The "undecided" or "waivering" voters have no idea what's going on and do not understand cause and effect. Consider this from the latest NYT polls showing an essential tie in the key Northern battleground states:
The polling results fit a recurring theme with voters in battleground states: Many tend to believe that Mr. Trump’s time in office helped people like them, and they worry that Ms. Harris’s policies would hurt people like them.
For these voters, economic correlation is causation: if the economy was good under Trump, Trump caused it. In fact, Trump's policies were not good for people of average income, but to know that you'd have to know something about his actual policies (e.g., his tax cuts). (Interestingly, voters give Trump a pass on the pandemic: they know he didn't cause that. On the other hand, they apparently don't know how badly he handled it, but, again, that would require actually paying attention to his malign influence on health policy.) (Achen and Bartels in Democracy for Realists discuss various cases in which correlation is treated as causation by voters, including some pretty bizarre ones.)
Conversely, because substantial inflation occurred under Biden, he caused it: correlation is causation and thus responsibility. The role of the pandemic and the disruption in supply chains in producing inflation is a consideration unavailable to the ignorant.
The problem for Harris is that every time voters walk into the supermarket they are reminded that prices of most stuff they buy is 15-20% higher than under Trump. (I'm not an especially alert shopper, but even I am astonished at times.) As the NYT also reports, "As for the issues that matter most to swing voters, pocketbook economics is No. 1 by far." There's just no way around that, and it may be enough to return the monster child to office. Harris's pitches to the prudent wing of the capitalist class won't change this.
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