For all the churn in the 2024 presidential election contest, one issue has remained at the top of voters’ minds. Most voters weren’t concerned President Joe Biden didn’t have a competitive primary opponent or that Vice President Kamala Harris slid into his seat at the top of the ticket when it became clear that he should have had a tougher opponent earlier in the process.
Former President Donald Trump ignored the rush of primary opponents, not deigning to join them on the debate stage and letting them eat each other alive before eventually falling in line behind him as the nominee.
Whoever was at the top of the ticket was going to have to tell voters what they were going to do about the economy.
As the sun sets on the campaign, a flurry of economic reports has been released, giving last-minute voters an extra morsel of food for thought as they decide who is better suited to address their concerns.
Economic Reporter Zach Halaschak has put together a helpful explainer this morning to help voters make sense of the slew of items that, when cobbled together, make up “the economy.”
Harris was at an immediate disadvantage on economic questions as she was tied to Biden and his dismal economic approval ratings, Zach wrote. Trump has been running on the message that his first three years as president meant an economic boom and that the freefall in the final year was due to COVID-19 and not anything he did himself.
The primary economic concern has been inflation. Though the consumer price index, the most-watched gauge of inflation, has been trending down, voters have the 8% inflation high-water mark from June 2022 seared into their memories.
“Consumers are feeling the sting of higher prices,” Greg McBride, chief financial analyst at Bankrate, told Zach. “Lower inflation doesn’t mean prices are going down. It just means they’re not going up as fast.”
How much money it costs for a basket of groceries is an economic indicator that hits close to home. Another is how productive the country’s economy is — or at least how powerful it feels.
Here, Biden and Harris have good news to tout, though they have struggled to brag about the overall victory when the prices of eggs, milk, and bread still feel like they’re climbing out of reach.
“Gross domestic product growth, a measure of economic output, increased by 2.8% in the third quarter of this year,” Zach wrote. “The news was released this week in the Bureau of Economic Analysis preliminary estimate.”
“GDP growth has largely been positive during Biden’s time in office, although it contracted in the first two quarters of 2022, which at the time raised concerns that the U.S. would fall into a recession — although those fears never materialized,” he wrote.
Click here to read more about how the economy could affect who wins at the polls tomorrow.
Immigration nation
Voters aren’t being moved off their commitment to saying the economy is their No. 1 concern for candidates to address. But a consensus second option has been the question of whether Trump or Harris is better equipped to handle a border crisis that has tapered off but is never far from spilling back into view.
The messaging on immigration has not been as divided as might be expected. Trump has continued to push a hard line on illegal immigration and immigrants. Harris hasn’t tacked as far as Trump’s positions on sealing off the southern border and rounding up bands of immigrants for mass deportations, though she has moved off her previous position of decriminalizing illegal border crossings.
Immigration Reporter Anna Giaritelli is up with an item for us this morning looking at how both candidates have put immigration at the center of their campaigns — as a signature issue for Trump and a defensive crouch for Harris.
“A New York Times-Siena College poll released on Oct. 25 revealed that immigration had tied abortion as the second-most important issue to U.S. voters just a week ahead of the election. Only the economy beat out immigration and abortion,” Anna wrote.
“That, in and of itself, shows the magnitude that Americans feel personally affected by immigration and border policies, but deeper down in the survey is another example of why some are so concerned with border security,” she wrote.
Trump has consistently held an advantage over Harris in voters’ minds about who is better suited to handle immigration. The disparity has allowed Trump to use the issue as a cudgel and forced Harris to speak up about how the Biden-Harris administration has handled the historic influx of illegal border crossings and what she is going to do differently than her boss.
Separating her future self from her past “border czar” position has been a difficult prospect. She has spoken about the “border crisis — a reference to the highest-ever number of illegal immigrants arrested at the southern border in the first three years of the Biden-Harris administration,” Anna wrote, but only in the past tense as a phenomenon that has ended.
The reversal, she says, proves she is capable of handling the presidency.
Trump, on the other hand, has been pressing his advantage on the issue, Anna wrote. He took precious time away from campaigning in swing states to visit New Mexico, a state he has close to no chance of winning, to hammer home the dangers of rampant illegal immigration.
Immigration is a salient issue in some swing states, too, though. Nevada and Arizona are up for grabs by either candidate, and Trump is banking on his hard line helping push him over the top.
Click here to read more about how immigration could swing states and the election.
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For your radar
Biden will travel back to Washington, D.C., from Wilmington, Delaware. He does not have any events on his public schedule, though he will call service members to thank them for their service in recent counterterrorism operations against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria at 3:15 p.m.
Harris will spend the final hours of the campaign season in Pennsylvania. She is speaking at events in Scranton, Allentown, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia.
Trump is wrapping up his campaign with events in Raleigh, North Carolina, at 10 a.m.; Reading, Pennsylvania, at 2 p.m.; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, at 6 p.m.; and Grand Rapids, Michigan, at 10:30 p.m.
Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) will appear on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert at 11:30 p.m.
