The vibes surrounding Vice President Kamala Harris are very good. There is the memesthe increase in fundraisingand general improvement swing state voting since she took the Democratic presidential ticket. In fact, the vibes are so good that she appears to have managed to shake off President Joe Biden. terrible economic reputation.
Despite being part of the administration, it appears that Harris is not overwhelmed by what happened. A recent poll even found that Americans trusted her to manage the economy more than the Republican ticket, a surprising feat for a Democratic candidate. Kamala does not exist entirely in the context that came before her. She looks around, laughs and says, “What vibecession?”
I’m being a little hyperbolic here, but it’s true that Harris has a serious opportunity to reshape her economic narrative. People may not believe she can solve all their financial problems, but enough voters seem willing to entertain the idea that she might be better for their wallets than former President Donald Trump.
Much of the conventional wisdom about elections — epitomized by Bill Clinton strategist Jim Carville during Clinton’s 1992 campaign — is: “It’s the economy, stupid.” It’s an accurate feeling; the economy is typically at or near the top of voters’ most pressing issues. But it’s also more complicated than it seems. When people say they’re worried about “the economy,” it can mean many things — food prices, gas prices, housing prices, health care. This year, for some people, it was a roundabout way of saying Biden was old.
Regardless of the underlying cause of his unrest, before Biden’s exit from the 2024 race, voters’ opinions about his economic record represented one of the biggest obstacles to the president’s re-election. People were angry with pricesthey hated inflationand they blamed Biden for all these problems. The White House tried to put a positive spin on this and dub it all”Bidenomics”, but people weren’t getting what was being written.
Now, with Harris at the top of the ticket, the terrain is shifting.
ONE new poll conducted in early August by the Financial Times and the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business found that more Americans trusted Harris to manage the economy than Trump, 42% to 41%. That’s a notable jump from July, when Biden was still in the race. At that time, only 35% of voters said they trusted the president more when it came to the economy, while 41% chose Trump. Not everything in the poll was rosy for Harris — Trump still has an edge on trade issues with China that people believe will leave them better off financially — but the results are a marked improvement.
“Harris is being considered extremely independent of the Biden-Harris record,” said Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster and president of Lake Research Partners. “They were blaming Biden as the man responsible. But I think it’s a new page now and people are interested in the future.”
And although this is just one poll, the trust that Americans place in Harris is relatively unique for a Democrat. Historically, voters tend to perceive Republicans as better managers of the economy. Biden was ahead of Trump in some polls in 2020 as the pandemic caused unprecedented economic chaos, but as a general rule, the American people think the Republican Party will do better in the economy – especially when the candidate is a businessman, like Trump.
But Harris managed to change the narrative. A late July poll from Blueprint, a Democratic polling firm, found that Harris and Trump were tied on who voters trusted most to lower prices and create jobs for everyone who needs them. Harris has the edge in keeping rent and housing costs affordable, but trails Trump in lowering gas prices and interest rates. Blueprint also found that Harris did much better than Biden on a variety of economic measures, including passing economic policies that people thought would benefit them and lowering prices.
“Relative to Donald Trump, the Biden administration’s economic policies are not strongly associated with Kamala Harris in voters’ minds,” said Evan Roth Smith, Blueprint’s principal pollster. Overall, Smith told me, voters are in wait-and-see mode.
“Voters are instinctively ready to give him a chance,” he said. “They trust she will be at least as good as Trump on most of the economic issues they care about, but she needs to help voters connect the dots about what she thinks.”
This change in perception is not because the economy transformed overnight – unfortunately, we did not eliminate the inflation of recent years and returned to 2019 prices. It is because people’s impressions and perspectives are different. With Biden out of the race, many voters simply feel better.
“At some point, elections are about vibrations, right?” Eli Yokley, US policy analyst at Morning Consult, said. “And if you’re a voter and you think the vibes are bad — whether it’s the economy, whether it’s because of the age of the former Democratic candidate weighing on your thoughts — all of those things kind of build on and change perceptions of a lot of these issues. . We saw sentiment decline about Biden’s handling of climate change or LGBT rights, the key things Democrats are always ahead on, and it was moving at a similar pace on the economy.
The Penta-CivicScience Economic Sentiment Indexwhich measures Americans’ expectations for the economy’s progress, saw a big jump in the last two weeks of July, around the time Biden dropped out and Harris entered the picture.
Whether people feel it, much of the economy is good on paper. Economic growth It’s strong. Inflation is falling, even if prices remain high. Gas prices are lower. Salaries increased. Mortgage Rates have fallen. The Federal Reserve is likely to cut interest rates in September, which will be a welcome relief for consumers and businesses alike. The job market remained resilient, although some cracks are starting to appear. Over time, inflation should start to hurt less as people get used to the prices and wages increase.
“People are still outraged by how much they’re paying for things compared to a few years ago, but I think less and less,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics.
But Biden was limited in his ability to make this case. Democrats cannot reason, argue or shout to convince people that the economy is good or to make them less angry about the real annoyance of high prices. But maybe, with Harris as the nominee and the governor. Tim Walz of Minnesota next to her, they won’t need it, at least not as much.
For one thing, it’s unclear whether voters think Harris, as vice president, had much involvement in Biden’s economic policies. A recent swing state poll from Morning Consult asked voters what impact they thought Harris had on the economy and inflation under the Biden administration. About a third said it had a positive impact, a third said it had a negative impact, and a third said it had no impact or they didn’t know.
“Voters don’t know exactly how to blame her or how to fit her into this conversation,” Yokley said. “Just like her favorability numbers, which we have seen improvements in, she starts with a much shallower blank slate than people might expect the sitting vice president to do.”
This blank sheet of paper can be used as an advantage. Harris can speak to a distinct vision and more popular policies, whether tackling housing costs, supporting wealth building, promoting entrepreneurship, creating jobs or supporting the middle class. And she doesn’t need to say the words “inflation” or “Bidenomics”.
“It has a spot because people say, ‘OK, let’s take another look,’” Lake said. “It’s a race to define what your economic outlook is.”
Even with this opportunity, Harris has to compete with some history. There is a deep partisan divide in how people say they feel about the economy. When a Democrat is in the White House, Democratic voters say everything is fantastic and Republican voters say everything is terrible. When a Republican is elected, everything changes. As mentioned, voters often trust Republicans over Democrats on the economy, and many polls indicate that Trump still has an edge over Harris. People remember the Trump economy as a better time – interest rates were lower, prices were lower, homes seemed more affordable.
“Most people don’t even know what the policies are, but they definitely know how much their groceries cost,” said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster and political consultant. Still, this is one factor among many. “You cannot say that inflation is more important than the character of Donald Trump or that inflation is more important than the capabilities of Kamala Harris,” he said. “It’s apples and oranges. They are two different sets of concerns.”
Harris’s task now is to define an identity and an economic agenda before others beat her to it. She ran on a very progressive agenda in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, but she changed some of her positionsso it’s unclear to what extent this is a guide to what she would do as POTUS. In the Senate representing California, Harris proposed legislation to obtain tax credits for low- and middle-income families. In the 2024 campaign, she will also likely tout her record as California attorney general in going after pharmaceutical companies and big banks, including securing a US$20 billion deal of financial institutions during the foreclosure crisis. At a rally in Las Vegas earlier this month, Harris he said she would fight for increase in the minimum wage and endorsed the elimination of tip taxes for service workers. The latter is a proposal that Trump has already made.
Harris will likely have to present a positive message about the economy, although given the excitement around her, she may not want to get too involved in that. She could probably land a few jabs at Trump, too. He is proposing a set of tariffs what many economists say would increase prices even furtherand he would push to extend the 2017 tax cuts that disproportionately benefit the rich.
“I just think the Democrats have a very good theory about the economy, and I think the more people learn about Trump’s approach to the economy, the more concerned they will be about it,” said Bharat Ramamurti, formerly the deputy director of the Economic Council Biden National.
None of this is to say that this will all be smooth sailing for the Harris campaign, on the economy or on any other front. The problem with being a blank canvas is that anyone can paint on it, including your rivals. The Trump campaign and the Republican Party are trying to link it to negative feelings around Biden’s economy, affordability and inflation.
But for now, voters are giving Harris the benefit of the doubt on the economy, or at least an opportunity to chart her own path. Fortunately for her, she is removed from some of the context that came before her. In the economy, it’s almost as if Harris fell out of a coconut tree.
Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent for Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.
Read the original article at Business Insider
