A new Trump campaign ad this week has gone semi-viral in right-wing social media circles. The ad splices together clips of Vice President Kamala Harris citing the high costs of inflation at an event this month with her past comments extolling the virtues of \u201cBidenomics.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe debate we\u2019ve all been waiting for,\u201d the text on the screen reads, \u201cHarris vs. Harris.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Trump campaign has started running a new ad in Arizona focused on inflation and using Harris\u2019 past support for the WH\u2019s \u2018Bidenomics\u2019 push, per @AdImpact_Pol pic.twitter.com\/wb2rIo05OU<\/p>\n
\u2014 Alex Thompson (@AlexThomp) August 26, 2024<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
The ad highlights something Republicans have been apoplectic about: how President Joe Biden\u2019s unpopularity hasn\u2019t seemed to weigh down Harris thus far.<\/p>\n
She is, after all, his second-in-command. Doesn\u2019t she also own the outcomes \u2014 on the border, on the chaotic 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal and yes, on inflation \u2014 that Americans have been so unsatisfied with?<\/p>\n
The answer appears to be: Perhaps less than you might think \u2014 and certainly less than Republicans hope.<\/p>\n
Whether she will maintain that distance between Biden\u2019s liabilities and her candidacy remains to be seen; this is clearly going to be a battleground. But it\u2019s worth drilling down on just how much voters actually do and could connect Harris to those outcomes.<\/p>\n
Thus far, polling shows that Harris is performing better than Biden ever did in the 2024 cycle and appears a slight favorite to win the presidency. Her image ratings have improved significantly in recent weeks, making her more popular than both Biden and Donald Trump.<\/p>\n
I noted this month that Harris also does better than Biden when you drill down on specific issues. She has significantly closed the gap on what have long appeared to be Democrats\u2019 biggest issue liabilities: the economy and immigration.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s possible that\u2019s a temporary sugar high owing to the sudden enthusiasm for having a non-Biden and non-Trump candidate in the race. But there is also reason to believe that she might not suffer too much from being tied to Biden\u2019s policies.<\/p>\n
A Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll this month got at this dichotomy in a really interesting and instructive way. It asked Americans how much influence they thought Harris had on the Biden administration\u2019s economic and immigration policies. (On the latter issue, Republicans have sought to label Harris as Biden\u2019s \u201cborder czar,\u201d even though her role was more limited than that suggests.)<\/p>\n
It turns out they don\u2019t think Harris as vice president played a particularly central role.<\/p>\n
On the economy, 64 percent of Americans said Harris had \u201cjust some\u201d or \u201cvery little\u201d influence within the administration, compared with 33 percent who said she had a \u201cgood amount\u201d or a \u201cgreat deal.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was closer on immigration, an area in which Harris took more of a high-profile role. But still Americans said 57-39 that she had only \u201csome\u201d influence or less.<\/p>\n
And very few Americans believe she had a \u201cgreat deal\u201d of influence \u2014 just 11 percent on the economy and 15 percent on immigration.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s also interesting in these numbers is how the partisans break down. Republicans were actually less likely to say she had at least a \u201cgood amount\u201d of influence than Democrats \u2014 despite their party trying to attach her to Biden on these issues. Perhaps some of that owes to them viewing her as generally incompetent.<\/p>\n
But the group least likely to see her as influential? Independent voters. Fully 70 percent of them said she had relatively little influence on the administration\u2019s economic policies, while 62 percent said she had relatively little influence on immigration.<\/p>\n
Only 8 percent of independents said she had a \u201cgreat deal\u201d of influence on the economy, and only 13 percent said she had a great deal of influence on immigration.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a real question in these numbers about precisely why Americans don\u2019t think she has been more influential. Is it because they didn\u2019t see her much until recently? Is it because they think she\u2019s not particularly strong on policy? Or is it because they think the vice presidency just isn\u2019t that instrumental?<\/p>\n
The vice president, after all, has only a couple of major constitutionally defined roles: succeeding the president if need be and casting tiebreaking votes in the Senate.<\/p>\n
But regardless, you begin to see how voters might look at Harris and believe that she might be better and even something of a \u201cchange\u201d candidate. For now, that\u2019s what they\u2019re doing.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
A new Trump campaign ad this week has gone semi-viral in right-wing social media circles. The ad splices together clips of Vice President Kamala Harris citing the high costs of inflation at an event this month with her past comments extolling the virtues of \u201cBidenomics.\u201d \u201cThe debate we\u2019ve all been waiting for,\u201d the text on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":8636,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8635","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8635","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8635"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8635\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8636"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}