For some Americans, the motive behind their vote was best expressed in a poster, visible in the western Pennsylvania countryside last week, which read “Trump, God and Guns”. But for many others, the right slogan seems to have been closer to “Trump, Groceries and Gas”. Everywhere the talk was of prices.
The idea that Trump won on economic issues may seem strange, given all the upbeat talk about “Bidenomics” and the torrents of infrastructure spending the Biden administration has sent surging through the economy. This has stimulated job creation, and more broadly, growth is strong. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, US GDP rose 3 per cent year on year in the second quarter of 2024—five times better than Britain’s. In and around Pittsburgh, for instance, there are plenty of “Now Hiring” signs. Even inflation, which soared to over 9 per cent in June 2022—a four-decade high—is now less than 3 per cent.
So how did Trump manage to create a narrative that the economy was wrecked, and he alone could fix it? Some of it was a mix of misinformation and misunderstanding. He won unearned praise for supposedly giving people money during Covid; there is a curious sense that because he is a businessman, a “money guy”, that he will run the economy in ways that benefit ordinary people—his bankruptcies and the huge tax cut he gave billionaires last time notwithstanding.
But underneath all that, American voters’ economic unhappiness is real enough. To reduce inflation the Fed raised interest rates, which currently stand at 5 per cent. And while headline inflation has fallen, the effects are evidently still being felt. Among respondents to a CNN exit poll, fully 74 per cent said inflation had caused their family moderate or severe hardship in the last year. Unsurprisingly, another survey suggested the same proportion of Americans believed the country was on the “wrong track”. And at the same time, NBC reported that Trump had a 12 per cent poll lead as the candidate better placed to tackle the cost of living.
Economic worries also underpin anti-incumbency feeling on other issues, such as illegal immigration, which unavoidably costs already hard-pressed taxpayers money. Economic disempowerment—a feeling that the system is rigged by uncaring coastal elites and their huge, hard-faced corporations—exacerbates the kind of conspiracist thinking which Trump has played on so effectively. And the primacy of economic problems seems to have neutered some strands of the Democrats’ broader messaging.
It’s not hard to find black voters in Pennsylvania who object to the implication that they owe the Democrats their vote. And on Sunday night on Fox News, for instance, presenter Laura Ingraham made great play of a viral TikTok recorded by a desperate woman in her car, fulminating that while she had never seen her husband work so hard, they were running up credit card debt, and were still rationing bacon and couldn’t afford socks. So she didn’t take kindly to being lectured by super-rich celebrities about how voting Trump was morally wrong.
This fits with the larger turn Trump has forced on once hardline free market Republicans: a focus, however calculated, on the struggles of the proletariat. This turn seems to be having an effect. Trump is promising such things as no tax on overtime, in adverts that complain that “American workers have been forgotten”. Behind him there is an emerging generation of younger Republicans who have focused their rhetoric in this direction, such as Josh Hawley, the Missouri senator who backed Trump’s 2020 election denialism but who has also been photographed on a picket line. In June, Hawley launched a devastating attack in a Senate hearing on the now former CEO of Boeing, accusing him of cutting corners on safety in a drive for profits and retaliating against whistleblowers, all while trousering an exorbitant salary. Another member of this ostensibly pro-worker tendency, JD Vance, is now vice president.
The Democrats responded by arguing that the orange tycoon’s claims to be the friend of the working man were a bit rich given his actual record—basing one ad, for instance, around a retired nurse saying Trump cuts billionaires’ taxes while threatening to cut seniors’ benefits. Kamala Harris promised to end price gouging, boost entrepreneurs and help with affordable homes and healthcare costs. But her ads came across as underpowered, even apologetic. They often merely detailed what Harris had voted for in the past or supported now, which has a less-than-punchy impact when you’re flying past them on the freeway. It was hard to detect a clear rebuttal of the brutally simple Trump lawn signs which read “Trump Low Prices, Kamala High Prices”. Almost all the Democratic lawn signs I saw, right across Pennsylvania, simply read “Harris Walz”.
Trump is not in any danger of sounding apologetic—but, as those signs suggest, he is at risk of overpromising. He has given voters his word that there will be lower taxes, lower prices, lower interest rates and much else. But some of his policies may raise prices, such as his plans to impose tariffs on imported goods and deport vast numbers of undocumented migrants. He may well defund Biden’s infrastructure spending plans, which are still mostly in the pipeline, hitting jobs. His new ally Elon Musk has been talking about the need for spending cuts—“temporary hardship” to bring “long-term prosperity”—even as Trump offered bountiful prosperity from day one.
The role of economics in the Democrats’ defeat throws Labour’s victory in July into an impressive new light. Starmer was certainly free of the burden of incumbency with which the Democrats chose to encumber themselves by nominating Kamala Harris. But Labour also managed to articulate a more effective offer to ground-down, fed-up voters.
However, Trump’s victory also contains a hard lesson for the Democrats’ political brethren over here. Like Trump, Starmer and his government will now have to take the political risks necessary to deliver, and actually make life better for ordinary working people. Labour needs to heed the grim paradox in the Biden-Harris failure: no one votes on impressive GDP statistics. People need to feel the benefit in their pockets, and to be persuaded they have the government to thank for it. If Labour fail the same way, they need look no further than Trump’s election eve rally in Pennsylvania to see where British voters might turn next. There in the audience was the grinning face of Nigel Farage.
