Breitbart Business Digest: Kamala Harris Was the Biggest Cheerleader for Bidenomics

Biden’s Economy Is Likely to Weigh on Kamala Harris

Kamala Harris has entered the presidential race burdened by her deep ties to the widely disliked Biden economy.

The latest Harvard CAPS/Harris poll has Harris behind Donald Trump by three points. While that is narrower than the seven point lead Trump had over Joe Biden, it is hardly the explosion of popularity you might expect from the ebullient reaction from Democratic partisans and their allies in the establishment media.

Keep in mind that Republicans have lost the popular vote in all but one election since 2000. So, Harris being just behind Trump 100 days before the election means Trump is in a strong position.

There’s no realistic path to victory for Harris if she loses the popular vote—and the odds are against her even if she makes up the distance. Nate Silver’s modeling currently gives Harris a 53.5 percent chance of winning the popular vote—and only a 38.1 percent chance of winning the electoral college and the presidency.

Harris is rapidly attempting to run away from her own positions. Campaign officials have anonymously leaked that Harris would no longer support a national ban on fracking—a ban she had unequivocally endorsed in the past. Aides have also said she does not support looking into the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement or banning private health insurance in favor of “Medicaid for All.”

These flip-flops have so far not come from the mouth of the candidate herself but from aides, often speaking anonymously. It’s easy to see why Harris might be hesitant to repudiate her positions. They are very popular with small but influential segments of her party. The Green New Dealers will not be pleased to hear that she now supports fracking and fossil fuel production—unless they can be convinced that she doesn’t really mean it.

This is a tricky game. On the one hand, Harris needs to convince voters in Pennsylvania that she really has changed her mind on fracking. Without a thorough explanation of what brought about this shift, such claims are likely to be viewed with suspicion. On the other hand, her campaign hopes that the green-left will see this as a cynical ploy to win votes and not actually an indication of what direction policy would take under a Harris administration.

The Burden of Bidenomics Is Getting Worse

The deeper problem for Harris, however, is that she was one of the biggest cheerleaders for “Bidenomics.” This was a term that was originally deployed by critics of the Biden administration’s economic policies and later adopted by the White House and its supporters. The hope was that the term Bidenomics could be co-opted into a positive, much the way “deplorable” was adopted by Trump’s supporters and turned against Hillary Clinton.

The flaw in this strategy is that the public really dislikes their current economic circumstances. By accepting the label Bidenomics to describe it, the White House was actually complicit in tying economic pessimism and dissatisfaction to President Biden. And by deploying Harris to promote Bidenomics, they wrapped her in its mantel of negativity as well.

A few months ago, many Democrats held out hope that the public’s view of the economy would change. They convinced themselves that what they saw as “objective” data signaling a strong economy—mostly low unemployment and falling inflation—would be reflected in public opinion before election day. Back in February, Nate Silver wrote in the New York Times that improvements in objective data were likely to be tracked by improvements in subjective consumer sentiment. That, in turn, “leaves the door open for a potential second Biden term.”

But that has not happened. Consumer sentiment has worsened in the intervening months. The University of Michigan’s index of consumer sentiment began the year with a 79 reading. That turned out to be the peak. It has now fallen for four consecutive months. The final July survey showed it plunging to 66.4.

Other surveys tell a similar story. The Conference Board’s index of consumer confidence stood at 114.8 in January and had fallen to 97.8 last month. It improved to 100.3 in July, but that was entirely due to an improvement in the expectations part of the survey—which was likely boosted by Republicans gaining confidence that they would return Trump to the White House. The index of current conditions fell in July, meaning people think the economy got worse.

This was Biden’s biggest obstacle to re-election, and it is now Harris’s.

It likely will not be enough for Harris to renounce the far left positions that made her popular while she was a rising star in California politics. She will need to convince voters that she offers a fundamentally different economic agenda than the one enacted by the Biden administration—without alienating the Democrats who joined her in applauding that agenda for the past four years.