With just two and a half weeks to go until Election Day, and early voting already under way in many states, the presidential race is a statistical dead heat. Kamala Harris has a small lead in the national polling, but is barely ahead in three of the seven battleground states. At this point, it's anybody's guess what will happen in November.
To quote Wallace Shawn in the Princess Bride, it's inconceivable that Donald Trump could win a second term in office, but yet here we are just days away from that possibly becoming a reality.
I have tried to wrap my head around how a man who lies as often as I breath, and who orchestrated an attempted coup of the United States government on January 6, 2001, isn't trailing Harris by at least 10 points. I suspect political scientists and sociologists will be grappling with it for years to come regardless of what happens.
This much I do know: continuing to remind voters about Trump's unfitness for office won't work, anymore than it worked for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Those who plan on voting for him already know about his unfitness and are either a) completely fine with it, or b) have rationalized it to such an extent that they tune out any criticism as just white noise. At this point, if he burned an American flag outside Mar-a-Lago, 99 percent of his supporters would probably say the flag was defective and had to be destroyed. Many a prominent psychiatrist has pulled his hair out trying to figure out how cult leaders can wield such power over their flock.
There is one line of attack, though, that Harris can use that has a very good chance of being successful, and ironically enough, it has to do with the economy. I thought it was odd that Bret Baier's first two questions in his interview with Harris on Fox News had nothing to do with what a majority of people claim is their number one concern: the economy; mainly inflation.
You hear it all the time; at least you use to. Prices are up on everything, from eggs to gasoline. Well, as inflation has come down, so too have prices. According to AAA, the average price for a gallon of regular unleaded is $3.19. A year ago it was $3.58. Why is this relevant? Because a central tenant of Trump's economic plan is to impose tariffs on virtually every item that is imported. While the particulars have yet to be ironed out, it is believed it will be 20 percent across the board, 60 percent on goods from China and 200 percent on all auto imports, which would include cars assembled in the U.S. but which use parts from other countries like Canada and Mexico.
I don't believe enough voters truly appreciate the ramifications here. Contrary to what Trump keeps telling his supporters, tariffs are not paid by the country they're imposed on. They are paid by the importers, who then pass them on to the distributors, who then pass them on to the retailers, who finally pass them on to the customers. So a 60 percent tariff on Chinese goods would mean that an iPhone 16, which goes for $399, would end up costing $638. A 200 percent tariff on imported cars would mean that a BMW X-1, which is made entirely in Germany and sells for around $45,000 depending on the options, would cost, are you sitting down?, $90,000. Even cars that are assembled here in the United States, if they have parts that are imported from other countries, will cost more. Flat-panel TVs and laptop computers, all of which are imported, would cost anywhere from 20 percent more, to 60 percent more if they come from China.
The Harris campaign has estimated Trump's tariffs will cost American households an average of $4,000 per year. But it goes way beyond just mere cost. A series of tariffs like the ones Trump is proposing would almost certainly trigger a trade war with other countries; a trade war that will hurt U.S. exports and increase America's trade deficit.
For the next two and a half weeks, Harris needs to hammer this home everywhere she goes. Enough with making fun of Trump's crowd sizes; enough with digging up every skeleton in his closet. He has enough to start his own haunted mansion. If character meant anything, Hillary would be entering the final months of the second term of her administration.
Harris has done interviews, has laid out her vision for the country, and still she's tied with Trump. Maybe the remaining undecided voters will never be completely sold on her, but I'll bet the ranch and your kids tuition that they're not too keen about having to pay considerably more for the same goods they've been purchasing for years. If there's one thing Americans excel at, it's buying stuff. No one does it better. If they lost their minds over 9.1 percent inflation, imagine how they're going to feel about 12-15 percent inflation, year after year after year. And that inflation will be coupled with a recession that will make the 1980s look tame by comparison.
There isn't a single economist whose degree isn't lining the bottom of a hamster cage that believes tariffs work. Just the opposite, in fact. The more Harris stays on that message, the better her odds of winning the election; the more she allows herself to get distracted by the Trump freakshow, the more likely it is he will prevail.
We're at the two minute warning and the game is tied. The good news? Team Harris has the ball.
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