In what will be a surprise if readers buy what the mainstream media has been telling them, voters not only understand VP Kamala Harris’ economic policies, they prefer them.
“Kamala Harrisâs economic policies proved far more popular than Donald Trumpâs plans in a blind test of their proposals,” the Guardian reported from their exclusive bling testing poll.
Also of note, “Though Harris has received criticism for being ‘light on policy’, a majority of all voters in the poll suggested they understand her policies just fine. More than 60% of voters said they understood Harris policies on the economy.”
People from both sides of the aisle remain pessimistic about the economy, so the most popular proposal was a federal ban on the price-gouging of food and groceries, which is a Kamala Harris plan. “Nearly half (44%) of all those polled agreed that it would strengthen the economy.”
The top issue for those polled was the cost of living, and Harrisâs price gouging proposal is meant to address that. “A majority of those polled (66%) indicated that the cost of living was one of their biggest economic concerns right now.”
Harris wants a federal ban on price gouging because grocery prices have surged 25% since 2020. The Guardian notes that some economists have criticized this plan.
However, 37 states actually have bans on price gouging already, and they don’t operate like “Soviet-style” price setting. Erin Witte, director of the consumer protection at the Consumer Federation of America told NBC the difference is “price-gouging laws, by contrast, target corporate conduct rather than mandating concrete pricing levels: ‘Price-gouging laws require the enforcing agency to look at several factors and decide whether the conduct was unlawful.’”
Harris’ plan, in other words, is about holding corporations accountable for price gouging. This is an example of what the government is meant to do — to regulate big business so that it doesn’t inflict too much harm on people while making a profit.
This poll shows that when voters are just shown actual policies, they prefer Kamala Harris’ four out of five times. The one policy of Trump’s they like is not taxing Social Security. This plan sounds good on the surface, but again the media doesn’t demand the hows from Trump for some reason.
For instance, Rep. John Larson (D-Conn), ranking member of the House Ways and Means subcommittee on Social Security, called Trump’s plan CNBC a âfatal mistakeâ because it fails to make up for the revenue that would be lost.
Larson says Trump’s plan would end up cutting the Social Security trust fund.
From the Guardian:
Guardian Poll Economic Policies
One of the biggest takeaways from this poll is that when actually presented with the economic policies of the candidates, voters prefer Harris’. Yet for some reason voters continue to think that Republicans are better on the economy, in spite of over a decade of evidence to the contrary.
For a media that has been lamenting Harris being “short on policy” while not attaching that to Donald Trump, who is still working on “concepts of a plan” for an Obamacare replacement, even though he was actually in the White House and undermining Obamacare and trying to repeal it without any actual replacement plan, this is a stunning rebuke.
Speaking of economic policies that matter to voters, this morning, the Biden-Harris administration announced cost savings for 54 prescription drugs via the Medicare Rebate Program — thanks to President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, for which not a single Republican voted.
Much of the media is lost and flailing under the Vice President’s presidential candidacy. They have not been allowed to gatekeep voters’ impressions of her the way they insist only they can do. Their track record hasn’t been great in recent history, as when given that power, they’ve abused it and failed to focus on the actual issues that matter to voters. (The media isn’t a monolith and many journalists are doing important work; this criticism is aimed at the overarching narratives established by the beltway media and political news media gossips who replace issues with snark, which might be why Harris has done more interviews with local journalists.)
Harris spokesperson Ian Sams called this poll a “Reality check for the Beltway class” and he is not wrong, except that they will not be checked by reality.
In recent years, too much of the media’s craven obsession with Donald Trump’s chaos and drama and the resultant clicks and ratings seems to be incentivizing horse race type coverage of the candidacy of a convicted felon and adjudicated rapist, whose one term in office was a chaotic, dangerous nightmare from which the nation has not yet recovered.
This poll shows that if the media were actually interested in educating voters about policy, voters would know who had the policies they liked and who didn’t.
Sarah has been credentialed to cover President Barack Obama, then VP Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and exclusively interviewed Speaker Nancy Pelosi multiple times and exclusively covered her first home appearance after the first impeachment of then President Donald Trump.
Sarah is two-time Telly award winning video producer and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.
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