The following is part of a post by Zeeshan Aleem at MSNBC.com:
Much of the Republican case against a Kamala Harris presidency has rested on the claim that she’s responsible for — and would continue — policies that caused eye-watering inflation for people during the Biden administration. But a new survey of economists, conducted by The Wall Street Journal, finds that most economists believe that former President Donald Trump would pursue a more inflationary policy regime.
The Journal polled 50 economists as to whether they believed Harris’ or Trump’s proposed policies would cause higher inflation and found that 12% said Harris and 68% said Trump, while another 20% responded there would be no material difference between the two. Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman described the coalescing around Harris as less likely to produce high inflation as “as close to unanimity as the profession gets.”
More striking still: That survey represented a broader consensus pinning higher inflation on Trump than an earlier version of the survey in July, which compared Trump with Biden, since Biden was still the expected Democratic nominee at that time. In that earlier poll, 16% of economists said Biden would cause higher inflation, 56% answered Trump, and 27% said it would make no material difference.
These survey results are damning for Trump, whose main pitch to voters outside of his diehard base is that his economic record is stronger than Biden and Harris’ — and that he alone can bring down high prices. And yet, the more economists are hearing about his plans, the more they’re convinced he’s more likely to cause prices to surge. . . .
The Journal’s poll is good news for Harris. Now a key task of the campaign is to make sure that ordinary citizens — especially the coveted low-information swing voter — understand that she should be the obvious preference for people worried about how expensive everything is