Poll Shows Voters See Harris As Better Than Trump On The Economy

It’s been a series of surprises since President Joe Biden stepped down as the Democratic presidential nominee and Vice President Kamala Harris replaced him.

It’s a mystery why voters would suddenly rate Harris higher on the economy than Biden. I Photo: Lawrence Jackson, The White House Flickr

Harris has surged in the polls, drawing campaign crowds that make Donald Trump jealous.

Once-mordant Democrats are now enthused about their odds of beating Trump, the GOP nominee, in this year’s race for president, Rick Newman wrote in a column for Yahoo Finance.

Voters suddenly seem to rate Harris higher than Trump when it comes to the economy.

The latest monthly Financial Times poll finds that 42% of voters say they trust Harris the most to handle the economy, while 41% trust Trump the most. That’s an eye-opener for a couple of reasons.

First, voters consistently rated Trump higher than Biden on the economy, and Harris hasn’t done anything at all to distinguish herself from Biden on economic issues since Biden dropped out on July 21.

Yet voters rate her 7 points higher on the economy than they rated Biden just one month earlier.

Second, voter attitudes on the economy have been the single most important advantage Trump has had. Voters say the economy is their top political concern, and Trump has been their go-to candidate on the issue.

If Trump loses that edge, it could doom his campaign.

On the surface, it’s a mystery why voters would suddenly rate Harris higher on the economy than Biden. However, there’s one intriguing clue deep in the FT poll that might explain Harris’s improved rankings on the economy.

Sixty percent of respondents say that if Harris wins the presidency, she should adopt different economic policies than Biden. In an open-ended follow-up question, respondents mainly said they want Harris to find better ways of getting inflation under control.