Vice President Kamala Harris has what she used to call a 3 a.m. agenda. To be an effective president, she’ll need to add a 3 p.m. agenda.

Let me explain. When Harris was running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019, she put out a television ad that was pretty effective. She described how her mother, after putting the girls to bed, “would sit up trying to figure out how to make it all work,” presumably sometimes until 3 in the morning.

Harris said her 3 a.m. agenda was “a real plan to help you solve those worries,” including a big middle-class tax cut paid for by repealing the Trump tax cuts for high earners and corporations; Medicare for all; and fines for companies that don’t give women equal pay. “Because,” she intoned, “you’ve waited long enough to get a good night’s sleep.”

At the time, Harris was positioning herself as a liberal in an election that had the Democrats moving well to the left. She suspended her campaign in December 2019 and endorsed Joe Biden, a career centrist who himself shifted leftward to fight off the challenges of Senators Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.

We’re already hearing more about the 3 a.m. agenda — without that label or those precise policy positions — now that Harris is the odds-on favorite for the Democratic nomination. In a speech in West Allis, Wis., this week, she promised a “people-first presidency” that would deliver affordable health care and child care and paid family leave.

It makes sense for Harris to present herself as someone who cares about how ordinary Americans are feeling in the middle of the night. First, because it seems heartfelt. “I think she is personally much more passionate about the care side of the agenda” than other aspects of economic policy, Ernie Tedeschi, who was until this year the chief economist of the White House Council of Economic Advisers and now is director of economics at the Yale Budget Lab, told The Times.