The New York Times ran a column, by Duke University law professor Jedidiah Briton-Purdy, telling Vice-President Harris how she can turn around her deficit in public opinion polling on the economy. The gist of the piece is that most people are hurting now, but Harris can turn things around by adopting a more populist agenda.

It would be great to see Harris push a more populist agenda. I have written extensively on how the economy has been rigged to redistribute income upward, so I totally support Harris pushing more progressive policies. However, the extent to which anyone will hear a progressive message is open to question. The most fundamental problem is that people now believe a story about the economy that is almost completely at odds with reality.

Contrary to what Briton-Purdy tells us, most people are not hurting now, or at least not more than they did in the past, like before the pandemic when Donald Trump was president. Back then most people said the economy was good.

Somehow, when all the data tell us that most people are doing better off, especially those in the lower end of the income distribution, we have a continual drumbeat in the media about the economy being awful. And it is not just data on wages and prices, we see people behaving as though they are doing pretty well.

For example, air travel was at record highs this summer. At its peak, boardings were close to 3 million a day. That is not the one percent. We have a similar story with car travel, which also hit record highs this summer, with 70 million people hitting the road on the holidays, also not the one percent.

Purchases of restaurant meals are up by 10.5 percent compared with the pre-pandemic rate, after adjusting for inflation. Purchases of meals at fast-food restaurants, also adjusted for inflation, are up by 19.4 percent. Inflation-adjusted spending at sporting events is up by 12.2 percent.

This list can be extended at considerable length, but the point is that people are not acting as though they are suffering. We do have tens of millions of people struggling to get by, and many of them are not getting by, but that was true in 2019 when the prevailing story was the great economy.

When we have a prevailing economic story that is literally 180 degrees at odds with the economic reality, it is worth asking how we can envision Vice-President Harris getting her economic message out to the electorate, if she were to push the themes advocated by Briton-Purdy. The media have bent or even invented data to tell a bad economy story throughout the Biden-Harris administration.

Since the media have used their power to convince the public of a bad economy story that is 180 degrees at odds with reality, what chance will Harris have of getting out her message on the economy in a coherent way? That seems pretty unlikely in the seven weeks left until the election unless we envision that the media will completely change their policies on covering the Democrats.  

To be clear, I don’t know what Harris can best say in the current media environment, but any discussion that does not recognize that Harris’s message will not be directly transmitted to the voters is unrealistic. Instead, it will be mediated by news organizations that have been insistent on painting a negative picture of the economy regardless of the facts.

I wish the Democrats had spent more time combatting the misinformation about the economy that major media outlets spewed endlessly for the last three and a half years, but it’s kind of late now. Harris can put worthwhile proposals on the table, which she already has, and hope that they reach the public. But her best hope is that a majority of voters will be unwilling to put a lying, corrupt, incompetent, buffoon back in the White House. I guess we’ll see.