With only days to go before the Nov. 5 election, the presidential campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris got some good news in the form of solid economic readings this week.
The Commerce Department’s first estimate of economic growth in the July-September quarter, out Wednesday morning, found a 2.8% growth rate, a solid pace likely to keep unemployment down and wages rising.
On Tuesday, the Conference Board, a think tank, reported that its monthly consumer confidence measure jumped to 108.7 in October from 99.2 in September. That’s the biggest one-month change since March 2021, when the U.S. economy was still moving out of the slowdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Even gas prices have turned more favorable for the White House. The automotive organization AAA said the average price for a gallon of regular gasoline was $3.135 on Wednesday, and ranged as low as $2.897 to $2.687 in the Southern and central states.
The White House touted the statistics, the last major set of data that will be released ahead of the election aside from the October jobs report Friday.
“It wasn’t so long ago when commentators were certain that we would need a recession to beat inflation caused by the pandemic,” Lael Brainard, director of the White House’s National Economic Council, told reporters Wednesday. “But it’s now clear we’ve been able to bring inflation down to rates from before the pandemic while growing faster than projected. And that didn’t happen by accident.”
However, the reports, and Brainard’s assessment, stand in stark contrast with how voters perceive the economy. An Economist/YouGov survey found that 97% of respondents felt the economy was important and 38% of those polled felt the economy was in poor shape, compared to only 51% who felt it was fair or good.
But with the widely watched Dow Jones Industrial Average of stocks hitting record highs in recent weeks, the Federal Reserve cutting interest rates as insurance against a downturn, and price growth continuing to moderate, there are signs the economic mood may be lifting just in time to help Harris in her quest to succeed fellow Democrat Joe Biden as president.
The consumer confidence report data showed that expectations of the economy entering a recession fell in September, to their lowest levels since at least July 2022. Respondents’ expectations for their families’ financial situation six months from now were also the highest since then.
Brainard said the new estimate of economic growth, the first before revisions in November and December, brought the annual average rate of economic growth under Biden to 3.2%, the highest of any president since the turn of the century.
However, that hasn’t kept GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump and his allies from talking about how inflation hit a four-decade high in 2022, and saying the economy had been artificially propped up.
Billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk, who has endorsed Trump, recently said federal debt has fueled the economy, and that budget cuts supported by Trump would cause “temporary hardship” for some people.
The next big economic report will be the monthly jobs tally released by the Labor Department on Friday morning. According to a survey of economists by Reuters, the projected growth in payrolls is only 90,000 jobs. That would be the lowest number in a while, as October saw a brief port strike as well as economic disruptions from Hurricane Helene in the Southeastern U.S.
Brainard downplayed expectations, calling the Labor release “a noisy report.”
“We anticipate that the payroll numbers will be lower as a result of those disruptions,” she said. “But nonetheless, we don’t anticipate that this will in any way affect the underlying trend. And the underlying trend, as you can see in several months of data, has been quite resilient.”
