Well, it should come as no surprise that in the final weeks of the presidential campaign we're being gaslit about which candidate voters trust more on the economy.
"Vice President Harris is gaining steam with voters on the economy, just as the economy itself is showing new signs of its strength," reports The Hill. "The economy is the top issue for voters, according to many different polls. Polling agency Ipsos described it as 'the single most important issue to Americans since April 2024' in a survey earlier this month. Trump has long had a lead, first over President Biden, and then Harris when it came to the economy as an issue. But that lead is now getting smaller."
The article cites a Marist poll claiming that Harris only trails Trump by three points among adults on who would be better to handle the economy.
Even The Hill seems perplexed by this.
It’s not entirely clear why the gap is closing, though one reason is likely the replacement of Biden with Harris as the Democratic candidate.
While both Biden and Harris would be tied to their administration’s record on the economy, Harris has proven to be a stronger messenger than Biden on a host of issues and has excited Democrats and independents in a way the current president did not.
While Biden struggled in his July debate with Trump, which ended up pushing him out of the race, Harris was widely seen as defeating Trump in her debate against the ex-president earlier this year.
Ask yourself what has changed over the past couple of months to cause Harris to have a surge in approval on economic issues. When she's not taking Trump proposals and trying to pass them off as her own (like no tax on tips) her economic plans have been so bad that they've been panned by people on the left.
For example, her proposed federal ban on “price-gouging" was blasted by liberal Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell.
"It’s hard to exaggerate how bad this policy is,” Rampell wrote last month. "It is, in all but name, a sweeping set of government-enforced price controls across every industry, not only food. Supply and demand would no longer determine prices or profit levels. Far-off Washington bureaucrats would. The FTC would be able to tell, say, a Kroger in Ohio the acceptable price it can charge for milk."
Even an Obama economist trashed the plan.
"This is not sensible policy, and I think the biggest hope is that it ends up being a lot of rhetoric and no reality," Jason Furman, the former National Economic Council chair under Obama, told the New York Times. "There’s no upside here, and there is some downside."
Meanwhile, the prices of utilities and necessities are still too high. This is something even Harris admits in her stump speeches, while pretending she's not the sitting vice president.
So, what has happened to explain why Harris would be able to close the gap on trust on the economy.
The likely explanation is that she hasn't actually done so. The easiest way to prove this is that this is hardly the first time we've been told that Kamala Harris has closed the gap with Trump on the economy and it didn't reflect reality. In fact, last month the narrative was that Harris had eclipsed Trump on this key issue.
In mid-August, Newsweek reported that "Donald Trump's chances of winning the election in November look 'bleak' after a new poll showed more Americans trust Kamala Harris with the economy."
The poll in question was from the Financial Times and the University of Michigan Ross School of Business, which claimed that 42% of Americans trusted Kamala Harris to handle the economy—barely edging out Trump at 41%. That poll made no sense and clearly didn't reflect reality. I didn't believe it then, and countless polls since showed this clearly wasn't the case.
The media is just counting on all of us to fall for it again.
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