For months, polls showed that Donald Trump had a sizable lead regarding who would best handle the economy. For anyone who remembered that Trump left the nation in the middle of a deep economic crash after hitting the highest level of unemployment since the Great Depression, trusting Trump on any economic issue was maddening. The rise in inflation was part of the price required to drag the nation out of the ditch, and it made zero sense to hand the keys back to the man who drove it there.
However, in recent polls, Kamala Harris is rapidly closing Trump’s advantage. And that was before her new series of economy-centric ads or the CNN interview that should help make Americans more comfortable with Harris as the kind of capable, thoughtful leader they want at the helm.
But part of the reason that gap may be closing is that Democrats are becoming increasingly unified in their economic approach. What Harris is proposing in her economic plan is appealing, and the unity of Democrats on these issues means that it’s much more likely to become reality.
You don’t have to look very hard these days to find Republicans calling someone a “RINO.” The term that was used in the 1990s to describe Republicans who weren’t conservative enough for the increasingly powerful right wing of the party is now used by Trump supporters, often against the same staunch conservative Republicans who were quick to lob that same insult against more moderate colleagues in the past.
And when it comes to economic policies, Republicans simply don’t have one. The Republican platform is little more than a cartoonish list of bullet points that treats the economy as something that can be managed with slogans.
Trump has a plan, but it’s based around the lie that the economy can be managed through the heavy application of tariffs on imported goods. That plan is obviously a route to high inflation, but Trump tries to wave that away with unsupported promises to “defeat” inflation and “quickly bring down prices.”
An analysis of Trump’s plan released earlier this month indicates that it would generate a revenue shortfall of $5.8 trillion over the next 10 years and add over $4 trillion to the nation’s debt. It would cost trillions more if Trump were to follow through on off-hand promises to eliminate taxes on Social Security payments. At the same time, Trump’s heavy tariff plan could trigger a trade war and “inflation shock” with prices heading sharply higher.
Trump’s love of tariffs in 2019 created a rift in the Republican Party. That rift has never healed, and Trump’s talk about larger, universal tariffs as a replacement for income tax is making it worse.
It’s not that Republicans don’t love to float big changes that would save billionaires a fortune and place the burden on everyone else. They’ve been doing it for years. They just haven’t figured out how to slip a few trillion bucks around the necks of working and middle-class Americans without them noticing.
Meanwhile, as Republicans wander in the economic policy wilderness, Democrats have come together around a remarkably consistent economic view across the party.
As a piece in The New Yorker explained earlier this month, the Harris-Walz economic platform could also be a Biden-Harris platform, a Whitmer-Shapiro platform, or a Newsom-Pritzker platform because all these leading Democrats share the same view of the government’s role in the economy.
This hasn’t come by shrinking the Democratic tent, forcing everyone into a personality cult, or driving out those who disagreed with that view. No one has been going through the halls of Congress screaming “DINO” at anyone who doesn’t adhere to a narrow set of beliefs. Democrats haven’t been picking a policy first, and then worrying about its effects later.
Democratic unity over economic policy developed naturally over a period of years. In particular, it’s been forged through the effort required to clean up the messes Republicans have left with with their chaotic, uncoordinated policies.
After doing cleanup for a term following George W. Bush’s market crash and another for Trump’s COVID-bungled collapse, Democrats have been convinced that a strong economy requires a strong level of government intervention. That intervention is required to keep businesses from going off the rails in pursuit of greed, as was the case in 2008, and to keep the economy growing and innovating even in the face of disaster, like in 2020.
Democrats have been confirmed in the belief that markets, left to run wild, will run off the tracks., and that good policy “involves robust policy interventions to correct glaring market failures and to rebalance economic power.”
That unified idea of the government’s role in the economy doesn’t mean the party has become intolerant of alternate views. It does mean that, when they have the edge in Congress, Democrats can get things done. They don’t have to waste time arguing about basic principles or water down legislation to make it acceptable to rebellious factions.
That unity is reflected in the transformative legislation passed during President Joe Biden’s first two years: The American Rescue Plan, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the CHIPS and Science Act. In their way, these bills are as consequential as any legislation since FDR’s “New Deal.” People will drive on roads and bridges enabled by the infrastructure bill for decades. Careers will be spent in factories created because of the CHIPS Act. The Inflation Reduction Act created a set of environmental incentives so successful that Republicans are afraid to touch it. And none of it would have been possible without the American Rescue Plan to relight the fire Trump nearly extinguished.
That’s what a unified vision can do.
