Paul Krugman: Is it morning in Kamala Harris’ America?

Like everyone who follows this stuff, I’m a bit awe-struck by the polling shift since Vice President Kamala Harris replaced President Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket. We still don’t know what will happen on Election Day; Harris could easily lose, despite her improved poll numbers. But if she wins, one way to think about what happened will be to say that Republicans were trying to replay the wrong election.

You see, GOP messaging has been quite explicitly modeled on Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign, when he asked, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” Applying this approach in 2024 has always been problematic, depending as it does on voters forgetting what 2020, with its soaring unemployment and mass deaths, was really like. But it’s now looking as if this election may bear more resemblance to 1984, when Reagan won a landslide victory with the theme “Morning in America.”

Before you dismiss this comparison, consider the actual state of America in 1984, which was a lot more problematic than the legend – carefully cultivated by conservatives over the years – would have it. In November of that year, the unemployment rate was 7.2%, compared with 4.3% now; inflation was just over 4%, compared with the current 2.9%. The homicide rate was much higher than the rate today.

But unemployment and inflation had come down from their peaks a few years earlier, and many Americans felt that the nation was emerging from the despondency that gripped it in 1980. In retrospect, the celebration was premature: The 1980s were a time of soaring inequality and deindustrialization, and Bill Clinton won in 1992 basically by running against the Reagan-George H.W. Bush economic legacy. But the hollowness of “Morning in America” wouldn’t become apparent until much later.

The parallel with current politics is that the state of America in 2024 isn’t just objectively very good, particularly when compared with other wealthy nations; it has also been improving rapidly along multiple dimensions. The percentage of prime-age Americans employed is at a 23-year high. Inflation is down by about two-thirds from its peak in 2022. Violent crime, which rose significantly during Donald Trump’s last year in office, has been falling fast.

Yet voters didn’t seem to be feeling the good news, and until recently Trump seemed to be running a successful campaign centered on false claims that crime is “through the roof” and that we may be in “the throes of a depression.” Oh, and that the price of bacon has quadrupled.

You may say that people don’t care that inflation – the rate at which prices are rising – is down, that they care only about the fact that prices are higher than they were. But in November 1984, consumer prices were 21% higher than when Reagan took office, which didn’t stop him from getting credit for curbing inflation (which was actually the Federal Reserve’s doing, but whatever).

No, increasingly it seems the reason the good news wasn’t getting through to voters was the messenger. Very good things have happened on Biden’s watch, many of them attributable to his startlingly bold policies. He will surely receive a much deserved hero’s welcome at next week’s Democratic National Convention, and future historians will, I believe, rate his presidency extremely highly. But for various reasons – his age, the fact that inflation surged in 2021 and ’22 and maybe just his personal style – voters weren’t willing to give him credit for his achievements.

Now that Harris is the Democratic nominee, however, the vibes have shifted.

A Financial Times poll showing that voters prefer Harris on the economy may be an outlier, but there are other polls showing that Trump’s once sizable (and utterly undeserved) advantage on that issue has been greatly eroded. And a new Associated Press/NORC poll shows the candidates tied on who could better handle crime, and Harris leads by wide margins on abortion and health care.

Now, I’m not saying that Harris, who appears to be leading but not by much, will win. Many voters have good memories of 2019 and have largely forgotten about 2020; Trump leads on immigration. In our fractured media environment, many voters may not even know that inflation and violent crime are down. Furthermore, a Reaganesque landslide is almost certainly impossible for either candidate, given our current political polarization.

Still, there is a real sense in which this election suddenly looks more like 1984 than like 1980, with Harris, not Trump, playing the Reagan role. Trump is running as the candidate of American carnage, insisting that things are terrible, which was sort of true in 1980 but isn’t true now; along with his ranting about crowd sizes and all that, he’s coming across as a whiner.

Meanwhile, Harris is running as the candidate of optimism and hope, declaring that we have triumphed over adversity – which we have. The truth is that there was ample reason to feel good about America a month or two ago, but voters weren’t willing to believe it as long as Biden was running. With Harris as the Democrats’ standard-bearer, Biden’s achievements may finally pay off politically.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.