“Egg prices,” the top Democratic strategist told me. “This is the path to 270!” He was joking, but not really. “If you could just get all the egg producers together and lower the prices for a few months—it’s hugely symbolic, and it could save civilization.”
For the past year, near the end of most interviews regarding the presidential campaign, I have been asking smart people what they wish they could know in advance about the final months of the race. The state of the war in Gaza? The outcome of Donald Trump’s trials? If Russia will interfere with the election again? And the answer—whether the person on the other end of the phone was a former senior Barack Obama strategist or a grassroots organizer in Wisconsin or a Black activist in Georgia or a disaffected Republican operative—has always been amazingly consistent. “I wish I knew,” Jim Messina, who ran Obama’s 2012 campaign, said back in early May, “what the economic situation was going to be.”
So does Kamala Harris, probably more than anyone. The incumbent vice president turned Democratic presidential nominee has enjoyed a monthlong honeymoon, and the good feelings should carry on for another few weeks, through her party’s convention in Chicago. But Harris has recently been given a reminder of one enormous problem she’ll need to tackle if she’s going to beat Trump in November: an unpredictable and fragile economy.
July’s disappointing jobs report, which showed American unemployment rising to 4.3%, triggered a worldwide financial market plunge. And while stocks rallied the next two days, the episode was an indication that the US’s post-pandemic recovery remains uneven, and that the economy is still a large political vulnerability for the Democrats. More bad economic news from here out could be especially damaging, both because it would arrive so close to Election Day, and because it would hit hardest two groups the Democrats badly need and have struggled to motivate: younger voters and voters of color. Meanwhile Harris’s rival, Trump, is tossing out tax cut promises to everyone from waiters to senior citizens.
Harris inherited a political deficit when she took over as nominee. Polls had regularly shown voters trusting Trump more than Biden to manage the economy—even though Trump presided over the biggest job loss in American history since Herbert Hoover, and Biden’s time in the White House has seen the largest number of jobs added during a first term, with both stats skewed, in different ways, by the pandemic. Biden’s inability to claim credit for the good economic news is one of the most interesting and inexplicable currents running through his presidency. His team tried to improve perceptions, beginning in June 2023, with a sales pitch that included branding the president’s policies “Bidenomics.” The push was expensive—at least $25 million in ads—and ineffectual. It was “political malpractice,” a Biden adviser told me at the time. “‘Bidenomics’—they actually sat in a room and someone said, ‘Yeah, that’s a great f*cking idea.’”
The name was the least of the problem; the emphasis on macroeconomic data instead of real-world illustrations of progress was a larger failure. Indeed, it’s hard to see how even the slickest marketing could have overcome what was happening in millions of grocery store aisles, home mortgage offices, and gas stations across the country. Nearly everything was more expensive. Biden and Congress had spent big to get the economy revved up again after COVID; inflation was an unfortunate side effect.
The economy, on balance, is better off than it was in January 2021. But the improvements didn’t raise Biden’s political fortunes, largely because most Americans experience the economy through things like egg prices. And the average price of a dozen Grade A large has climbed from $1.47 to $2.72 under Biden’s watch. “One of the things I tell the [Harris] campaign and the people around her is, this is strictly a question of cost,” says Bakari Sellers, a Democratic strategist and former South Carolina state representative who is close to the Harris operation. “When people are still feeling the pinch of cost, it doesn’t matter who the messenger is, it’s a difficult sale.But she’s a far superior communicator, and in the first five minutes of her first speech as the nominee in Atlanta she tackled immigration and inflation.”
