There are themes playing out in the US presidential election that are familiar to most people across the developed world.
The lack of affordable housing. Rocketing home insurance and childcare costs. How expensive owning and running a car has become.
More acutely, at least for lower income groups, an inflationary surge has sent food prices soaring by more than 20% in the last two years. In the US, voters can add healthcare and pharmaceutical costs to the list of unaffordable items on the average household’s ledger.
Psychologically, US households were hit by inflation more than in other countries, if only because they had become used to cheap stuff over many decades.
Much as the UK experienced during the Brexit vote in 2016, there is a desire to kick the incumbent administration. In 2024, it is Donald Trump’s most powerful political weapon.
Travelling around Pennsylvania and hearing how families scrape a living is sobering, when in close proximity there are ordinary and yet much wealthier households that have few money worries. Of course, it’s the same story in France, Germany and the UK, where millions of people feel left behind and are responding with a vote for a populist candidate.
By most measures of the economy, logic says the reaction will be very different. If anything, there should be a huge wave of gratitude for Joe Biden, rolling through to Kamala Harris, for a rate of economic expansion most European nations would envy.
Productivity rates, driven by the US pharma, tech and financial services industries, and even sections of manufacturing, remain well above European levels. And the US hosts major consumer and industrial brands that are world-beaters.
Prices in the shops might be higher, but petrol stations are selling fuel, as they have been in most countries, at almost pre-pandemic low levels .
To shift the blame for high prices, Biden and Harris have tried to blame major companies, accusing them of price gouging. There is a growing audience for claims of corporate greed. Hopefully, voters have pricked up their ears.
Education is another possible winning card for Harris, who has tended to steer clear of putting forward a vision for the economy in speeches and television appearances.
As the economist Robert J Shapiro wrote in the not-for-profit magazine Washington Monthly, the Democrats have a positive story on education.
“Under the Biden-Harris administration, federal support for elementary and secondary schools increased by 44%, versus Trump, who pushed for deep cuts in federal funding for public schools every year he was president, even during the pandemic. This year, he promised to defund and abolish the department of education, a position fully aligned with Project 2025,” said Shapiro, who was an adviser to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
About 16 million US citizens in the seven swing states destined to decide the election rely on Medicaid. Democrats can show they have streamlined the application process, reduced waiting periods, scrapped limits on lifetime benefits for people with costly chronic conditions, and ended state work requirements. Harris hasalso pledged to go further and increase rural access to hospital care, and expand maternal health coverage.
“Every budget Trump proposed as president pressed for deep cuts in federal funding for Medicaid, ranging from $780bn to $1.1tn over 10 years, averaging 20.5% of federal support for the programme in those years,” says Shapiro. “This should be an especially sensitive issue for groups that have tended to support Trump, since the 16 million Medicaid recipients in the swing states include nearly 3 million who live in rural areas and almost 12 million who never attended college.”
While Trump’s team is trying to distance the Republican candidate from Project 2025 and disown the people behind it, saying they will disbar its supporters from official positions should Trump win, it is the guiding light for many of the party’s biggest donors. The privatisation of large sections of state provision is a central theme of the project – a 900-page policy “wish list” for the next Republican president that would expand presidential power and impose an ultra-conservative social vision.
Constructed from a free-market playbook championed by the Heritage Foundation thinktank, among others, it would defund more than just education. A publicly provided healthcare safety net would be whittled away and federal support to tackle environmental issues would largely disappear.
It means there is a yawning gap between the candidates on healthcare, education and the environment that will hopefully play into the hands of the Harris team from Pennsylvania to Nevada. When only a few thousand votes could swing the election, there must be a chance that bread and butter issues push Harris over the line.
