The One Thing Harris Needs to Do More Of

Plus Pennsylvania Analysis

Photo by joshua wann on Unsplash

I could write an entire column about the Democratic freak out over the last week, with anonymous and on the record sources telling reporters about how the Harris campaign is stuck, struggling in a key state, or flailing with a key population. As Puck’s John Heilemann summarized, “a large swath of the party is currently in a state of panic over where it sees Harris and her campaign standing today: stuck in the mud, not closing the sale, letting Trump get up off the mat and put himself on the path to victory.”

But here’s the truth: this freak out isn’t really coming from any sort of data or numbers indicating that Harris is slipping significantly. It’s coming from the fact that the campaign remains fairly static — which isn’t surprising, given how polarized Americans are — and there is very little substantial news about the election. In the absence of anything real to chew over, Democrats tend to start panicking and since they like the mainstream media more, it ends up in print. Republicans, by contrast, don’t share their anxieties with their favorite neighborhood scribes, so it produces an imbalance that is making it look like Harris is in trouble.

She’s not. She remains a narrow favorite. That doesn’t mean she’ll win, but you’d rather be her than Donald Trump.

Yet, if she wants to close Trump out, Harris needs to start playing offense on what ought to be Trump’s biggest weakness. If you asked me to summarize in two words why Harris isn’t running away with this election despite good economic indicators and Trump sounding more and more like an early 20th century authoritarian demagogue obsessed with genes and race, I’d respond with “grocery prices.”

The sense that Trump will produce a better economy explains a big chunk of why he remains close in the polls.

Americans remember how prices for staples were much lower before the pandemic, and they credit Trump. They also blame Democrats for the price increases during the Biden Administration, despite the fact that prices actually jumped less in the U.S. than elsewhere around the world. In a new NBC News poll on Sunday that found the race tied, 50% of respondents said Trump would do better at handling inflation and the cost of living, while 39% said Harris would. Similarly, in a new ABC News poll that found Harris up two points among likely voters, 44% of respondents said they trusted Trump more to handle inflation vs. 37% who trusted Harris more to handle prices.

In the ABC poll, 59% of respondents said the economy is getting worse (despite this being objectively false), and with those who felt this way, Trump led by a whopping 74%-21% margin.

Yet, there is an easy way for Harris to shatter Trump’s advantage on prices/the economy and it’s baffling that her campaign isn’t pouncing on it.

Trump has proposed huge tariffs and mass deportations. But those are things that would cause prices to go up — on imported goods, and possibly on agricultural products, since roughly one quarter of American agricultural workers in 2022 were undocumented immigrants. A Tax Policy Center analysis found that Trump’s tariff proposals would lower average after-tax incomes for American households by roughly $1800. And a Wall Street Journal survey of economists found that Trump's proposals would be more inflationary than Harris's.

All of this provides more than enough grounds (let’s face it, factual accuracy is not exactly a major focus for political campaigns or political advertising) for Democratic ads and campaign rhetoric saying, “elect Trump, and watch prices skyrocket.” These ads would be plausible and it’s easy to explain why prices would jump to the average voter. Democratic ad makers could get creative in depicting the impact on the average family.

Such ads would be far more effective than the ones the Harris campaign is running with some of the morally awful things Trump has said. There are a lot of Americans who are willing to tolerate Trump’s immorality, his threats to democracy, and his authoritarian impulses if they think it will benefit their bottom lines.

This sobering reality is why Harris should be attacking Trump’s economic agenda and at least creating uncertainty in the minds of these voters as to who will be better for them economically. To some extent, she’s doing this with advertising talking about how Trump wants to raise taxes on average Americans while cutting them for billionaires. But a focus on prices would complement that attack while flipping the script on Harris’s biggest negative.

Better still, Trump can’t readily fight back on this topic. Oh, he can focus — and has relentlessly — on how much prices have gone up over the past few years. But that’s about the past. He can’t outline how he’d lower prices, other than his usual empty boasts. Nor can he offer a counter to refute the idea that his tariff proposals, especially, would hurt Americans, since almost no analysis shows that they would be good for the economy.

And Harris doesn’t need to win on this issue. She only needs to cut into Trump’s advantage. She has advantages on other issues like abortion and protecting democracy. If she can slash Trump’s margin on the economy enough to pick off some voters who aren’t hardcore MAGAites, it could deliver the election.