Andrew Roth/Sipa USA via AP Images
Scene at a town hall with former President Donald Trump in Flint, Michigan, September 17, 2024
This is a change election increasingly dominated by two dominant factors. The most important is voters choosing which leader will stand with the hardworking middle class being hit by high prices and the cost of living, while the big corporations make super profits at its expense.
And the second is who will get control of the border and immigration, while U.S. citizens get in line for public services.
Likely voters put cost of living 18 points higher in importance than the border, but both of them well above everything else.
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You can see voters’ increased anger in the double-digit rise in those choosing those two issues. This is how voters are expressing their feeling of being victimized and wronged. With both, they see changes in the policy offer that will make their lives better if the right side wins. They get excited about bold offers, like the expanded monthly tax credit and big corporations paying their fair share. They also like closing the border or building a wall.
Trump shifted the momentum in the race when he began his outrageous, slanderous, and racist statements about Haitian immigrants. He has also made immigrants the cause of high rents and food prices and spread the false rumor that FEMA ran out of funds for North Carolina hurricane victims.
It was very effective and is still shaping the race.
Trump’s daily blows pushed up Republican enthusiasm ahead of Democrats and shifted white working-class and Hispanic voters. They shifted votes toward Trump in North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada. And critically, they dropped Harris’s margin in Pennsylvania from near 2 percent to a half percent. Polls in Pennsylvania and nationally show her support trending down.
The Harris campaign understands these powerful dynamics. In her launch, she said her mission was the middle class, and that the election will be a choice. When showcasing Harris’s vice-presidential choice, she focused on her and Tim Walz’s authentic biographies. She drew the contrast with them battling for the middle class against Trump championing big tax cuts for himself and his billionaire friends. Her first economic speech was on the cost of living. It included middle-class tax cuts for 100 million Americans. It included making permanent the expanded monthly Child Tax Credit and $6,000 for newborns. It addressed the cost of housing and expanded health care policies to reduce prescription drug costs. And it got up the ire of traditional economists when it went after price-gouging in the food industry.
She carried this message and policy focus deep into the Democratic National Convention, the debate, and advertising on her policies helping with the cost of living.
What do we think voters are hearing? They may be hearing more continuity than change.
Harris gained 3 points as soon as Biden passed the torch. But her message and priorities grew her vote steadily until she had a 3-point national lead and tied with Trump in almost every battleground state. She moved into at least 2-point leads in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Maybe most important, Harris and her message raised Democratic unity and enthusiasm. After the convention, Democrats and Republicans were at parity on enthusiasm.
These rapid gains were made possible by Joe Biden being in such a deep hole with so many parts of the Democratic base. He was badly underperforming with Blacks and Hispanics and even losing white Gen Z and millennials and unmarried women. Harris made her biggest gains with Black women, the young and millennials, white unmarried women, and working-class women. These groups paid close attention when the Democratic leader walked in their shoes, took on the same enemies, and offered policies that helped their families.
Trump made sure Biden owned these problems, and the hurricanes meant that Biden was necessarily the face of the government’s response.
I know there are other issues at play here that contribute mightily to who voters are choosing in this election. But people have heard so much and for so long about abortion, crime, Obamacare, jobs, and the peaceful transfer of power, and they are kind of baked in.
But in the last month, we have seen the percentage saying immigration and the border are the biggest issue jump by 13 points. The cost of living jumped 11 points.
So, these are the rules for the final duel. Not surprisingly, voters favor Trump by 15 points (54 to 39 percent) on handling the border. Hispanics favor Trump too on this issue, by 48 to 42 percent.
But Harris’s campaign has had a major impact on who is best on handling the cost of living. There she leads by a point, 48 to 47 percent. What a chance to build on what the campaign has achieved.
Reporters keep asking when Biden will get credit for the strong economy, and Paul Krugman keeps saying we have “low inflation” and the average worker has “higher purchasing power.” But that crashes against the real economy. Prices for housing are up 5 percent year over year. The household food basket is up 20 percent since Biden took office. Yes, wages exceeded prices this year, but only the well-off will make up for their lost incomes anytime soon. The great majority are still struggling every month to pay the bills.
That is why President Biden saying they are not struggling gets in the way of such a focus.
He interrupted the White House press briefing on October 4th to talk about the jobs report and settling of the dockworkers strike. “Outside experts were wrong,” he said. “Inflation has come down. Wages have gone up faster than prices. Interest rates are down. A record 19 million business applications have been filed for. The stock market reaches new heights.”
You could almost hear him say, the pollsters were wrong too. He could have won this election.
And what President Biden is saying is just as important as Harris for the voter determining the priorities for a new administration.
In Michigan, Harris said, “Look, our economy, while we’re making good progress—just this morning, we got a solid jobs report, right? Over 250,000 jobs created last month; unemployment fell. And just a few weeks ago, the Federal Reserve cut interest rates, which helps.” But she quickly reminds people of the cost-of-living issue, and says, “There is still more work we need to do.”
What do we think voters are hearing? They may be hearing more continuity than change. It does not help that on The View, Harris could not initially come up with a policy difference with President Biden.
When 60 percent of Hispanics, white millennials and unmarried women, and a plurality of Blacks says the country is on the wrong track, you don’t want to be continuity.
Is the Harris campaign focused on the cost of living?
Tim Walz’s closing statement in the vice-presidential debate includes many messages, but not the cost of living. He talks about the surprising coalition supporting them to advance “democracy” and “freedom.” There is “optimism that there can be an opportunity economy that works for everyone, not just to get by, but to get ahead.” He reiterates the campaign’s theme, “Kamala Harris is bringing us a new way forward. She’s bringing us a politics of joy. She’s bringing real solutions for the middle class.”
She speaks of solutions, but not of an aggrieved middle class that Democrats championed since she took up the presidential nomination.
The interviewer on 60 Minutes asked about the high grocery prices, and people blaming Harris and Joe Biden: “Are they wrong?” She agrees on the economy being strong: “We have an economy that is thriving by all macroeconomic measures.” But then she adds, “And to your point, prices are still too high.” And then she proceeds to talk about her plan that addressed the price of groceries, the Child Tax Credit, and help for first-time homebuyers and small businesses. She then elaborates her plan on tax fairness. “It is not right that teachers and nurses and firefighters are paying a higher tax rate than billionaires and the biggest corporations.”
In all these interviews, she takes the opportunity to talk about the various policies that would help on the cost of living. That is why she has gotten to parity on who is better on that issue.
But when contrasting Trump and her plan, she does not mention the cost of living. “My plan would strengthen America’s economy. His would weaken it. My plan is about saying that when you invest in small businesses, you invest in the middle class and you strengthen America’s economy.”
As Trump was doubling down on his migrant strategy and getting momentum, the Harris campaign’s message talked about going “forward” and “creating an opportunity economy.” This is a weak hand, compared to cards played earlier.
Harris pulling back from championing the aggrieved middle class has proved costly going into this final duel.
At the height of Harris’s focus on the cost of living, however, she ran a powerful contrast on how their plans will “lower the cost of living.” Here is the ad:
Comparing the graphs, you see immediately that the college-educated groups, such as white college women, responded identically to each ad, but not groups that are predominantly working-class. White working-class women had pulled back from Harris after the Trump attack, and they gave the opportunity economy ad a -4 score. That meant more felt cool than warm. But the economic plan on cost of living received a net positive score of +1. Hispanics and white millennials are 4 points more likely to give a very warm, intense positive response to that ad. The biggest increase was for white unmarried women. Their very warm response was 8 points higher.
So, imagine how different the response would have been if Harris, in this run of interviews, compared their plans’ impact on the cost of living. Trump hits you with a $4,000-a-year sales tax. “We’ll lower the cost of living by investing in American manufacturing, cutting taxes for the middle class and making big corporations pay their fair share.”
And instead of simply saying, “Prices are still too high,” imagine she had showed empathy and talked about the struggles of those middle-class families. That is what she did when announcing her plan for addressing the cost of living.
Harris has to be the candidate bringing change if she is to regain momentum. Her campaign is heavily recruited from the Joe Biden world that admires him and his transformative policies. Right now, the Harris interviews and comments leave voters uncertain.
But the campaign could view this as an opportunity to explain. And it is not a difference in policy but an explanation and very different communication about inflation and the cost of living crisis:
“The spike in prices hit every country, and we helped people with reduced health care and drug costs and the expanded monthly Child Tax Credit. Unanimous Republican opposition ripped that help away and left people struggling to survive financially. My boss didn’t really want to attack Republicans. So, that is why my proposed middle-class tax cuts and help with health care costs are so important to my plan to help with the cost of living. They are the key difference with Trump, who will make it even harder for the middle class.”
That message will be heard by the voters who pulled back and gave Trump his current momentum. Harris can make sure that Trump and Vance don’t ever get to the White House.
