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Donald Trump has long cast himself as Mr. Economy. The former president has claimed on the campaign trail that his last term saw “the best economy in the history of our country.” (He glosses over the economic crisis of 2020.) He has presented a slate of far-fetched ideas for how to bring down the cost of living and strengthen business. (See: “Drill, baby, drill”; his promises to impose massive tariffs; his idea to deport immigrants to open up more housing; and his suggestion that he himself wants to “have a say” in toggling interest rates, which he later walked back.)

Until a few months ago, voters—who say that the economy is the biggest campaign issue on their minds—appeared to be buying his pitch. In polls, Americans overwhelmingly said that they trusted him more than President Joe Biden to handle the economy. But much has changed in recent months: Once Kamala Harris became her party’s nominee, she quickly distinguished her campaign’s economic message from Biden’s, a strategy that has resonated with some voters. Last month, the Federal Reserve lowered interest rates for the first time in more than four years, effectively signaling to Americans that inflation is over—and triggering a stream of positive news coverage to that effect. Voters’ perceptions of the economy writ large have proved stubborn, but the American public seems more and more willing to entertain the idea that Harris could be a better leader than Trump on the issue.

Scarred by a period of high prices and inflation, Americans have been reluctant to accept the message—from Biden or from pundits—that the economy is good, actually, even though inflation cooled off significantly by 2023 and the unemployment rate has been near historic lows for much of the past three years. (Consumer sentiment has risen considerably since a mid-2022 nadir, but it’s still nowhere near pre-pandemic levels). Harris’s strategy so far has not focused on defending Biden’s record; instead, her campaign has attempted to differentiate her from the president—even as Trump has tried to present her as an extension of Biden’s legacy. “Whether or not Harris is ultimately saddled with Biden’s economic baggage may come down to who wins this narrative war,” my colleague Rogé Karma, who covers economics, told me.

Harris has focused on acknowledging the high cost of living and offering paths to combat it—a departure from Biden, who spent the past year trying desperately to convince voters that the economy was strong, Rogé said. Harris’s approach (which Rogé has called “Bidenomics without Biden”) seems to be working so far: One poll found that she had a one-point lead over Trump on the economy in September, just three months after Biden was running 11 points behind Trump on the issue. Other polls also show Trump’s edge as the trusted economy candidate shrinking. “The economy as an issue has gone from being the winning issue for Trump to a virtual tie,” Rogé explained.

Harris has gained on Trump, but this trend is not guaranteed to continue until November. One primary predictor of success for the incumbent party, Gabriel Lenz, a political-science professor at UC Berkeley, told me, is the growth of what economists call “real disposable income,” or Americans’ income after taxes and transfers—spending money, in other words. Right now, that metric is on the fence: “We’re not seeing that incomes are going up relative to inflation as much as they could be,” Lenz said. News stories can also shift voter perception in the final weeks of an election, even in our calcified political moment, Lenz argued. Historical precedent has been set for that: In 1992, for example, the economy was picking up before the election, but the fact that media coverage remained negative may have influenced the incumbent George H. W. Bush’s loss, Lenz suggested. (It didn’t help that Bill Clinton’s team did its best to tie Bush to that negative narrative: That election featured the infamous Clinton-campaign line “It’s the economy, stupid.”)

The broad realities of the American economy haven’t meaningfully changed since Harris entered the race, and Americans don’t suddenly feel rosy about it. But the messenger has changed, and that may be enough to compel some voters in this final stretch. Because many Americans are so far distinguishing Harris from the Biden administration’s economic policy, she has been able to take advantage of good economic news in a way that Biden never quite could.

Related:

Bidenomics without Biden Kamala Harris needs an economic message voters can believe in.

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Today’s News

Iran launched waves of ballistic missiles at Israel. The Israeli military did not immediately report any casualties, but a Palestinian man was reportedly killed by shrapnel in the occupied West Bank. Iran said that it had concluded its attack. Senator J. D. Vance and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz will face off tonight in the vice-presidential debate hosted by CBS News, airing at 9 p.m. ET. Claudia Sheinbaum, a former mayor of Mexico City, was sworn in as Mexico’s first female and first Jewish president.

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The Weekly Planet: After experiencing Kentucky’s 2022 floods, Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle moved to the mountains of North Carolina, where she thought she would be safe.

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Evening Read

A boy plays near the remainder of a washed-out road near his family's home in Watauga County on September 27, 2024. (Melissa Sue Gerrits / Getty)

Hurricane Helene Created a 30-Foot Chasm of Earth on My Street

By Chris Moody

We knew something had gone terribly wrong when the culverts washed up in our backyard like an apocalyptic art installation splattered with loose rock and black concrete. The circular metal tubes were a crucial piece of submerged infrastructure that once channeled water beneath our street, the primary connection to town for our small rural community just outside Boone, North Carolina. When they failed under a deluge created by Hurricane Helene, the narrow strip of concrete above didn’t stand a chance. Weighted down by a fallen tree, the road crashed into the river, creating a 30-foot chasm of earth near our house.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

Courtesy: Everett Collection

Rewatch. The 2012 film Game Change (streaming on Max) knew exactly what was coming for American politics, James Parker writes.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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And we may ask ourselves (to quote Talking Heads—it’s never not a good time to quote Talking Heads): Well, how did we get here? How did we bring ourselves to this place of howling jeopardy? On the eve of the 2024 vice-presidential debate, with the stakes so terribly high, can we get a bit of context? And could it be presented entertainingly, so we don’t get bored? Allow me to recommend a viewing or re-viewing of Game Change.

But first: Let’s go back. Back through the germ clouds and the sulfur swirls and the windows getting broken with the butts of flagpoles, to a time when we were only half-crazy. Three-quarters crazy, maybe. Let’s go back to the summer of 2008.

Remember 2008? John McCain was the Republican candidate for president. The Democratic candidate was Barack Obama. The Great Backlash was yet to be unleashed; the foaming tides of grievance awaited their arch whipper-up.

McCain versus Obama. Interesting pair of characters, interesting binary moment for the nation: cranky old McCain the war hero, unpredictable, unsteady perhaps, rumbling around the country on the Straight Talk Express (his bus)—and handsome young Obama, the anointed, the noble profile with his arena-swelling cadences. “We are a people of improbable hope … with an eye toward the future!” (Cue hysteria, flashbulbs.) Did he have a bus? Surely he simply hovered, weightless, from rally to rally. And as the summer wore on and convention time neared, it became apparent that Obama was creaming McCain. The polls, they jigged and jagged, the mood of the electorate swung this way and that, but McCain was always behind. Always losing. He had to make a move. He had to shake it up. He had to do something … game-changing.

Game Change dramatizes the reckless hour when McCain picked Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska to be his running mate (“This is a woman with a gun, John!” burbles one of his advisers: “I mean, c’mon! The base is gonna be doing backflips”) and was then obliged to deal with the fallout as it emerged that she didn’t know much about foreign countries or what the Federal Reserve was. Woody Harrelson plays the McCain strategist/bouncer Steve Schmidt, all shoulders and gleaming cranium; Ed Harris plays a rambunctious, foulmouthed, wide-eyed McCain; and Julianne Moore, from a place of truly Strasbergian inwardness, plays Palin.

At the time of its release—2012—Game Change seemed a fairly earnest and didactic, if very well made, piece of entertainment. Framed at beginning and end by Schmidt’s interview with Anderson Cooper (in which a sweating Schmidt is asked, “If you had it to do over again, would you have her on the ticket?”), it seemed pretty clear on the idea that the Palin pick was a disaster, a Faustian bargain with the forces of American irrationality. McCain loses, of course, but right after his super-dignified concession speech, the crowd starts lowing: “Sa-RAH! Sa-RAH!” Something is happening. Palin glows, a radioactive glow. The soundtrack drones with foreboding; the McCain team look around nervously. They can feel the lion’s breath of history on their necks.

[From the June 2011 issue: Joshua Green on the tragedy of Sarah Palin]

Watched now, it feels more complex. Because it’s a movie, a good movie, with an obligation to character and narrative arc and so on, Game Change, almost in spite of itself, gives us a Palin who is rounded and human and likable. Plucked from her Alaskan habitat by the unscrupulous jocks of the McCain campaign, small-town Sarah struggles in the jangling world of prime time. She keeps her family nervously close—even including in her entourage the young man who recently impregnated her daughter out of wedlock. (“Thank you for inviting me, Mrs. Palin.” “Thank you for cutting your mullet, Levi. I really appreciate it.”) Her speech at the Republican National Convention is a smash—she kills it!—and the people out on the road love her, but her political persona is brittle. It does not retain information. It was not built for scrutiny. To the liberal media, she becomes quarry, and you feel for her in the big interviews. You dislike Charlie Gibson and his schoolmasterly frown. Katie Couric circles with a predatory glitter: “When it comes to establishing your worldview, I was curious: What newspapers and magazines did you regularly read before you were tapped for this?” (“Name one fucking paper!” groans Schmidt.)

Verbally, the movie has two registers, which serve as two opposing discourses. One is the homespun idiom of folksy Sarah: “Hey, Bristol? You hold Trig. I’m gonna take Piper on the roller coaster.” The other is the ultra-secular, sub-Sorkin politico-speak used by the hacks and flacks around McCain. “The data shows we have four things we have to do. We have to win back the independents, we have to excite the base, we have to distance ourselves from the Bush administration, and we have to close the gender gap.” If the “deep state” exists, this is how it talks.

So Game Change, pre-Trump, pre-pandemic, pre–January 6, unknowing as it obviously was of all the weirdness that was coming down the pike, saw quite clearly the cleavage in the American psyche out of which the future—our present!—would emerge. On the runway somewhere on the campaign jet, before the pick is announced, brutal Steve Schmidt is struck by Palin’s equanimity. (She is gazing blissfully out the window.) “You seem totally unfazed by this,” he says. She turns to him: “It’s God’s plan.” And despite the slight glaze of fanaticism on Moore’s face as she says this, and the flash of panic on Harrelson’s, you’re kind of with her. Schmidt, about to ascend to 30,000 feet, doesn’t know that he’s in the hands of God. But Palin does!

McCain-Palin was a tragedy: A great statesman, desperate for the win, succumbed to vanity and made a pact with darkness. That’s one way to look at it. McCain-Palin was a comedy: A flailing candidate, wrecked on his own ego, made a ludicrous decision, and it all blew up in his face. That’s another way to look at it. Game Change sort of splits the difference: McCain-Palin was a movie, soapy but terribly consequential, and we still don’t know how it’s going to end.