Vice President Kamala Harris has closed a wide gap with former President Donald Trump, her Republican rival in the 2024 presidential election. Polls suggest the race is a dead heat.
So what does she need to do to pull ahead? The answer isn’t mysterious. The state of the economy remains a top voter concern, and it’s also a key area where Harris trails Trump in terms of trust with voters. She needs to give voters better reasons to think they'd prosper if she were president.
High inflation during the Biden administration clearly stung voters while pushing Biden’s approval rating into the basement. But focusing on inflation alone would be a mistake. Americans are notoriously gloomy, and that has scarcely improved as inflation has dropped from a peak of 9% in 2022 to just 2.5% now, which is almost in the normal zone.
Something else is bugging people, and here’s what it is: Their living standards have taken a hit, and they don’t see relief coming anytime soon. That’s about both the past and the future, which means Harris doesn’t just need to explain away the inflation of the Biden presidency. She also has to make burned-out Americans feel more optimistic about what comes next.
Voters rate Trump higher on the economy largely because there was no inflation to speak of during his presidency, and other things went well enough until the COVID pandemic struck in 2020. The difference between then and now shows up very clearly in one simple chart Yahoo Finance maintains for our Bidenomics Report Card: Real income, adjusted for inflation, under both Biden and Trump.
Since Biden took office in 2021, real incomes have grown a scant 0.59%. Until this past June, real income growth under Biden was negative. That reflects the withering effect of inflation, and it means consumer purchasing power has flatlined under Biden.
At the same point in Trump’s presidency, real incomes had grown 6.9%. That number is distorted upward because the COVID pandemic that struck in 2020 led to more layoffs among lower-paid workers and pushed average incomes up. Before COVID, however, real income growth under Trump was about 4%, or nearly seven times higher than it has been under Biden. Ordinary people don’t gauge their purchasing power to the decimal point on a month-by-month basis, but the national ennui is rooted in stunted purchasing power.
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Americans expect this gloomy trend to continue. In its regular surveys of consumers, the University of Michigan asks respondents how they rate the odds that income gains will exceed inflation during the next year, representing real-income gains. The latest average probability of real-income gains is just 26%, the lowest level in data going back to 2008. The outlook for real-income gains has been plunging since January.
The bleakest outlook during Trump’s presidency was for 40% odds of real-income gains during the next year, which is 14 points higher than the current low under Biden. And there’s a huge gap in the relatively upbeat outlook for incomes at this point in 2020 compared with the dismal outlook today.
Now for a twist: Americans don’t seem especially concerned about future inflation, despite price hikes hitting a 40-year high under Biden. In the Michigan survey, respondents said they expect inflation of just 2.9% a year from now. At the same point in Trump’s presidency, they expected 3% inflation within a year. Even if consumers still feel sticker shock from prices that went up and stayed up, they seem to think prices have stabilized.
From Harris’s perspective, the inflation outlook could be both good and bad news. If consumers are less worried about future inflation, she has less work to do persuading voters she’ll get prices down. But if Americans are less worried about inflation — and they still have low confidence in future income gains — there could be deeper problems with earning power she can’t easily address.
Since becoming the Democratic nominee eight weeks ago, Harris has rapidly rolled out plans to lower food, housing, and healthcare costs; make childcare more affordable; and boost small businesses. What she hasn’t done is hammer home any single economic message that resonates with voters.
“People feel really bad right now about the economy,” Lee Carter, president of consulting firm Maslansky + Partners, said on the latest Yahoo Finance Capitol Gains podcast. “They want to hear something that makes them feel the economy’s going to get better, prices are going to come down, and things are going to be more attainable again, and they’re just not hearing it.”
Harris calls her vision the "opportunity economy," one in which more people find more open doors to a better future. At the moment, however, she's the one with the opportunity: to sharpen her economic message and get people to believe the road ahead is smoother than the rutted one behind. There's life after inflation. Voters need somebody to show it to them.
Rick Newman is a senior columnist for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on X at @rickjnewman.
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