Trump’s plea for working-class voters is a scam

I don’t recall ever seeing a presidential candidate condescending on the subject of the economy to the extent that we’ve seen this year. There are two economies right now: the real one, and the fictional one, both of which Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are pretending are real: Trump to destroy the Biden-Harris record, and Harris to appease voters who keep telling pollsters that inflation is out of control when it isn’t.

Inflation is actually so bad not out of hand that the Federal Reserve will almost certainly announce a rate cut on Wednesday for the first time in four years. Some Democrats have expressed hope that this action will convince voters that the Covid-induced spike in the consumer price index that, to reiterate, started with a 4.2 percent increase in April 2021, peaked at 9.1 percent in June 2022, immediately began to decline and is now at a very respectable 2.5 percent, that this inflationary wave has been over for some time. The Fed is not worried about inflation now, but about unemployment, which is still quite low at 4.2 percent but could become a problem as the economy cools.

I have urged Harris to say, “Wake up and smell the coffee, voters, this economy is booming!” The argument against this, which has prevailed so far, is that many people are still in pain. That is certainly true of long-term unfavorable trends, such as the 45-year rise in income inequality (which I wrote a book about 12 years ago). But setting aside how unsatisfactory economic conditions have been over the past half century, most people are better off now than they were four years ago. If dissatisfaction with the economy expressed to pollsters were limited to those who feel worse off now than they were four years ago, you would have a September 11-12 Financial Times– A poll from the University of Michigan Ross School of Business found that a whopping 72 percent of registered voters said economic conditions in the United States are “negative,” while the percentage who said economic conditions in the United States are “negative” personal For people who have difficulty paying expenses, this percentage is much lower at 26 percent.

What we see here is the familiar American habit of believing that you are better off than others, as documented in David Whitman’s 1998 book, The Optimism Gap: The ‘I’m OK, They’re Not’ Syndrome and the Myth of American Decline and Gregg Easterbrook’s 2018 book, It’s Better Than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear. Paul Krugman of The New York Times has cited several examples of the I’m OK–you’re not mentality lately, pointing to a May Quinnipiac poll that found a robust 65 percent rated their personal finances as “excellent or good,” while only 35 percent would say the same about the economy, and an April poll Wall Street Journal A poll in swing states found that 54 percent of voters in all seven states rated their own state’s economy as “excellent or good,” while only 36 percent would say the same about the national economy.

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When you view local conditions as favorable and distant conditions as unfavorable, you are likely to have a negative view of distant (i.e., federal) authority. The result is that both Trump and Harris sell themselves as candidates for changeIn Harris’s case, she’s selling herself primarily as a farewell to the tiresome chaos of the Trump presidency, but she’s also inviting voters to judge her as a refreshing departure from the Biden administration (aka the Biden-Harris administration). Beyond lacking credibility, this strategy obligates Harris to great file on the management of the economy, which should appeal above all to the working-class voters it seeks to attract.