Trump is losing his edge on the economy among voters

Americans are finally starting to feel better about the economy, invigorating Vice President Kamala Harris’s pitch for the presidency as she narrows her Republican opponent’s longtime lead on an issue that is foremost on voters’ minds.

Although voters still favor former President Donald Trump over Harris on handling the economy, his advantage has dropped dramatically in recent weeks. Trump now averages a six-percentage-point edge on the economy, compared with a 12-point lead against President Joe Biden earlier this year, according to an analysis of five polls that measured voters’ opinions before and after Biden dropped out.

A Fox News poll this month, for example, found that 51% of registered voters favor Trump on the economy, compared with 46% who favor Harris. That’s compared with a 15-point advantage Trump had over Biden in March. Other recent polls — by ABC-Ipsos, NPR-PBS NewsHour-Marist, USA Today-Suffolk University and Quinnipiac University — show similar shifts.

“Voters are beginning to give to give [Harris] the benefit of the doubt — and that’s really significant,” said Frank Luntz, a longtime GOP pollster. “Affordability is a top issue for voters, but Trump has failed to hold Harris to account or to tie her to Biden’s inflation failures.”

Underlying that sea change, analysts say, is the fact that Americans are feeling better about the economy. Prices are stabilizing, interest rates are coming down and wages are rising faster than inflation. At the same time, voters seem to view Harris as a clean slate, unburdened by the rapid run-up in prices that has plagued Biden for much of his presidency.

Plus, political strategists say, she has struck a decidedly different tone on the issue. Unlike Biden, who spent a lot of time trying to convince Americans that the underlying economy was great, Harris has come across as more sympathetic to their everyday struggles. Her economic policies — including a slate of new proposals rolling out this week — have focused on issues important to middle-class voters, including affordable health care, housing and child care. Harris is scheduled to speak on the economy Wednesday in Pittsburgh.

“She’s been very aggressive about laying out specifics, and that’s what people want,” said Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster. “It also helps that she’s a new face with a new set of life experiences, so people don’t assume her policies will be the same as Biden’s. And on top of that, inflation is abating. The fact that prices have stabilized and seem more predictable — that goes a long way.”

The shift in economic polling coincides with Americans’ improving views on the economy. Consumer sentiment, at its highest level in four months, has risen 40% from its low in June 2022, according to a closely watched survey from the University of Michigan. The latest figures show that Americans are feeling better about inflation, as well as the economy and their own finances. Researchers also noted that “a growing share of both Republicans and Democrats now anticipate a Harris win.”

In a statement, the Trump campaign said it was “unequivocally false” that the former president’s advantage on the economy was slipping.

“Every poll shows President Trump is trusted on the issue of the economy far more than Kamala Harris because he has a first term record of success with record-low unemployment, inflation, interest rates, and mortgage rates — in sharp to contrast to the economic misery, record-high inflation and gas prices that the Harris-Biden Administration has created over the past four years,” said spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt.

In San Diego, Clayton Lisk, a software engineer and veteran, said he has recently begun feeling better about the economy. His family’s grocery trips to Walmart have flattened out at about $200 a week, and he is spending less to fill up his small pickup truck than he was a year ago.

“Obviously I do see inflation, but I also feel it cooling,” said Lisk, 36. “Gas prices are dropping all over the place. Eggs sometimes go up, but then those prices come back down. Things seem to be getting better.”

Lisk plans to vote for Harris, in part because he says he is worried about Trump’s plan to impose tariffs on all imports.

“Anybody who takes a basic economics course knows that’s going to raise prices across the board,” he said. “That’s a nonstarter for me.”

Trump on Tuesday laid out some of his economic plans during a speech in Georgia, saying he plans to cut corporate taxes, increase tariffs and make other concessions to support U.S. manufacturing.

“As your president, here is the deal that I will be offering to every major company and manufacturer on Earth: I will give you the lowest taxes, the lowest energy costs, the lowest regulatory burden, and free access to the best and biggest market on the planet,” he said. “But only if you make your product here in America.”

Republican strategists, though, say Trump has recently gone off message on the economy — focusing too much on unrelated talking points instead of addressing families’ everyday concerns.

“Trump had an unprecedented opportunity to ask the American people, ‘Can you really afford four more years of Joe Biden?’” Luntz said. “And instead he’s focusing on people eating pets.”

Christine Walker, who owns a veterans’ magazine in Denton, Tex., voted for Trump in the last two presidential elections and plans to do so again. She trusts his instincts on the economy, she said, and was able to easily afford necessities such as rent, utilities and groceries when he was president.

“I feel like I’m barely making it now,” the 52-year-old said, noting that her rent has doubled in the past five years. “Honestly, Trump may send mean tweets, but he’s a builder. He’s literally a builder — he builds business, and he knows the economy.”

If Trump were to enact his tax cuts and spending proposals, they would add $5.8 trillion to the federal deficit over the next decade — roughly five times the $1.2 trillion Harris’s plans would cost in the same period, according to estimates from the Penn Wharton Budget Model.

More than 400 economists and former U.S. policymakers endorsed Harris for president in an open letter this week, calling her “a strong steward of the U.S. economy.” Meanwhile, they said Trump’s proposals “risk reigniting inflation and threaten the United States’ global standing and domestic economic stability.”

Bryan Schaefer, a longtime Republican in Sykesville, Md., voted for Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson in 2016 and left his ballot blank in 2020. This time around, he says he has been swayed by Harris’s economic policies and plans to vote Democratic all the way down the ballot for the first time.

“In general, I like the policies of Trump, but he’s a toxic person,” the 42-year-old said. “Harris, though, she’s been very much like an old-school candidate. She’ll say, ‘We need to build 3 million more houses.’ As a fiscal conservative, it’s like: ‘Yes, that is absolutely how you bring down housing costs. That’s what we need right now.’”

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Scott Clement contributed to this report.