Even James Carville, the ragin’ Cajun, didn’t see that one coming.
It was Carville, chief strategist on Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, who delivered modern American politics’ most powerful message in his famous Louisana drawl: “It’s the economy, stupid.”
He was right then and he would probably have been right now—if he hadn’t loudly predicted a Kamala Harris victory this time around.
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According to CBS News exit polls, two-thirds of voters think the economy was in bad shape. Forty-five percent consider themselves worse off now than when Joe Biden was elected four years ago, and of those eight in 10 voted for Donald Trump, helping to return him to the White House.
And if it really was the economy, stupid, then maybe there wasn’t much Harris could have done to bring voters around, given that she was at Biden’s side as he pushed through trillions of dollars in post-COVID recovery spending that had to fuel inflation.
Given more time to make her case, and not just the three months she had after Biden finally stepped aside, Harris might have been able to build a dividing line between her and her boss on economic policy and avoid blame for the rising cost of groceries, cars, fuel, and rents.
Instead, she had to find other issues to campaign on: abortion, encouraging first-time homeowners, protecting consumers from predatory pricing. None of them quite stuck. It wasn’t about the women, stupid. It wasn’t about owning your own homes. It wasn’t even about Donald Trump, however much the Harris campaign tried to warn voters about the orange-skinned felon and the threat he poses to constitutional democracy.
Perhaps, it was just the Democrats’ turn to lose and the Republicans’ turn to win. We will never know but maybe another, less MAGA Republican candidate would have done even better. After all, no party had ever won a second term when so many people think the country is headed the wrong way.
Carville’s famous line about the economy was immortalized in The War Room, the brilliant documentary about the 1992 Clinton campaign, when the fresh-faced Arkansas governor managed to consign President H. W. Bush to a single term in office against the backdrop of a recession.
But it wasn’t Carville’s only message. The strategist hung a sign on the wall of the campaign HQ in Little Rock with three messages for people to drill home.
- Change vs. more of the same.
- The economy, stupid
- Don’t forget healthcare.
If Trump won on the price of groceries, then, according to exit polls from the major networks, he also won as the candidate for change. Healthcare was never really an issue in this election, not for the Trump campaign at least, but two out of three was enough to win it.
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