Do Voters Pay Attention to Economic Issues?

Today on TAP: Yes, if they are framed right. Biden and Harris are winning the battle for fair pricing. That should be a big deal in the campaign.

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One piece of weirdness in the campaign is that a majority of voters tell pollsters that they trust Trump more on the economy. Nearly all of that is the accidental result of the fact that most of the COVID-driven inflation happened after Biden took office in 2021.

In the effort to correct the record of what actually occurred under both presidencies and what the two campaigns are proposing, some of the details are wonky. It’s hard to educate voters on supply chains. And Trump has proposed a massive general tariff of 20 percent, which would function like a sales tax on consumers. Except some of the cost might be absorbed by sellers; and hold on, didn’t Biden keep Trump’s tariffs on China? We are already in the weeds.

Here are two big winners that resonate with consumers and voters:

Biden and Harris have made a big deal of “shrinkflation”—the fact that food and beverage companies are charging the same price for smaller quantities. The price per ounce of salty snacks has increased 36 percent since 2020, largely because of deceptive packaging.

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The White House’s spotlighting of these pricing games was easy to understand, and created bad publicity for trusted brands. The result? PepsiCo, the largest seller of snack foods, has just announced that Tostitos and Ruffles “bonus” bags will contain 20 percent more chips for the same price as standard bags. PepsiCo is also adding two additional chip bags to its variety-pack option with 18 bags, a spokesperson told CNN. PepsiCo says that it is trying this out “in select locations.”

Now is the time for the Harris campaign to claim a victory and to keep the pressure on. PepsiCo earns a shout-out, but it should be using honest packaging everywhere. Likewise other companies.

An economist might say this was just the normal result of supply and demand influencing prices. But it wasn’t. What made the difference was the White House calling out the abuse. And the subtext is a tried-and-true Democratic theme. Consumers need activist government to keep big business from ripping us off.

Here’s another one. The Federal Trade Commission has just finalized its “click to cancel” rule, which requires sellers of subscriptions and memberships to make it as easy to cancel as it is to sign up. If you’ve ever tried to cancel a membership for premium movies and scads of other online products, you find that you are stuck with automatic renewals and that options to cancel are buried several screens down if they exist at all.

This is another easy-to-grasp victory for consumers over sneaky sellers and for the positive role of government regulation. It also chimes with Harris’s emerging general theme of freedom—the freedom to cancel an unwanted membership, to control your own body, to change jobs without being locked in by a noncompete clause; the freedom to repair your own tractor or car.

Harris should be shouting about these wins from the housetops, and pressing for more. And what did Trump and Vance and the Republicans in Congress ever do to protect or advance these freedoms?

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