Is Kamala Harris having a breakthrough with voters on the economy?

Good morning and welcome to US Election Countdown.

Today let’s talk about:

• Harris convincing voters on the economy

• Trump’s fundraising sweep through oil country

• What will it take to win Wisconsin?

Donald Trump has painted an extremely bleak picture of the US economy for voters, and one of Kamala Harris’s biggest tasks in the last stretch of the election is to show it in a different light.

With voters fixated on inflation, accomplishing that will be hard, conceded Edward Montgomery, a Democrat and ex-chief economist at the US labour department.

“Here’s the problem: inflation is the rate of increase, and [that] has slowed, but the public’s focus is on the absolute price,” he told the Financial Times’ Colby Smith. “It takes a lot for the price level to come down. That would be a recession and deflation, and it’s not quite clear you really want that.”

Without the excess savings amassed during the Covid-19 pandemic, “people don’t feel as secure now” and “they know that they are consuming past their means”, said Paul Isley, an economics professor at Grand Valley State University.

But despite these hurdles, she seems to be breaking through to some voters as they start to feel better about the economy.

She’s winning over people who feel less pessimistic about inflation and some of those who think it’s neither improving nor worsening, said Amy Walter, the top political analyst at the non-partisan Cook Political Report. More importantly, she’s pulling in 42 per cent of those who think inflation “is getting a little worse”, though she’s still 13 points behind Trump. The only group of voters significantly supportive of Trump are those who think inflation will get a lot worse.

CPR’s findings yesterday came after last month’s FT-Michigan Ross poll found that Harris had a narrow lead over Trump on economic stewardship among voters nationally.

However, about 5 per cent of battleground state voters say they’re undecided or considering a third-party candidate. Those voters “are more economically stressed than the overall electorate” and trust Trump more on the issue, said Walter.

But zooming out, Walter highlighted that for the first time ever, a plurality of voters think Harris will win the election — 46 per cent to Trump’s 39 per cent. That’s “the vibe that’s out there”, said Walter. “That doesn’t mean that she is going to win” but that “she has passed the bar . . . about whether she could win the job”.

Campaign clips: the latest election headlines

• Jack Smith, the special counsel overseeing the justice department’s cases against Trump, said the Republican candidate engaged in a “private criminal effort” to overthrow the 2020 general election in a newly unsealed court filing. [Free to read]

• Trump’s campaign said it raised $160mn in September and had $283mn in cash on hand as it tries to narrow the fundraising gap with Harris’s campaign. (Politico)

• As the Middle East becomes an unavoidable topic for Harris on the campaign trail, the US and its allies are trying to limit Israel’s response to Iran’s ballistic missile attack — but their influence on the Jewish state may be limited.

• Trump megadonor and US shale magnate Harold Hamm has accused the Biden-Harris administration of leaving the country “unusually vulnerable” to a Middle East price shock.

• In Tuesday’s vice-presidential debate, JD Vance mounted a slick defence of Trump, while Tim Walz attacked his opponent for refusing to accept the result of the 2020 election. 

Behind the scenes

Trump swept through Texas oil country yesterday to tap some of the industry’s deep-pocketed moguls as he raced to get more cash to propel the final month of his campaign [free to read].

He started in Midland — the heart of the Permian basin — for a donor lunch at a posh golf club with the town’s most prominent figures. VIP tickets went for almost $1mn. Then he jetted to Houston — home of the US’s biggest oil companies — for a reception hosted by Hilcorp boss Jeff Hildebrand.

The oil and gas industry has been one of Trump’s biggest fundraising sources. The Republican candidate has gotten executives onside by vowing to get rid of the Biden administration’s environmental regulations and promising to let them “drill, baby, drill”.

In his remarks at the Midland Country Club lunch, Trump accused President Joe Biden of undermining the US’s energy security amid geopolitical tensions. Oil prices jumped after Iran launched almost 200 missiles at Israel on Tuesday.

The lunch was hosted by Javaid Anwar, chief executive of Midland Energy and one of Trump’s biggest industry supporters, and his wife, Vicky, alongside Bubba Saulsbury of construction group Saulsbury Industries, and Doug Scharbauer, another prominent local oilman. 

Kirk Edwards, an oil executive who attended the event, told the FT’s Myles McCormick it was “a spectacular day” for the local industry to have Trump visit. 

But not everybody is as enthusiastic. One executive said he doesn’t want to see prices at the pump come down: “Don’t come here and tell us you want $2 gasoline. We don’t want fucking $2 gasoline . . . shut up about ‘drill, baby, drill’,” he said.

Datapoint

Today, Harris and Republican Liz Cheney, daughter of former vice-president Dick Cheney, will campaign in Ripon — the Wisconsin city considered the birthplace of the modern Republican party — where they’ll try to lure Republicans who have become disaffected by the direction of their party under Trump.

In the 2020 election, Wisconsin had the highest turnout rate of any of this year’s seven battleground states.

Both the Trump and Harris campaigns want the votes of Waukesha County in the traditionally Republican suburbs of Milwaukee. In 2020, Biden improved over Hillary Clinton’s 2016 tally in the county, but Trump still took it with almost 60 per cent of the vote to the president’s 30 per cent. More specifically, Democrats hope to peel away suburban women voters from the Republican party.

Democrats also want to hold on to voters in the cities in the western part of the state such as LaCrosse and Eau Claire that lean Democratic. Additionally, Harris needs high turnout in Madison, the state capital, from state employees and students from the flagship University of Wisconsin.

Though voters in the state are disproportionately white compared with other swing states, a history of union organising could help the vice-president.

Trump’s messaging attracted many voters in rural farmlands, but some of them were hit hard by his trade policies while he was in office, and their widespread support is not guaranteed this time around.

Harris is leading Trump by 0.9 percentage points in Wisconsin, according to the FT’s poll tracker.

Viewpoints