Harris vs Trump: Forget red or blue, people will vote on the basis of the dollar green

With five weeks until the US election, the Listener’s Washington DC columnist Jonathan Kronstadt’s weekly column surveys the weighty, the weird and the wonderful from the Harris vs Trump race for the presidency.

Democratic political strategist James Carville is credited with boiling down a presidential campaign to its essence, with the now-famous line “It’s the economy, stupid.”

As the final days of the 2024 tilt count down, both candidates appear to be heeding Carville’s call. One day last week, former President Donald Trump spoke at a farmer’s roundtable in Pennsylvania, followed by a supposed speech on the tax code in Georgia that as usual was thematically elastic, though he did mention tariffs an awful lot. Then another speech on the economy in North Carolina under a banner that read “Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!” that seemed a bit hysterical, given that unemployment sits at a historically low 4%.

Vice President Kamala Harris is driving her own economic messaging machine hard and fast, wrangling a roundtable of Teamsters Union members in DC followed by an economic speech in, you guessed it, Pennsylvania.

The US economy is by any standard the strongest and sturdiest in the world and yet, combined with its unwelcome relative inflation, forms by far the electorate’s greatest single issue of concern. Inflation peaked here earlier and lower than in Europe, and prices continue to level off, as the inflation rate has dropped from a high of 7% in August 2022 to just 2.5% last month.

The problem is that most voters don’t remember the last time inflation topped 7%, as it was 1981 so they’ve been afflicted by shopping PTSD, and few are made sanguine by taking a global perspective on the matter and realising that the trend is our friend.

And so the candidates beat their respective economic drums.

Trump promises a rebirth of US manufacturing and huge reductions in food prices thanks to “100%, 200%” tariffs to be slapped on ill-behaved nations like China and Mexico; ending taxes on tips, overtime and Social Security earnings, which few economists endorse and which will cost about $125 billion a year; and the lowest energy prices ever, thanks to his first-day plan to “Drill, baby, drill” and access all of what he calls the “liquid gold” beneath our feet. Linguistic gold, not so much.

Harris’s money message centres on her notion of a middle-class-focused “opportunity economy” which, until a recent speech in Pittsburgh, had little meat on its bones. She called for higher taxes on corporations and immense wealth, lower costs for child and elder care, tax incentives for small businesses and homebuyers, and government investment in forward-looking industries like bio-manufacturing, artificial intelligence, blockchain technology and clean energy.