Good morning and welcome to the countdown to the elections in USA.
donald trump painted an extremely bleak picture of the American economy for voters, and one of the most important tasks of Kamala Harris in the final stretch of the elections is to show this area in a different light.
With voters obsessed with inflation, achieving this will be difficult, he acknowledged. Edward MontgomeryDemocrat and former chief economist of the US Department of Labor.
“This is the problem: inflation is the rate of increase, and (it) has slowed down, but the public’s attention is on the absolute price,” he told Colby Smith of Financial Times. “It takes a lot to lower the price level. That will be a recession and deflation, and it is not very clear that we really want that.”
The inflation in the United States It stood at 2.5 percent during August, reaching its lowest level since 2021.
Without the excess savings accumulated during the coronavirus pandemic, “people don’t feel as safe now” and “they know they are consuming much more than they can,” he warned. Paul Isleyprofessor of economics at Grand Valley State University.
Yet despite these obstacles, the vice president appears to be gaining ground among some voters who are beginning to feel better about the economy.
People are being won over who feel less pessimistic about the inflation and some of those who think it is neither getting better nor worse, he said Amy Walterthe chief political analyst for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report (CPR) newsletter. More importantly, it is attracting 42 percent of those who think the consumer price index “is getting a little worse,” although Kamala is still 13 points below trump. The only group of voters that significantly supports the former president are those who think that inflation is going to get much worse.
The CPR results came after last month’s FT-Michigan Ross poll found that Harris had a narrow lead over Trump on economic stewardship among voters nationally.
However, about 5 percent of voters in battleground states say they have not yet decided or are considering a third-party candidate. Those voters “are more economically stressed than the general electorate” and trust Trump more on this issue, Walter said.
But when expanding the information, Walter highlighted that, for the first time in history, a plurality of voters believe that Harris will win the election, 46 percent compared to 39 percent for Trump. That is “the feeling there is,” Walter said. “That doesn’t mean he’s going to win,” but rather that he “raised the bar… on whether he could get the job,” he added.
The latest headlines
–Jack Smiththe special counsel overseeing the Justice Department’s cases against Trump, said the Republican candidate engaged in a “private criminal effort” to overthrow the 2020 general election in a newly unsealed court filing.
-The campaign trump reported that it raised $160 million in September and had $283 million in cash on hand as it tries to close the fundraising gap with the campaign. Harris.
-While the Middle East becomes an inevitable topic for Harris in the election campaign, USA and its allies try to limit the response Israel to attack with ballistic missiles Iranbut its influence on the Jewish state may be limited.
-Trump megadonor and American shale magnate, Harold Hammaccused the Biden-Harris administration of leaving the country “unusually vulnerable” to a price crisis in the Middle East.
-In Tuesday’s vice presidential debate, JD Vance mounted a skillful defense of Trump, while Tim Walz attacked his opponent for refusing to accept the result of the 2020 election.
behind the scenes
donald trump toured the Texas oil patch to take advantage of some of the industry’s richest tycoons as he scrambled to raise more money to fuel the final month of his campaign.
It started in Midland — the heart of the Permian Basin — for a donor luncheon at an elegant golf club with the city’s most prominent figures. VIP tickets sold for almost a million dollars. He then flew to Houston—home of America’s largest oil companies—for a reception hosted by Hilcorp’s boss, Jeff Hildebrand.
The oil and gas industry has been one of Trump’s biggest sources of fundraising. The Republican candidate has managed to get industry executives on his side by promising to get rid of the Biden administration’s environmental regulations and by promising to allow them to “drill, drill, drill.”
In his remarks at the Midland Country Club luncheon, Trump accused the president Joe Biden of undermining US energy security amid geopolitical tensions. Oil prices rose after Iran launched nearly 200 missiles at Israel on Tuesday.
The lunch was hosted by Javaid Anwar, chief executive of Midland Energy and one of Trump’s biggest supporters in the industry, and his wife, Vicky, along with Bubba Saulsbury of construction group Saulsbury Industries and Doug Scharbauer, another prominent oilman. local.
Kirk Edwardsan oil industry executive who attended the event, told Myles McCormick of Financial Timesthat it was “a spectacular day” for the local industry to receive a visit from Donald Trump.
But not everyone is so enthusiastic. One executive said he doesn’t want to see prices drop at gas stations: “Don’t come here and tell us you want $2 gas. We don’t want $2 gasoline… shut up and don’t talk about “drilling, drilling, drilling,” he warned.
Data
Kamala Harris and Republican Liz Cheney, daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, campaigned in Ripon — the Wisconsin city considered the cradle of the modern Republican Party — where they will try to attract Republicans who feel distanced from the direction it has taken. his party under Trump’s leadership.
In the 2020 election, Wisconsin had the highest turnout rate of this year’s seven battleground states.
Both the Trump and Harris campaigns want the votes of Waukesha County, in Milwaukee’s traditionally Republican suburbs. In 2020, Biden improved the count of Hillary Clinton in the county in 2016, but Trump took the vote with nearly 60 percent of the vote to the president’s 30 percent. In more detail, Democrats hope to take suburban women’s votes away from the Republican Party.
Democrats also want to retain voters in cities in the western part of the state, such as LaCrosse and Eau Claire, that lean Democratic. In addition, the vice president needs a high turnout in Madison, the state capital, of state employees and students from the emblematic University of Wisconsin.
Although the state’s voters are disproportionately white compared to other battleground states, a history of union organizing may help the vice president.
Trump’s message appealed to many voters in rural areas, but some of them were greatly affected by his trade policies while in office, and widespread support is not guaranteed this time around.
Harris leads Trump by 0.9 percentage points in Wisconsin, according to the Financial Times poll tracker.
Points of view
-The columnist of Financial Times Ed Luce believes JD Vance won the debate because he offered “Trumpism in its most palatable form” and a glimpse of a possible future for the Republican Party.
-Israel and Iran just gave the elections their so-called October surprise, with Trump as the likely beneficiary, says senior foreign affairs analyst Gideon Rachman.
-The United States as a politically unpredictable country is more like an emerging market, writes the columnist Foroohar Frog.
-The columnist Simon Kuper He claims that he has stopped making political forecasts because the concept of the rational voter is a myth.
–Oren Casschief economist at the conservative think tank American Compass, writes that members of American unions may not be as progressive as their leaders are.
-Republicans and Democrats cooperated during the Cold War, but China is not an external challenge that unifies in the same way, argues columnist Janan Ganesh.
