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A new survey from the Financial Times and the University of Michigan shows Vice President Kamala Harris eating away at one of Donald Trump’s key political advantages.
For months, voters have indicated in numerous surveys that they trusted Republicans—and Trump—more on the economy. A wide range of explanations was given for this, but much of it ties back to the sharp rise in consumer prices and other monumental shifts in the economy that occurred as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine, which occurred in early 2022, also caused a sharp spike in global energy prices, which has had a subsequent ripple effect across other sectors of consumer goods and services.
President Joe Biden has languished under the political consequences of these back-to-back economic body blows throughout his presidency, and in repeated polls of the 2024 election trailed Trump on trust ratings for economic issues including inflation.
But his vice president, Harris, may not be weighed down by that same political baggage. The Financial Times survey released Sunday found Harris making a sharp improvement over Biden’s economic trust numbers.
Biden had languished around 35 percent of the vote on who voters trust to handle the economy, while Trump sat at 41 percent. However, Biden dropped out of the race, and now, voters say they trust Harris at 42 percent, just beating the number of those who say they would trust Trump.
The vice president now leads her opponent, by a hair, making it the first time the Democratic candidate has led the Republican on this subject this year.
Pointedly, the surge in Harris’s numbers come as Trump’s have remained steady now in the tracking poll for almost the entire year, varying little and remaining at the 41 percent level for the past three months.
It also has taken place while voter pessimism about the economy remains high, and even ticked up three percentage points between July and August. 73 percent of voters now have a negative outlook on the US economy.
While the Trump campaign has seen Harris surge in key battleground states, much of that has been around the evaporation of concerns regarding the age of Biden, previously leading the Democratic ticket with plans to complete a second term and leave office at the age of 86.
Those concerns mounted considerably after June’s presidential debate, where the incumbent president appeared confused onstage at times and was unable to complete some of his points coherently.
Harris’s ascendance to the top of the Democratic ticket has been met with a surge of enthusiasm from Democratic voters, and her campaign has registered a massive wave of enthusiasm for an alternative to the Trump-Biden rematch previously set to occur in November. Her campaign brought in $310 million in July, after Biden dropped out on July 21, and in the wake of her running mate selection, she raised another $36 million in a 24-hour span. Trump has reportedly been fuming for days over Harris’s recovery in the polls, and this past week held a press conference to attack his new opponent from Mar-a-Lago.
