Inflation, Immigration, Insanity: Harris has weak points if GOP can stay on message

Former President Donald Trump and his campaign spent much of last week addressing Vice President Kamala Harris’s racial background, but industry analysts and polling data suggest they may be missing the mark and ought to focus on three key issues: inflation, immigration, and insanity, as some have named the keynote progressive issues Harris has supported.

Harris’s status as vice president closely links her with the policies and record of the Biden administration, which currently faces low polling on all of those critical issues. Current data shows President Joe Biden with a 34.5% average approval rating on inflation, according to RealClearPolitics, while 62.5% disapprove of his handling of the issue. On immigration, moreover, Biden earns a 33.2% approval rating to 62.8% disapproval in the same metric.

The Trump camp did make some initial efforts to tie her to the Biden administration’s record, such as an early campaign ad that depicted her as the driving force behind the White House’s keynote policies. “Look what she got done: a border invasion, runaway inflation, the American Dream dead. They created this mess. They – no, Kamala – owns this failed record,” the ad declared.

But the campaign swiftly got off message, with Trump side-tracked by Harris’s mixed-race background and her efforts to capitalize on that. Trump suggested she had only recently opted to identify as a black woman. Harris is the daughter of a Jamaican father and an Indian mother. She has long emphasized her Indian heritage, but Trump’s remarks nonetheless triggered a punishing news cycle and put his campaign on defense.

Trump somewhat returned to form this week amid a stock market tumble he deemed the “Kamala crash,” asserting on Truth Social that "Of course there is a massive market downturn. Kamala is even worse than Crooked Joe. Markets will NEVER accept the Radical Left Lunatic that DESTROYED San Francisco and California, as a whole.” He further warned of a possible “Great Depression of 2024.”

If the Trump campaign continues with that sort of messaging and focuses on Harris’s weaker polling points, industry analysts see a greater opportunity for the Republican message to resonate with voters amid the faltering economy.

“When Donald Trump is talking about growing the American economy, building new great cities, baby boom, no taxes on tips, Donald Trump is winning. When he gets into that petty stuff with her, he's not winning,” Trafalgar pollster Robert Cahaly said on the “John Solomon Reports” podcast last week.

“But this campaign is no longer about stirring up the base to fever pitch, it is about delivering a message that looks presidential, that is in keeping with his values. When Donald Trump explains trade abuse, and how it affects people, they're more likely to be supportive of his tariff plan,” Cahaly said.

“And when he talks about… the decline in small town America and the Rust Belt, because, you know, jobs are shipped overseas… And so when he's talking about that, I think he is really effective,” Cahaly added.

Democratic operatives: Trump has the advantage

The Democrats’ last-minute shuffle at the top of their ticket has thrown a wrench in the race, bolstering Democratic confidence while confounding Republicans who have struggled to solidify their messaging against Harris.

But Democratic operatives have warned that Trump still enjoys the advantage and that Harris would not sail to victory. Speaking on CNN on Sunday, former Obama senior advisor David Axelrod said “[t]here's a lot of irrational exuberance… on the Democratic side of the aisle right now, because there was despair for some period of time about what the November [election] was going to look like.”

“Now, people feel like there's a chance, but it’s absolutely Trump's race to lose right now,” he said. “He is ahead, and he is ahead [in] most of the battleground states, they're close.”

The Trump campaign, for its part, seems at least partly inclined to continue as though Biden remained the nominee and to link the Democrats’ new standard-bearer with her former running mate’s initiatives. One Trump campaign release attempted to label Harris as “Biden 2.0,” while yet another called her the “copilot on some of Biden’s most egregious failures,” including the crisis at the southern border.

Biden “endorsed Kamala Harris, who's been with them for three and a half years,” pollster John McLaughlin asserted on the “John Solomon Reports” podcast last week. “So the two thirds of voters that say the country is on the wrong track, the majority of voters who say they're worse off today than they were four years ago, they're the ones who think the… country's going backwards. That follows, she's responsible for all these things.”

A recent Fabrizio Lee survey, moreover, has suggested that voters would respond to messaging that links Harris with Biden on key issues. The survey, conducted July 29-Aug. 1, questioned 600 voters in the key state of Pennsylvania, asking how certain premises would affect their likelihood of voting for Harris, including on immigration, economic concerns, and an array of environmental and criminal issues. Early Vote Action, a Republican-aligned voter registration group, commissioned the poll.

Inflation a key issue for voters

The Fabrizio Lee survey found that if voters were presented with messaging tying Harris to Biden administration policies that they say led to inflation, she would suffer significantly with the electorate, including among “persuadable voters.”

Respondents were presented with the following prompt: “Kamala Harris supported every one of the Biden/Harris administration policies that led to the record high inflation and rising prices that we have now for groceries, housing and gas prices.” Forty-nine percent of the overall sample indicated they would be less likely to vote for Harris in light of that information, while 63% of the “persuadable” bloc said the same.

Cahaly, for his part, asserted that “if Republicans want to be successful, they have got to make her own everything… make her own inflation.” McLaughlin, moreover, pointed to a direct action from Harris upon which the campaign could seize to directly link her to inflation: her tie-breaking vote to pass the COVID-19 stimulus package in 2021.

“So she cast the deciding vote that triggered inflation, right? The 1.9 trillion that Biden wanted to spend, she broke a 50-50 tie [in] the U.S. Senate to get a pass. So she triggered inflation,” McLaughlin asserted on the “John Solomon Reports” podcast last week.

Indeed, the Trump campaign has already seized on that point, with Trump Campaign National Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt highlighting last week that “[s]he cast tie-breaking votes in the Senate for spending that put inflation on steroids.”

Addressing the economy more broadly, former Trump advisor Steve Moore linked the ongoing market falls to growing investor familiarity with Harris and the potential impact of her policies on the economy.

"I think there's also a political factor here... But I do think that there is something to this idea of Kamala crash," he said Monday on the "John Solomon Reports" podcast. "And think about what's happened in the last couple of weeks, we had a situation where Trump was, you know, about a 62% favorite to win the election. And then Kamala has had this amazing honeymoon... the race is now close to tied."

"And I think that the investors around the world are looking at what this woman actually stands for in terms of, you know, doubling the capital gains tax taxing unrealized capital gains, and about $2 trillion of debt and spending, you know, shutting off the oil and gas production in the country," he went on. "It's very, it's a very, very bearish, anti investor, anti business agenda. And I think people are waking up to this and saying, 'Oh, my God, this woman may actually win.'"

Immigration: The border crisis

“She's still [for] open borders,” McLaughlin said. “[Left-wing megadonor George] Soros’s son Alex is out there tweeting in the world that they should support her. Well, those are the open border guys. Those are the nonprofits that gave us the millions and millions of illegal immigrants here.”

On immigration, the Fabrizio Lee survey posed four premises to respondents. The first asserted that she supported “giving taxpayer funded healthcare coverage to illegal immigrants. Forty-eight percent of respondents were less likely to vote for her because of that, with 53% of persuadable voters saying the same.

When faced with the claim that Harris supported “abolishing” Immigration and Customs Enforcement, moreover, 47% were less likely to vote for her overall, including 61% of persuadable voters. "I think there is no question that we have to critically re-examine ICE and its role and the way that it is being administered and the work it is doing and we need to probably think about starting from scratch," Harris said in a 2018 interview with MSNBC.

Forty-seven percent overall were less likely to back Harris, as were 59% of persuadable voters when told she “supported every one of the Biden/Harris administration policies that caused our Southern Border to be open and allowed millions of illegal immigrants to flood into our country.”

When told that “7 million illegal immigrants have illegally entered the United States” since Biden named Harris the “border czar,” 46% were less likely to back her overall, while 57% of persuadable voters said the same.

Insanity (crime and environmental policies)

Among Harris’s keynote progressive issues has been her approach to law enforcement and her support for environmental causes, both which may present difficulties for the Democrats in pitching Harris to the wider electorate.

The Fabrizio Lee survey suggested that proper presentation of her record on either could significantly impact her perception among key voters.

Fifty-two percent of respondents overall indicated they would be less likely to vote for her when told that she “cut pleas that let murderers off the hook and put predators back on the streets,” while serving as San Francisco District Attorney. Among persuadable voters, that figure stood at 67%.

When told she “encouraged people to contribute to a fund which bailed convicted rapists, assaulters and murderers out of jail,” she lost ground with 51% of the overall sample and 58% of persuadable voters.

Fifty percent overall were less likely to vote for her when told that, as district attorney, she “granted probation to a dangerous illegal immigrant felon who upon release went on to kill a father and his two sons.” Sixty-seven percent of persuadable voters reflected that sentiment.

On environmental issues, her stances prompted backlash, albeit less so than her prosecutorial decisions. When told she “bragged about her role in the extreme climate agenda of her administration,” 47% of respondents were less likely to vote for her, as were 60% of persuadable voters. Her support for the Green New Deal, and promise to ban fracking, saw her lose ground with 46% of the overall sample and 56% of persuadable voters.

“So the Democrats really… they don't have an age problem anymore. But they still have an electoral problem, because she's more radical than Biden,” McLaughlin said. “And the other part when voters are asked about her, they tell us that she's incompetent. She's unqualified, and she's a phony. She's a fool.”

“So instead of saying she's dangerously liberal, I would say she's foolishly liberal, because the one thing that makes being president different than any other elected offices: you can't be a fool,” he added.

Ben Whedon is an editor and reporter for Just the News. Follow him on X.