(Headline USA) Kamala Harris refused to acknowledge inflation in her campaign speeches on economic policy.
Shortly after Joe Biden left the race a week ago, Harris began to craft a new narrative around the economy.
Not once in speeches in Wisconsin, Indiana or Texas did she mention the word “inflation.” Inflation was the overwhelming economic challenge that has dogged Biden and Harris’s administration. It forced Biden to consistently acknowledge voters’ pain as they cope with higher grocery, gasoline, housing and auto expenses.
Harris, instead of acknowledging the reality of the economy, is emphasizing what she imagines could be ahead.
“In our vision of the future, we see a place where every person has the opportunity not just to get by but to get ahead — a future where no child has to grow up in poverty, where every senior can retire with dignity and where every worker has the freedom to join a union,” Harris told the American Federation of Teachers on Thursday.
But Republicans have moved quickly to highlight the reality of the increase in inflation under the Biden and Harris presidency. They are emphasizing the cumulative impact of high prices under the Democratic administration.
Labor Department data show that consumer prices are up 19.2% since Biden and Harris took office.
GOP leaders are seeking to ensure Harris is accountable for her administration’s record.
“Vice President Harris owns this administration’s record,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. “Her fingerprints are all over the past four years of failure.”
President Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, are focused on highlighting the fact that Harris as more liberal than Biden.
President Trump, at a rally in North Carolina on Wednesday, called Harris “the most incompetent and far left vice president in American history.”
Vance went after her policies in a Friday interview on Megyn Kelly’s SiriusXM program.
“We cannot let people who are going to destroy the American manufacturing and energy economy take over the reins of power,” Vance said. “It’s going to be a lot worse when you get somebody who’s even more liberal than Biden in there.”
The Trump campaign has Cited Harris’s own words to demonstrate her radically left positions. In Harris’s statements from her short-lived run for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, she said that she favored banning plastic straws, offshore oil drilling and the use of fracking for oil and natural gas.
Republican lawmakers also highlighted the fact that Harris would raise taxes.
Experts say Harris’s biggest problem, however, is probably the persistence of inflation.
The consultancy Oxford Economics said in an analysis Monday that the odds favored Trump.
“I doubt that Harris will significantly change how swing voters think of the economy,” said Bernard Yaros, an economist at Oxford Economics. “She still carries that same baggage of presiding over the high inflation of 2021 and 2022. Like Biden, her approval took a hit during that inflation surge.”
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
