In this nail-biter of a presidential election, any number of factors will be said to have made the difference. Here’s one that’s certain to be cited if Kamala Harris loses: the (mis)perception among many voters, even those with no love for Donald Trump, that he’d be a better manager of the economy.
Harris has been closing the gap on who would be the preferable economic steward, but a Wall Street Journal poll last week showed that Trump had increased his lead on the question to 12 percentage points from 8 points in August. And yet, just over a week earlier, the Journal reported this consensus from economists: Inflation, interest rates and federal deficits would be significantly higher under Trump than Harris, based on the candidates’ policy proposals. Meanwhile, financial analysts reach for superlatives to describe a U.S. economy right now that’s the envy of the world.
Opinion Columnist
Jackie Calmes
Jackie Calmes brings a critical eye to the national political scene. She has decades of experience covering the White House and Congress.
The disconnect between voters’ and experts’ opinions dismays Democrats, but they bear a lot of the blame. They’re not alone, but more on that later.
For years Democrats have been chronically bad messengers about the economy and their economic agenda. Americans don’t recognize the very real recovery from the pandemic-wracked Trump economy in large measure because, unlike Republicans, Democrats in my years of reporting on presidents and Congresses have been loath to take credit, lest they be seen as out of touch with those still struggling.
Their reticence is especially striking in this pre-election week. According to a report on Tuesday, U.S. consumer confidence increased in October by the most since March 2021, beating economists’ expectations. On Wednesday, new data for the gross domestic product showed that the economy expanded in the third quarter by a 2.8% annual rate — “firing on all cylinders,” as one accounting firm economist told the New York Times. On Thursday, a key inflation metric is expected to show the lowest rate of price increases since Biden and Harris took office. And on Friday, forecasters say, the monthly jobs report will show the lowest pre-election unemployment in this century.
Consumer confidence, GDP growth, lower inflation, more jobs — all in one week’s data. But don’t expect Democrats to be shouting it from the housetops. They should.
To be fair, Democrats have to be cautious. Americans’ agita about the economy isn’t unfounded. Inflation, largely a consequence of the pandemic, has been brought under control and yet prices and interest rates remain higher than they were when Trump was president.
That doesn’t mean that Democrats — and Harris — shouldn’t boast. They can crow that the economy has grown, defying widespread predictions of a post-pandemic recession, and acknowledge that ongoing pain means more work to do. No one’s saying they should wave “Mission Accomplished” banners. (But they could stop citing the high price of eggs to signal empathy; the culprit there is avian flu decimating poultry flocks.)
It’s little wonder that the New Yorker this week published a piece by Nicholas Lemann headlined “Bidenomics is starting to transform America. Why has no one noticed?” (The subhead: “The full effects of the President’s economic policies won’t be felt for years. That might be too late for Kamala Harris and other Democrats.”) Democrats have abandoned the term “Bidenomics,” yet in time — much like “Obamacare” — they’ll embrace it, I’ll wager.
As Lemann notes, all over the nation — and mostly more rural in Republican-leaning areas where land is cheaper and more plentiful than in Democratic-leaning cities — hundreds of new manufacturing, clean-energy, semiconductor and infrastructure projects are underway, including in JD Vance’s Ohio hometown, thanks to laws that Biden signed. More than 800,000 manufacturing jobs have been added during Biden’s term; they’re not, as Trump claims, simply add-backs of jobs lost in the pandemic. Yet you don’t often see Harris at ground-breakings, ribbon-cuttings or new job sites.
Democrats should have taken a page from Trump, who put his name on federal stimulus checks that Congress created at COVID-19’s height, leaving some voters to credit him to this day. “The biggest mistake we made, we didn’t put up signs saying ‘Joe Did It,’ ” a rueful Biden mused to Lemann. Indeed.
Here’s another economic message you don’t hear from Democrats, yet it goes to their other big vulnerability: immigration. Analyses consistently show that immigrants boost the economy and reduce federal deficits — by nearly $1 trillion in the coming decade, the Congressional Budget Office estimated — not the opposite, as Trump contends. His promise for mass deportations is by far the single biggest reason that Bloomberg Economics forecasts that his policies would reduce GDP by nearly 9% — about twice the hit of the 2008-09 financial crisis. Democrats aren’t making that case, though; when it comes to immigration, only crackdowns are cool.
As I said, Democrats aren’t alone in culpability for Americans’ mistaken views on the U.S. economy. The media deserves blame, too, for underplaying reports of the economy’s health and all but ignoring it in the political coverage. Time after time, reporters allow Trump and other Republicans to go unchecked in making claims as outrageously false as saying Biden and Harris have “destroyed the economy.”
Which goes to the other place to point the finger: Trump. The former president never really left the stage after his 2020 defeat and subsequent disgrace. Instead he has dominated it, attacking Biden all four years, lying about the president’s policies while falsely gilding his own economic record.
Trump hasn’t paid a price; neither Democrats nor the media have extracted one. Worse, he’s benefited politically — and might even get reelected.