Why Harris Dodged the Most Important Question of the Debate
The most important moment of the presidential debate this week took place at the very start.
ABC News debate moderator David Muir asked what might have been the most predictable question of the night: Are Americans better off than they were four years ago?
This is a classic question that any incumbent candidate should expect to be asked. It’s an especially salient question now because polls show that many Americans are deeply unhappy with economic conditions and believe their own financial condition is deteriorating.
Ronald Reagan used the question to devastating effect against incumbent President Jimmy Carter in the 1980 debate.
“Are you better off than you were four years ago? Is it easier for you to go buy things in the stores than it was four years ago?” Reagan asked.
The question on Tuesday night did not come from Donald Trump but from the moderator.
“Vice President Harris, you and President Trump [sic] were elected four years ago and your opponent on the stage here tonight often asks his supporters, are you better off than you were four years ago? When it comes to the economy, do you believe Americans are better off than they were four years ago?” Muir asked.
We will not burden you with quoting Harris’s answer. If you’d like, you can read it in the ABC News transcript. It begins with her talking about her biography (“I was raised as a middle-class kid”) and ends with the false claim that the tariffs proposed by Trump would amount to a national sales tax. What it does not do is attempt to address the question at all.
That’s quite extraordinary. Certainly, the advisers to Harris would have prepared her for this question, either from the moderators or Trump himself. How is it she could not provide an answer?
The Problem for Harris Is That We’re Worse Off Than We Were Under Trump
The most charitable answer would be that the Harris campaign decided that avoiding the question was preferable to answering it because any honest answer would require admitting that in many ways the America people are worse off than they were. And the central cause of many of the economic woes of voters is inflation.
Start with household income. If it weren’t for inflation, the last few years would look terrific for our incomes. Median household income rose from $68,700 in 2019 and $68,100 in 2020 to $70,780 in Biden’s first year in office. The following year it climbed to $74,580. Last year, it jumped again to $80, 610. (Obviously, this year’s numbers are not yet available.)
The shadow of inflation, however, changes the picture entirely. In constant 2022 dollars, real median income was $81,2210 in 2019 and $79,650 in 2020. In 2021, as inflation took off, it fell to $79,260. The following year, it declined to $77,540. On the day after the debate, the Department of Commerce released the 2023 data showing that real median income had climbed to $80,610, the first time in Biden’s presidency that the median income had exceeded median income in Trump’s final year, the year of the pandemic. It’s still below the pre-pandemic level under Trump.
Three straight years of declining real income—one under Trump, during the pandemic, and two under Biden—is a rarity. The last time real income declined at all was a single year in 2014, when it fell from $68,200 to $67,300. Prior to that, incomes declined from a pre-financial crisis peak in 2007 through the trough in 2011.
To put it another way, prior to the pandemic hitting in 2020, median income had been on the rise for five years. When Joe Biden ran on a platform of restoring the economy in the wake of the pandemic and growing it “from the bottom up and the middle out,” voters certainly did not expect they were going to see real incomes continue to fall for another two years.
Consumer Sentiment Is Worse Now Than During the Pandemic
The University of Michigan’s survey of consumer sentiment reflects the damage this has done. Four years ago, the index of consumer sentiment was at 74.1. The consumer expectations subindex read 68.5, while the current conditions came in at 82.9. The current conditions index had plunged 21.3 percent from a year earlier due to the onset of the pandemic.
So, where are we now? The most recent consumer sentiment index reading came in 67.9, which is 8.3 percent lower than it was in some of the worst days of the pandemic. In fact, throughout the pandemic year, consumer sentiment never fell below 70. It’s now been below that level for four consecutive months.
The expectations index is a bit higher than it was four years ago, at 72.1. But that’s entirely because Republicans are more optimistic today—with a reading of 56.3—than Democrats were in 2020—when they registered a score of 46.6. The current conditions reading at 61.3 is down by a jaw-dropping 26 percent.
There are, of course, some improvements over the past four years. The unemployment rate was twice as high in August of 2020 than it is today, for example. But many Americans quite reasonably do not use exactly four years ago as the baseline—the point of the question isn’t really to ask about four years ago but to compare progress during a presidential administration. And the unemployment rate just prior to the pandemic was lower than it is today, at 3.5 percent. Indeed, unemployment had been lower under Trump for two years than it is now.
No wonder why Harris did everything she could to talk around the most important question of this election.