News analysis
Better jobs, stronger economy: Harris, Trump focus on household hardships in final push
The White House could go to the side Americans think can improve their lives and livelihoods.
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The economy has consistently ranked as the No.1 issue for registered US voters over the past few years.
PHOTO: AFP
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In the final stretch of the most consequential election of 2024, the race could boil down to whom Americans trust to improve their lives and livelihoods.
The economy has consistently ranked as the No.1 issue for registered US voters over the past few years, particularly after President Joe Biden in June signed into law border restrictions
A Gallup poll published on Oct 9 shows 52 per cent of voters say the economy is an “extremely important” issue influencing their vote – the highest level since the 2008 global financial crisis. This figure hovered between 38 per cent and 44 per cent during past presidential elections. Another 38 per cent rate the economy as “very important”.
The economic mood, however, is mixed and patchy, meaning votes will go to whichever side offers the more compelling argument. While economic data posted this past week shows solid quarterly growth and ebbing inflation, new jobs created in October fell to the lowest since 2020,
Thus far, the economy has not featured that highly in either Vice-President Kamala Harris’ or former president Donald Trump’s messages. Both have mostly exploited emotive issues to rally their base.
For Trump, this includes stoking grievances with the establishment and scapegoating, evidenced by the inflammatory rhetoric at his Madison Square Garden rally.
The playbook for Ms Harris, meanwhile, has focused on abortion rights and safeguarding democracy. In delivering her last major speech from the Ellipse near the White House, where Trump had all but instigated an angry mob on Jan 6, 2021, to sack Congress, she wanted to remind voters of his attempt to subvert democracy.
A strategy of appealing to their base of confirmed supporters, however, might have reached its natural limits in this incredibly close election.
Is Trump better for the US economy?
With just two days to go, the window to convince in-person voters is closing. Finishing strongly will require winning over any remaining undecideds, most of whom share a preoccupation with the economy. Both sides have widely divergent messages on this count.
Declaring that her first goal as president would be to bring down the cost of living for Americans through tax cuts and Medicare expansion to cover home care at her Nov 2 rally in Atlanta, Georgia, Ms Harris repeated the message later that day in Charlotte, North Carolina.
In this final week, her campaign has pushed out ads showcasing she understands the challenges facing steel workers and smallholders, and emphasising her support for the working-class American.
Meanwhile, Trump has seized on the lacklustre jobs data, calling them “depression numbers” in his trailblazer through Gastonia and Greensboro in North Carolina on Nov 2. Economists doubt his election promise to cut petrol to US$2 a gallon (70 Singapore cents a litre), repeated over 20 times during the campaign, is realistic.
The question is how much traction these last-ditch efforts would have.
Ms Harris has commendably narrowed Trump’s lead on the economy in the past month by drawing up a policy platform for the middle class and families, with a vision and plan for an “opportunity economy”. Her initial focus on fighting price gouging, enhancing access to affordable housing, and making home care affordable for the elderly, resonated strongly and brings the Democratic Party back to the middle on the economy.
But Trump continues to trend better than Ms Harris on the economy. Fifty-two per cent of respondents to a national New York Times/Siena College poll of the nation’s likely electorate, taken in late October, say they trust Trump to do a better job on the economy, compared with 45 per cent for Ms Harris.
Across registered Democrats, Republicans and declared independents, American consumer sentiment was more upbeat during the Trump years compared with the past four years under Mr Biden.
Luck and timing played a massive role. Having inherited a strong economy from Mr Barack Obama, Trump simply presided over the second stretch of America’s longest economic rally, with low unemployment, low inflation and robust job creation.
Mr Biden – and by extension Ms Harris – was not so fortunate. Facing a gargantuan task in repairing the US economy after a devastating Covid-19 pandemic left millions jobless, the Biden administration was forced to clear a course through the rubble.
So they rolled up their sleeves. They provided financial relief to US businesses and Americans. Through major pieces of economic legislation, they brought back big industrial policy rebuild infrastructure poised for another rate cut later this week,
Are these enough to convince voters? “When it comes to the economy, I think a growing number of beleaguered middle-class Americans have become increasingly alienated from Trump,” Mr Alex Capri, senior lecturer at NUS Business School and author of the recently published book Techno-Nationalism: How It’s Reshaping Trade, Geopolitics And Society tells me, pointing to Trump consorting with billionaires like Mr Elon Musk.
“Mr Trump’s economic mix of tax cuts for the wealthy and widespread deregulation, along with his designs to downsize ‘deep state’ government agencies, seems better suited to an enclave of American oligarchs, not to America’s working poor,” he adds, referring to the Big Tech firms that have profited under Trump.
Different worlds
Yet, ask any American whether he or she has benefited from the Democrats’ economic programmes, and a variegated picture emerges. The positive headline macroeconomic outcomes aside, many cite their long and frustrating struggle with a persistent inflation never seen before in their lifetime.
Overall real wage gain from January 2021 to September 2024 barely ticked upwards by 1.4 per cent. Price levels remain elevated. Housing prices, utilities and groceries have all soared by over 20 per cent over this period. Petrol prices have remained high since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Economic pain typically creates an anti-incumbent sentiment. More than half say they and their families are worse off than four years ago, another Gallup poll published on Oct 18 shows.
Those hit the hardest could punish Ms Harris for it, especially in the battleground Sun Belt states.
Four in five Americans in Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina live in counties where housing prices have soared higher than the national average after an influx of new residents. Nevada, currently with the highest unemployment rate in all 50 states, had turned away from Trump in the last race as unemployment spiked to 30 per cent in April 2020.
These developments also coincide with a growing partisan divide centred on education status. Since Trump’s ascent, more non-college-educated voters living in rural areas gravitated towards the Republican Party, while more college-educated adults in coastal cities moved towards the Democratic Party.
Life has not been easy on this first group. Manual jobs held by mostly male workers without a degree – machinists, welders and construction workers – have dropped lower on the pecking order in terms of relative income, a New York Times study published on Oct 26 found.
Many are not simply lamenting lost jobs or rising costs of living but expressing deep-seated concerns of further downward mobility, of an inescapable sense of declining status in a country where others are getting ahead.
Despite the Harris campaign’s best efforts to shore up her appeal with this group, wooing them is likely to be an uphill task that cannot be accomplished in a matter of days or weeks. The same New York Times/Siena College poll found that 64 per cent of non-college-educated white voters planned to vote for Trump, and just 34 per cent for Ms Harris.
Today, the college-educated and non-college-educated seem to inhabit different worlds. “Bidenomics”, a term employed by the outgoing administration
Other issues apart from the economy might prove more powerful in motivating turnout in a polarised electorate. Associate Professor of political science Huang Chin-Hao, who is also co-chair of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy’s International Affairs Programme, says: “We have seen how this election has been about what people cannot stand for.
“This might turn out to be a gendered election. One cannot discount the hold abortion has for women voters when the Supreme Court’s 2022 repeal of Roe versus Wade
Abortion had outweighed inflation in the 2022 midterm elections
But in these final moments as Ms Harris and Trump make their closing arguments, it is the economy that most yet-to-vote Americans are concerned about. And in all likelihood, whoever can convince fence-sitters that he or she understands their economic pain points and can be trusted to improve people’s lives may win the keys to the White House.
