How Trump Accidentally Let His Biggest Advantage Over Harris Slip Away

If you’ve spent time on social media lately, you’ve surely encountered the argument that Kamala Harris and Democrats have squandered way too much time and resources on attacking Donald Trump as a sexual predator, dangerous madman, and wannabe fascist dictator. In this telling, the Democrats’ obsession with Trump—with the civic emergency he poses and with his thoroughly debased character and temperament—has led the party to neglect addressing the economy, and it’s costing them support with the American voters who will Actually Matter in this election.

There’s one complication with this theory, however: It’s wrong. The Harris campaign and the Democratic Party have poured immense amounts of resources into economic messaging—to the tune of well over $200 million, according to figures provided to me by AdImpact, which tracks political advertising. Harris and the Democrats have actually outspent Trump and Republicans on ads about the economy by around $70 million, according to the firm.

This should begin to flip the script on our understanding of this election. Rather than Democrats taking their eye off the economic ball due to their obsession with Trump—or with reproductive rights, as another version of this theory has it—what if Trump actually got caught napping on the economy, due to his campaign’s hubristic certainty that he can’t lose the argument over it? This can be the case even if Trump ends up winning, as it will still be true that Harris largely closed the gap with Trump on the economy to near parity—a remarkable achievement that is partly fueled by these huge expenditures.

At my request, AdImpact tallied up the total spending on all ads that are in some sense about the economy or the candidates’ economic agendas. I asked for all spending by the two campaigns—and by the parties and all major super PACs and other associated groups aligned with the campaigns on both sides—from July 21, when President Biden dropped out of the race, to the present.

The results are striking. In that time period, the Harris campaign and all allied organizations spent an estimated total of nearly $225 million on such ads about the economy, AdImpact found. By contrast, the Trump campaign and its allied groups spent just over an estimated $155 million.

If Harris does win this election, these expenditures should inform what Democrats and liberals conclude from the outcome about how to do politics going forward. They suggest that it’s possible to campaign against the civic menace Trump poses and talk about the economy at the same time. Indeed, both these things together might be essential in defeating the broader threat that Trump represents, in that they appeal to different constituencies in the anti-MAGA coalition.

A look at the ads that Harris and Democrats are currently running on the economy in the race’s final days—tracked and provided by AdImpact—demonstrates how they are speaking to many different elements of this coalition in unappreciated ways.

One spot leads with Trump’s vow to persecute his enemies, then pivots to a point-by-point series of promises on Harris’s economic agenda: Curb corporate price gouging, lower housing costs, cut middle class taxes, and protect social insurance for the elderly. This appears aimed partly at suburban voters, including right-leaning ones, who have deep reservations about Trump’s temperament and character but still feel seduced by Trump’s economic promises and need to be reassured that Harris is economically on their side.

Another ad, from the super PAC Future Forward, features a two-time Trump voter lamenting Trump’s tax cuts for the rich and extolling Harris’s plans for middle-class tax cuts. Another spot shows a steelworker hitting the same themes. Still another ad from the Harris campaign features a similar message coming from a farmer in western Pennsylvania. These ads reach out to Trump-supporting working-class voters whose allegiance to Trump and the GOP is soft. Note how they’re targeted at somewhat different micro constituencies: both industrial workers and farmers in the Midwest.

Yet another ad from Harris’s campaign appears aimed at nonwhite working-class voters tempted by Trump’s economic message: It talks emotionally about the hardships of working-class life, slams Trump’s policies as a giveaway to billionaires, and hits corporations for price gouging on basic necessities. And this spot promising to target “price gougers” is aimed at that same constituency.

It’s sometimes said that the Democratic Party has lost touch with its populist roots. That’s true in some ways. But ads like those above—which emphasize Trump’s allegiance to the billionaire class, shady special interests like corrupt landlords, and price-gouging corporations—show that Harris and Democrats have been employing a lot of populist appeals that have gone largely unnoticed by the media.

“The pro-Harris coalition has quietly but aggressively drawn an economic contrast with Trump using populist messaging,” Sawyer Hacket, a senior adviser to the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, told me. “Under the radar, they’ve fought the economic battle to a draw.”

As David Weigel reports at Semafor, it’s a mostly untold story that, while the news cycle chases after Trump’s latest outrage—and the Democratic response to it—all these ads about the economy are grinding away in the swing states, day after day. As Weigel also reports, many of the stump speeches from Harris and her surrogates are also focused on the economy, even as attacks on Trump suck up the media attention.

That $225 million has gone into Democratic ads about the economy underscores that dynamic. But it also challenges a deeper theory of our politics that lies behind claims that Democrats are overly focused on Trump’s personal excesses (or reproductive rights, in other iterations of the tale). According to this theory, the voters who will decide the presidential race view the searing social tensions and hatreds that Trump has unleashed and his depraved moral character with relatively little concern.

Democrats, goes this theory, have fixated on those things at their peril. As a result, the party is neglecting the authentic material concerns of working-class voters, which Trump is exploiting with populist bombast aimed squarely at those concerns. However demagogic it all may be, it’s filling a void left open by Democrats, putting him on the cusp of victory yet again.

All these ad expenditures call this into serious question. Instead, if the election goes well for Harris, it will demonstrate that holding the forces of rising authoritarianism at bay requires appealing to numerous voter groups spanning the center-left and center right—and that a multiplicity of messages is required to reach them.

For instance, right-leaning independents and moderate Republicans—especially affluent suburbanites—who have supported GOP economics all their lives might need to be nudged into Harris’s camp by reminders of Trump’s fondness for violence, authoritarian threats, sexual predations, and open boasts about taking reproductive rights away from half the population. Those voters might respond more to those things than, say, working-class voters who are more motivated by nostalgia for the good pre-Covid economy, and thus need more direct populist reassurances.

The threat posed by Trump and his MAGA movement thrives on the deep pain and trauma resulting from enduring the Covid catastrophe; totalitarian-style movement propaganda falsifying his own economic failures and the largely successful recovery under his successor; and a massive, durable support base that’s energized by his naked authoritarian cruelties and unmoved by his degeneracy and criminality. It requires a large, diverse coalition to defeat that threat, and assembling that coalition has required both economic and anti-authoritarian appeals alike.

This election remains a toss-up, and none of this is to suggest that the Democratic Party has solved its problem with working-class voters. But if Harris does win, a recognition of the need to combat growing authoritarianism with a broad, multiracial, cross-class, economically diverse, pro-democracy, pro-rule of law, pro-choice, and pro-human-decency coalition will be a key reason why.