Given that the stickiest moments from last week’s presidential debate seem to be Donald Trump’s false claim that Haitian immigrants are eating cats in Ohio, and Taylor Swift’s post-debate endorsement of Kamala Harris, it may come as a surprise that what voters are most concerned about in choosing their next president is still, as usual, the economy.
According to a new survey from Morning Consult, 77% of voters cite economic issues as “very important” to their decision. Perhaps more illuminating, however, the report also finds Harris and Trump tied at 46% among registered voters on the subject of which candidate they trust more to handle the economy—with undecided voters preferring Harris’s economic policies.
This report, which surveyed 2,202 registered voters, marks a dramatic shift in sentiment over a short period of time. Morning Consult’s political intelligence team has been asking respondents who they trust more on various issues every week since last fall, and when it came to the economy, Trump ran consistently ahead of Biden.
Once Harris supplanted Biden at the top of the ticket in July, however, the polling began to shift in her favor. Biden had been trailing six points in economic trustworthiness—41% to Trump’s 47%—back in June, before the candidate switch raised that figure to 44% in July. In the weeks since, Harris has closed the gap entirely.
“I was really surprised with how much more voters support Harris than Biden on the economy and trust her more,” says Sofia Baig, an economist at Morning Consult and author of this report. “I had the sense that she was able to distance herself from inflation and from the concerns voters have with the economy, but I didn’t expect that it would be by this much.”
According to the report, Harris has somewhat evaded the stench of animosity that persistently followed Biden’s handling of the economy. Voters are still frustrated by current conditions, with 39% of Democrats giving the economy a C-grade, and 40% of Republicans giving it an F.
But 76% of them find Biden “somewhat” to “very responsible” for their grade, compared with the 68% who point to Harris. That may not sound like much of a difference, but the report shows voters blaming other factors like corporations, the pandemic, and the Federal Reserve over Harris, providing more daylight between her and Biden on the issue.
What’s responsible for the change since moving on from Biden?
“A lot of it may have to do with the vice president versus president role,” says Baig. “A lot of people might not think the VP has much power or say on what goes on. I also think it has to do with just the general energy and vibe of Harris’s campaign, and the shift that it’s brought. The base is more excited, and Harris is throwing out a lot more economic proposals tackling the issues that matter most to voters than Biden was when he was running, which might also be injecting some confidence.”
According to the report, the economic issues voters find most important are “cost of living,” followed by “inflation,” and “taxes.” Although the popularity of proposed solutions to these issues is polarized by political party, unsurprisingly, the policies most popular with undecided voters are those related to cost of living. Undecided voters rated price gouging regulations and caps on prescription drug prices as their top proposed economic policies.
Both of those policies were put forward by the Harris campaign—something the many voters polled for this study were already aware of.
“We asked which policies voters had heard of, and then which policies they associated with which candidates,” says Baig. “And I was impressed with how much they had heard about the policies, and how they were generally able to identify which policies were associated with which candidates. For example, more than half of voters know that Kamala Harris is more associated with capping prices for prescription drugs, and many were able to identify increasing tariffs or reducing the corporate tax rate with Trump.”
Considering that most of the data featured in the report comes from surveys conducted in late August, before the candidates sparred over economic policy at the widely viewed debate, voter sentiment on the topic may have shifted even further since.
