Trump has a stellar economic record, Kamala Harris has an execrable one. So why are voters mixing them up?
President Trump has a stellar economic record. Taxes were down. Home ownership was up. Job participation rates were up. Wages were up. People made money, and had their choice of jobs. Retirement was a thing and 401(k)s were fat, credit card spending was down, gas was cheap, the stock market was up, oil was getting drilled, exports were going out the door, groceries were affordable, health care was decent, housing was available, vacations were taken, interest rates were low, and the economy was going up. Until COVID and all its falsely premised Fauci-ordained lockdowns came around, Trump was thought of as unbeatable for re-election in 2020 based on his Reaganesque economic record that out-Reaganed Reagan.
Many Americans remember it well, and the Trump record is there.
The problem, though, is that he's not messaging it well to voters, which is why we see dreary, disheartening news like this.
According to Issues & Insights:
If all the results from the latest I&I/TIPP poll, the most unsettling has to be that voters think Kamala Harris is at least as much of a fiscal and economic conservative as Donald Trump.
Our latest poll, taken of 997 likely voters, finds that more voters say they trust Harris (who’s already announced $4 trillion in tax hikes) than Trump to cut taxes by a 48%-45% margin. Among the crucial independent voters, the margin is even greater – 49% to 36%.
That’s not all.
More trust Harris to bring about energy independence, 48%-47%.
Trump is essentially tied with Harris on growing the economy (49%-48%), but he’s far behind with independents on this critical issue, with half saying they trust Harris to grow the economy and just 42% trusting Trump.
Harris is tied with Trump on cutting spending and fixing inflation. But among independents, she leads on the former, 44%-33%, and the latter by a 47%-39% margin.
The voters think Harris is going to give them a tax cut? Seriously? That has to be because she keeps vaguely saying she will give tax cuts, not specifying any serious plans. She may give tax breaks to certain favored special interest groups that donate to her campaign, but anyone who thinks there will be a tax cut for them from Harris is going to be sadly disappointed. Harris has big spending plans for favored special interests with that money, so voters can forget about keeping it.
Issues & Insights points to the strange inversion of reality as probably a matter of poor messaging discipline from Trump. He's not getting word out in the right simple soundbites to make it sink in with voters. Anybody who has a better explanation for it should lay that out now, but I think this has to be the root of the problem.
Trump is not messaging consistently, the way Harris does, robotically claiming she will give tax cuts and hoping that voters forget that promise once she's safely ensconced in the Oval Office, taking Instagrams. I&I has an excellent detailed list of the startlingly good reality of the first Trump term here.
In my view, this weakness from the Trump side goes back to the Sept. 10 debate with Harris.
Harris has since run with all her phony claims about cutting taxes and making things better than they are now, as if she hasn't been in power and onboard with this grotesque economic policies since the day she joined Joe Biden in the White House.
Having poll-tested her debate responses, and identified all her best one-liners that "test well" with voters, she's now creating ads from those responses, to be played over and over again with her bottomless pit of Joe Biden's campaign money.
While it's completely robotic and phony, it does preserve the message "discipline" that campaigns value. A lie, after all, told often enough, eventually becomes "truth," and Harris understands this very well.
Trump, by contrast, seems to be relying on voters' memories of his first term, which not everyone does remember, given that not everyone understands much about why the Trump economy was so good. It's very easy to forget the stellar Trump record if one doesn't know where that economy comes from.
At the debate, Trump generally bested Harris on substantial points throughout the debate, but he didn't give us enough about the roots of his excellent economy and its many particulars, from choices of jobs for workers of every background -- young, old, educated, uneducated, women, men, black, white, Asian, Hispanic, gay, handicapped, ex-convicts, what have you, everyone did very well. All of this was brought about by his tremendous deregulation, his freeing up the U.S. from greenie mandates that suffocate the economy and feed crony capitalist corruption, his willingness to make it easier to innovate and start new businesses, his low inflation. The only real economic talk he brought up was tariffs, a great disappointment since tariffs do have costs even if they are done with a scalpel. Most people aren't thinking about tariffs, in fact, they are thinking about the price of groceries, health insurance, mortgages lending rates, gas, and other nightmares.
Trump could have done a better job in keeping down government spending which is the root cause of inflation, but his record nevertheless is better than Harris-Biden's, which has taken the debt and deficit spending, as well as taxes to new heights, hitting little guys making as little as $20,000 a year. We will watch it soar even further as Harris takes office and treats the Treasury like her personal credit card for spending on her favored special interest groups. Her big dollar giveaways on housing and student debt of course, won't help everyone -- they'll give special interests their breaks, and those who don't get the breaks will get socked with higher taxes to pay for them.
As Reason magazine's strictly libertarian Nick Gillespie has pointed out, at least Trump is talking about cutting government and spending and regulations. Not a snowball's chance in hell that Harris would. At a minimum, it's beyond her intellectual capabilities, given that she doesn't know where inflation comes from.
He had some excellent tweets in the debate's aftermath about what Trump should have been addressing:
I do not welcome or fear a second Trump term. It will be bad in profound ways, but so will a Harris first term. But Trump backers should be worried abt his inability to coherently defend his first term, which was far from the disaster his opponents claim. https://t.co/0Svuqx1ual
— Nick Gillespie (@nickgillespie) September 18, 2024
#KamalaHarris talks a lot about helping the poor, but her policies shower the wealthy and well off with more loot, from EV car subsidies to loan forgiveness to child tax credits to allowing state-and-local tax deductions. Via @reason https://t.co/8gFgmbgwd4
— Nick Gillespie (@nickgillespie) September 10, 2024
As someone who is neither a Democrat nor a Republican, my biggest complaint about last's night debate is that there was no substantive policy discussion from either candidate, esp. about debt and the old-age entitlements driving it. pic.twitter.com/WiakmEL0Z4
— Nick Gillespie (@nickgillespie) September 11, 2024
Some of these thoughts could be the basis for brutal ads against Harris and her plummy world of Pacific Heights billionaires and Soros circles who take succor from her at the expense of the poor.
He's just one voice and there are a lot of good ones out there -- Elon Musk is sharp as a blade, Rand Paul is pure awesomeness -- Trump needs to have people like this around him all the time to help craft this economic message discipline and hammer it in ads over and over, and for that matter, craft policy itself, so that voters 'get' that Trump's economy was the good economy and Kamala Harris's stunk something fierce. Not getting that messaging discipline, with a sharp free-market focus, much as Javier Milei was able to do in Argentina when he won a surprise election, could actually be disastrous for the Trump candidacy, and for voters themselves. Trump has to start speaking over and over again about what and why his economy worked so well, because this misperception is so fixable. Harris is starting to run away with it, just through idiotic repetition.
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