US Vice-President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris will face heavy criticism just days out from the US presidential election after the latest jobs data fell chronically short of expectations. Photo / AFP
The Herald’s deputy political editor Thomas Coughlan is in the US for the presidential election. Follow his campaign diary here.
OPINION
Twelve thousand is the number of everyone’s lips today. It’s the number of jobs the US economy added in October.
The number is tiny - by far the lowest of Joe Biden’s presidency. Economists had forecast 100,000 jobs. By way of comparison, in September, the US economy added 223,000 jobs.
There’s a reason for the low figure: industrial unrest, including a major strike and two destructive hurricanes (an election playing out against economic disruption and extreme weather events sounds awfully familiar to New Zealanders - the unemployment rate, 4.1% is a little higher than the 3.9% posted in New Zealand prior to our election last year).
No excuse from Vice-President Kamala Harris or the Biden administration will fully atone for the fact this is an incredibly bad number and blaming the hurricanes might further imperil her already parlous campaign. One of the states hardest hit by Hurricane Helene, which hit the southeastern United States at the end of September, was North Carolina. The state is one of seven swing states this election, with its 16 electoral college votes making it the second-equal most valuable prize (with Georgia) among the seven swing states.
North Carolina was won by former President Donald Trump in 2020 with a margin of just 1.3 points (North Carolina is something of a bellwether state; Trump’s 2020 victory was one of just four instances in which the winner of North Carolina has not gone on to become president). He’s campaigning in Greensboro, North Carolina on Saturday local time (early Sunday morning NZT), which is where I’m currently headed, via a nine-hour train from Philadelphia.
Pennsylvania remains a battleground. Joe Biden is flying in to campaign as I leave, and Harris announced her final campaign stop of the election will be in Philadelphia, on the steps of the city’s Museum of Art (well-known to New Zealanders for being the scene in Rocky in which the titular boxer runs up some stars and raises his fists).
Polls show the race effectively tied, but with North Carolina grappling with the aftermath of the hurricane, Trump, whose campaign has falsely claimed that federal emergency funds are being used to house illegal migrants, has had an edge on Harris and Biden all year. It must be said that Trump’s claim is one of the more sane conspiracy theories going round about the hurricane - one Trump surrogate, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, said was caused by the Federal Government controlling the weather.
It’s trite to say the economy is a big issue this election - it’s a big issue in almost every election, but this election it appears to have taken on added significance, given the punishing wave of inflation Americans experienced after the pandemic.
A Washington Post poll in the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania published today found 62% of registered voters rated the economy as extremely important in deciding their vote, well ahead of any other issue (crime came in next on 50%. Overall, 62% of registered voters in Pennsylvania described the economy as not so good or poor, compared to just 37% who said it was negative, numbers that do not bode well for Harris (even if they represent a slight improvement on September), who carries the burden of incumbency.
It might seem odd that anyone could describe the American economy as poor. Americans are vastly richer than New Zealanders and they’re getting even richer.
American GDP per capita in NZ dollars, adjusted for purchasing power parity, was $102,200 in 2012 compared with $71,300 in New Zealand - a gap of $30,000, according to World Bank data.
American GDP per capita has grown by 20% since then to $122,900 in 2023 compared to just 15% growth for New Zealand, which sits at just over $81,000. The gap between the figures has widened to over $40,000, growth of 30% across three presidential terms.
Despite that incredible growth since 2012, American decline (“American carnage” as Trump dubbed it during his inauguration speech) has been a key theme of each of the three presidential elections since then.
Several measures of wage and income growth published in the last year show Americans are finally “better off” than they were when Biden took office in January 2021, after several years of being “worse off” thanks to income growth lagging inflation.
But many Americans aren’t convinced. Outside Independence Hall in Philadelphia, famous for being the site of the drafting and adoption of the Declaration of Independence and the Constition, I met Lawrence, an engineer.
He told me, frankly, life was better under Trump.
“When Trump was President, I made more money than I ever did - when Biden came, I’m f***ed up,” Lawrence said.
“I made US$92,000 [$154,000] when Trump was in office - legally … when Biden came back that went from US$90,000 to US$52,000.”
He didn’t have much hope whoever won.
“My honest opinion [is] both candidates running … it’s going to be bad on both ends. If anything, you’ve got to pick the best of the worst.
“We’ve got a Vice-President, she was Vice-President for three years and nothing got done, then we’ve got Trump who when he was President stuff got done, but what he says and how he goes about things turns a lot of people the wrong way,” Lawrence said.
He told me he will vote, but probably not for either of the two main candidates. Instead, he’ll vote independent.
A young Black man, Lawrence is one of the target demographics in this race, with some polling suggesting Black men are unmotivated by Harris. Former President Barack Obama has been targeting young Black men in his campaign appearances this month.
The US does a fairly poor job of converting its immense wealth into social outcomes. Average life expectancy here is 77 years at birth, compared with 82 in New Zealand (life expectancy is about 75 in North Carolina). It’s a story repeated across a number of social statistics. The unfungibility of wealth into social outcomes is perhaps one of the great post-Cold War trends in American life.
I put this to my Uber driver Anwar, originally from Jordan, who ran a pair of Middle Eastern restaurants in Philadelphia until the pandemic forced him to close up. He says driving for Uber is better than sitting around at home.
He, too, thinks the race will be tight and isn’t convinced either candidate will help him much.
He scoffed at the amount of time both Harris and Trump spend talking about the middle class.
“There’s no middle class,” Anwar said.
“If you want to live in America, you need to be in the 1%,” he said, referring to the wealthiest percentile of Americans.
Anwar said people that rich can do whatever they liked.
“If you get that money, you can just kill someone on the street and go home,” Anwar said.
Anwar isn’t the only one to think this. In 2016, weeks before his first presidential Primary, candidate and certified member of the 1% Donald Trump said he was so popular, he “could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and … wouldn’t lose any votes”.
It was dismissed as an outlandish comment at the time, but Anwar’s comments and Trump’s immutable rise suggest he might have been on to something.
Thomas Coughlan is Deputy Political Editor and covers politics from Parliament. He has worked for the Herald since 2021 and has worked in the press gallery since 2018. His travel to the United States was assisted by the US Embassy in Wellington.