple podcast, The Rest is Politics US, with British TV journalist Katty Kay.

In a recent series on how Donald Trump won the White House in 2016, Scaramucci gave a fascinating insider’s view of how late-stage right-wing money transformed the Trump campaign. He was also brutal but accurate about the Clinton camp's catastrophic mistakes, from the ill-advised comment characterizing Trump voters as “a basket of deplorables” to Clinton’s neglect of Midwestern "blue wall" states crucial to an electoral college victory.

It wasn’t all Hillary’s fault, of course, or the fault of her campaign staff, which one veteran politico told me, off the record, should be "sued for malpractice." At the last minute, right-wing donors flooded cash into the campaign of third-party candidate Jill Stein, Scaramucci points out. Stein’s votes could have swung the electoral college to Clinton. That could happen again this year.

With Trump and his supporters virtually certain to challenge the results if he doesn't win, the goal of any Democratic presidential candidate has to be resounding victory. The Harris campaign is doing many things right, including establishing a strong ground game in rural areas that Clinton's campaign wrote off. But working class support remains elusive. That includes support for Democrats among Latinos, especially Latino men, which has eroded over the last two election cycles. Latinos now comprise 19 percent of non-white voters, compared to 12 percent made up of African-Americans, and the majority are working class. There are other paths to an electoral college victory, as Republican political consultant and Never Trump Mike Madrid recently sketched out, but it's a tougher road.

Rua Texiera, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, cites statistics showing that the country's most profound voting division is not race, but education. This is something most of us grasp intuitively, if only because of our horror at Trump voters, but it is borne out by the polling cited by Texiera:

"In a September NYT poll, Harris was, as noted, carrying college voters by 26 points but losing working-class voters by 18 points. That translates into a 44 point education gap—exactly twice the 22-point gap in the 2020 election. Similarly, in the new CNN poll Harris leads among the college-educated by 24 points, but trails among the working class by 16 points, an education gap of 40 points."

When people say they don’t know if Harris is up to the job, what they really mean is: Can Kamala Harris make me feel safe? Can she help me send my kid to college? Will I be taken care of in my old age?

Harris is not answering enough these questions, and I'm not the only one saying it. In Politico, Gavin Bade recently wrote:

"...most of the folks who are feeling better about Harris’s economic platform are not the working-class voters who helped deliver Democrats the Midwestern “Blue Wall” states in 2020 and 2022. Instead, they are likely professional class voters, many of them in suburbs, who have college educations but were uneasy about Biden—the fabled 'Nikki Haley voter' that Democrats have been trying so hard to woo.

"And that shift makes sense when you consider Harris’ economic message since she ascended to the top of the ticket, which has been squarely aimed at professional-class concerns. Whereas Biden made manufacturing and industrial policy the centerpiece of his campaign speeches—and still does as a lame duck—Harris barely mentions those policies on the campaign trail. Instead she is focusing much more on elements of the so-called 'care economy,' like a child tax credit, as well as helping new homeowners and small businesses."

It's certainly ironic that a multimillionaire Republican is hammering on this, but the Mooch hasn't forgotten his blue-collar roots. On his podcast, he recently mused that if he'd come of age in 2024 America, he might never have made it to Harvard, where he was a classmate of Barack Obama, much less to the upper echelons of Wall Street. He talks about the difference between an aspirational economic message and what he calls the “desperational” economy that’s experienced by too many Americans.

What Trump has to offer, says the Mooch, is a return to the aspirational economy of Ronald Reagan. Hope, one might say. Whether it's political or personal, it's hard to live without it. This could explain why the myth of Reagan persists, even among faithless Republicans like Scaramucci and Liz Cheney, who recently gave the best speech of this election season in Ripon, Wisconsin explaining why she supports Kamala Harris. What Reagan represents seems to be, in effect, the Republican version of the Barack Obama "Hope" poster. Hope is potent. It is necessary, not just politically but personally.

Harris is very good at being empathetic. She needs to combine that empathy with statements showing she understands the lives of people who have not been on her successful career track.

There is a roadmap for Harris and it was laid out by Joe Biden. Most of us seem to have forgotten that in the 2020 election, and throughout his presidency, Biden understood and addressed the sadness, rage, and frustration of the Americans who are worrying about sending their kids to college or whether they can retire instead of buying beach houses. We've heard the litany: the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Build Back Better Framework, which together are projected to add an estimated 1.5 million jobs a year for a decade by upgrading roads, bridges, and energy infrastructure. (Hello, Texas?)

While this may be the biggest ticket item, it's only one part of a comprehensive effort to address the friction felt by ordinary Americans. In October 2023, the Biden administration announced the initiative to stop junk fees. While stopping high charges for bounced checks might sound small-bore, it isn’t if you’re hit with these fees. More than that, it’s a matter of trust. We need to rebuild trust not just in government but society as a whole, so demagogues like Trump can’t capitalize on people’s pain.

Just this week, Biden ended the longshoreman’s strike. He was able to do it when he made it clear that he would not invoke the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act to force longshoremen back to work. His strong pro-union stance brought employers to the table.

Biden understood that inequality creates instability, to paraphrase the economist Paul Krugman. He not only understood it, he felt it. While American health care remains the ripoff to end all ripoffs, despite the administrations' cap on insulin costs, the signs this week were remarkably positive. As of Oct. 4, wage growth was four percent, and 0.4 percent on a monthly basis, the latest in a 16-month trend of wage growth outpacing price growth. But we’re talking about reversing almost half a century of escalating inequality. It won’t happen overnight, or even in three-and-a-half years.

I have read the Harris platform (“The Opportunity Economy”). I’m sorry to say much of her plank is vague and platitudinous. When the proposals get specific, they are, for the most part, minor tweaks. Harris doesn’t need to go all Elizabeth Warren on us, but she needs to make strong, clear statements that allay fears generated by the cradle-to-grave monetization of our lives, from our kids’ education to health care to retirement.

Have the Democrats learned the lessons of 2016? Some of them, certainly. Hillary Clinton would have made a good president but only her most faithful supporters deny that she was a horrible campaigner. Her comment that Trump supporters were racists and sexists, a “basket of deplorables,” was not only tone deaf; it was contemptuous. This remark alone cast her as out of touch with all the regular folks who may indeed hold offensive beliefs on larger, abstract issues but are often quite decent people: loving parents, good neighbors, and pillars of their communities. These Americans need to know Kamala is not just Hillary with a tan.

James Carville was right. It’s the economy, stupid. Kamala Harris has a balancing act that would be difficult for even the most brilliant economic thinker. She has to thread the needle between reassuring Wall Street and tech bros that she won’t harsh their buzz - because every president has to bow down to the gods of finance - while telling the electorate that, to cite another Clinton-era phrase, she feels our pain. That hasn’t happened yet, at least not enough, and I’m worried. Someone tell her.

Susan Zakin is the Journal's editor.