Poll still comes down to one issue, says Bill Clinton’s mastermind

The man behind Bill Clinton’s 1992 triumph says most Americans feel poorer than four years ago – and a familiar issue will decide the presidency.

Bill Clinton with James Carville, who helped him win the 1992 presidential election Picture: Getty Images

When James Carville was running Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential bid, he scrawled three words on a whiteboard that became the foundation of that winning campaign: “The economy, stupid.”

Now, six weeks before another US election, Kamala Harris is rising in the polls, which mostly have her in a dead heat with Donald Trump. In such a close race many factors, including abortion and immigration, have the potential to be decisive but more than anything the election is coming down to the stubborn reality that many Americans trust Trump more on the economy.

Even Harris’s advisers say that if she can’t convince a large number of these voters they’ll be better off under her, and worse off under Trump, she won’t make it to the White House. In other words: it’s all still about the economy, stupid.

“It always is, of course it is,” Carville, 79, says when we meet in a New York hotel lobby. “And sometimes emotional issues converge with economic self-interest, I’ll buy that. But that’s how elections are decided: if people are kind of satisfied with the general state of their pocketbook.”

The good news for Harris is that the economic fundamentals should be working in her favour. Last week, the US Federal Reserve lowered interest rates for the first time since 2020, which will mean that it costs less for families to borrow money to buy a car or a house. Unemployment is low, inflation is down, wages are rising and the economy is growing.

The problem is that many Americans don’t believe that things are getting better. And there’s a very good reason why: in the US today, almost everything is much more expensive than it was four years ago.

Rents have soared. Cars are incredibly expensive. Childcare is unaffordable, even for many in the upper-middle classes. And while prices have stopped rising at the absurd rate they did during the pandemic, many still struggle to see how things are supposed to be getting better when a carton of eggs that cost less than $US2 five years ago can cost $US5 now.

Outside a corner shop in Queens, New York, last week, Lina, 42, a Trump supporter and mother of two who did not want to give her last name, said that rising prices meant she’d been making difficult decisions when it came to feeding her family: cutting down on meat, reducing the amount of milk she gave her children for breakfast. “It’s just crazy,” she said. “I hope when he wins again [the prices] will go back to normal.”

According to average prices from the US Bureau of Labour Statistics, the price of a loaf of bread went up from $US1.40 to nearly $US2 since 2020. The price of beef is up by 40 per cent. A gallon of milk is almost a dollar more than it was. And many people pay much more than these average prices. In the low income part of Queens where Lina was shopping, a loaf of bread was $US8.

Heartening statistics heralded by experts can fall on deaf ears. “As an economist, I can cite you lots of economic indicators that mean nothing to you if every time you go to the grocery store, things are more expensive,” Erik Gordon, a professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, said. “By conventional measures, the economy is going OK, but people don’t believe it.”

During Trump’s first three years in office, the US economy grew at an average rate of about 2.6 per cent – slightly higher than in the last years of the Obama administration. Many of his supporters believe that, as a famous businessman who has falsely claimed that he presided over the “greatest economy in the history of the world”, he understands how to deliver further growth in a second term.

Harris will be hoping that voters get used to the price increases and start noticing improvements in the economy before the elections. There are some signs that this is happening. According to figures by researchers at the University of Michigan, who study consumer sentiment, American voters are increasingly feeling better about the economy, and more hopeful about the future.

However, Harris has struggled to communicate in a straightforward manner how she will drive down prices. When asked in an unscripted interview with local media in Philadelphia on Tuesday for “one or two specific things you have in mind”, she responded: “Well, I’ll start with this – I grew up a middle-class kid.” She proceeded to riff at length on her affinity with working families (“I grew up in a neighbourhood of folks who were very proud of their lawn, you know?”) with little mention of policy.

Nevertheless, polls show that Harris is closing the gap with Trump on the economy – though neither has the edge on the other. Three polls released last week by different companies showed them essentially tied on the issue: a significant improvement for Harris, but not necessarily a winning one.

Carville, a Louisiana native known as the Ragin’ Cajun, has some advice for the campaign to take it over the line: fear. Fear that hard-won gains would be wiped out by the massive tariffs on imported goods promised by Trump (which Harris called a “Trump sales tax” in this month’s debate).

“If you can convince people they have something to lose, then that’s the immediate step, and I think that’s the more achievable step, as opposed to convincing them that they live in a good economy,” Carville said, later adding: “I think that fear has to be part of their economic messaging ... if you go with tariffs and you go with mass deportations, you’re going to choke our economy.”

A documentary about his life, Carville: Winning is Everything, Stupid!, is released in the US next month, and also follows his fight to get Joe Biden to stand down as the Democratic presidential candidate.

Having taken over from Biden, who tended to try to use statistics to try to convince voters that the economy was, in fact, improving, Harris is toeing a difficult line. Carville said: “The hardest thing in all of political messaging is, when can you talk about a good economy? Obviously if you prematurely tell people the economy is good, and they don’t think it, they say, ‘What’s that son of a bitch talking about? I’m living in this and he’s telling me that I got it good when I don’t.’”

Even Harris’s supporters admit her policy positions have tended towards the vague (she’s been campaigning on the promise of creating an “opportunity economy”) or the populist, such as removing taxes on tips. She’s also promised to raise taxes on corporations and the highest earners and proposed tax breaks for small businesses.

At the Democratic National Convention, and at the debate, she emphasised her humble upbringing with an immigrant mother who worked hard and wanted the best for her family. She’s spoken about working at McDonald’s while she was a student “doing french fries and ice cream”. Her challenge is to convince voters that she understands their pain, and can chart a better course ahead, and that despite having been Biden’s vice-president during years of high inflation, she is not to blame for their woes.

Yet all her best stump speeches can’t get past the fact that perception of the economy is incredibly divided by party affiliation.

According to the University of Michigan, Democrats are nearly twice as confident about the economy and their finances as Republicans. A third of voters this month told Morning Consult, a polling firm, that they believe that the US is currently in a recession, when in fact the economy grew by an annual rate of 3 per cent in the second quarter of this year.

It’s not hard to see why. At his office in the All Saints church in Queens, New York, Father Mike Lopez told me that during the pandemic, families flocked to their food pantry, where they give away goods to those in need. But when Covid restrictions were lifted, many didn’t seem to recover.

Today, they’re feeding 1000 families a week, many of them lower-middle class. When they see eggs or milk, which have risen dramatically in price, he said, the queue for the food pantry can turn into more of a scrum.

“A lot of the families that we thought would return to their secure lifestyle are still coming, and the need is huge,” he said. “There’s a lot of desperation.”

THE SUNDAY TIMES