Since Vice President Kamala Harris replaced President Biden at the top of the Democratic Party’s 2024 ticket, most national and swing state polls have produced predictable results. Before Harris was installed as the new nominee, most surveys portended a victory by former President Donald Trump in November. Now his national lead has ostensibly evaporated and it appears plausible that Harris could win.
There is, however, a noticeable pattern in the latest polls that suggests otherwise. Most surveys, including those which show a tied race or even a slim Harris lead, indicate that voters don’t trust her on the economy any more than they trusted Biden on the same issue.
CNBC’s latest All-America Economic Survey, for example, found the following: “On the economy, by 2-to-1, Americans think they will be better off financially under Trump.” The latest CBS News poll shows similar results: “On having policies that will improve peoples’ finances: Harris opens in the same position as Mr. Biden was in July, trailing Trump substantially.”
Specifically, 45 percent of voters say the former president will ease their financial plight while only 25 percent say the same about Harris. A recent Wall Street Journal poll found that, among persuadable voters, “Only 12 percent say Harris is better able to handle the economy than Trump, while 61 percent say Trump is the better economic steward.”
It’s clear that the Harris campaign understands the political peril such sentiments present, but their response has been none too creative. As the Washington Post reports, she has purloined one of Trump’s signature proposals: “Vice President Kamala Harris is echoing an idea first proposed by her opponent, Donald Trump, by pledging that she would push to eliminate taxes on tips.”
Her epiphany on this issue is unlikely to impress many, considering that Trump first proposed getting rid of the tax last June and the plan was subsequently included in the 2024 GOP platform. But this is worse than merely pilfering a policy proposal from her Republican opponent, it is hypocritical. As Fox Business’ Elizabeth MacDonald points out:
Kamala Harris’s first big policy idea is to steal Trump’s “no taxes on tips,” when she backed Democrats’ $80b for more IRS audits including on tip income. The Biden-Harris Admin also launched a novel new IRS crackdown on tips, getting the IRS inside the door at bars & restaurants to directly monitor tips at the cash register, “at point-of-sale.”
She also backed the $1.7T spending legislation expecting taxpayers to report their $600 phone app transactions to the IRS without she and the Senate reading the bill (later dropped as untenable).
Harris didn’t merely support this weaponization of the IRS, she played a crucial role in getting it passed in the Senate and sending it to President Biden’s desk for signature.
As Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) noted on X: “As V.P., Kamala was the deciding vote on the ‘Inflation Reduction Act’ that gave the IRS $80 billion of your tax dollars to make sure they tax every tip workers earn! Kamala Harris is a total fraud!”
This isn’t likely to inspire confidence among the voters that Harris will follow through with her pledge to eliminate taxes on tips or anything else. Her history suggests skepticism. She voted against the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA) when she was a U.S. Senator and has subsequently advocated repealing the statute.
It is, however, not easy to nail down Vice President Harris on her tax policies or anything else. It is difficult to escape the impression that she and her campaign staff believe she can run out the clock.
Her campaign website contains no policy page detailing her position on any issue, including the economy. Moreover, she has neither indulged the corporate media by agreeing to a sit-down interview nor faced the public in the kind of live press conferences to which her Republican opponent has routinely subjected himself since 2015.
She has, instead, restricted her public appearances to canned speeches full of tired bromides as she did during a recent rally in Wisconsin, where she offered this “strategy” for solving inflation:
While our economy is doing well by many measures, prices for everyday things like groceries are still too high. You know it and I know it. You know, when I was Attorney General, I went after price fixing schemes.
And, when I am President, it will be a day one priority to fight to bring down prices. I’ll take on big corporations that engage in illegal price gouging. I’ll take on corporate landlords that unfairly raise rent on working families. I will take on Big Pharma and cap the costs of prescription drugs for all Americans.
This nonsense was cut-and-pasted from President Biden’s talking points on the issue when he was finally forced to admit that inflation wasn’t transitory. None of these “solutions” will solve the problem because it wasn’t caused by corporate price-gouging, greedy landlords, or evil drug companies.
It was caused by the fiscal incontinence of the Biden-Harris administration beginning with the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, an unnecessary and inflationary stimulus that passed only because Harris cast a tie-breaking vote in the Senate. This was the first of many wild spending bills, culminating with the Orwellian “Inflation Reduction Act,” that produced a cumulative inflation rate of more than 20 percent.
Unless the Democrats have a plan to win the election without regard to ballots cast by eligible voters, Harris is likely to lose. Her 2024 campaign is already beginning to resemble the shambolic, unfocused effort she eventually abandoned in 2020 before any primary voter had a chance to reject her.
Harris has an aptitude for achieving high office without the benefit of votes. Nonetheless, the voters are very restive about the economy in general, and inflation in particular. And no amount of propaganda from the corporate media will reduce the rising prices they continue to pay for the necessities of life. If you are old enough to remember 1980, you know the voters are capable of saying, “OK, it’s time to listen to my wallet.”
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