Kamala Harris’s Campaign Thinks She Can Win on the Economy. Here’s How.

Harris advisers point to a number of brightening public polls showing that Donald Trump’s lead is eroding on the critical question of whom voters trust most on the economy.

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For many months, it has been an undisputed and durable fact of the 2024 race that former President Donald J. Trump held a strong political advantage on the most pressing issue to the most voters: the economy.

But with less than six weeks until the election, some of Vice President Kamala Harris’s top strategists are making the seemingly audacious case that she will not only neutralize the longstanding Republican edge on economic matters but also flip the script entirely by Election Day.

“This is not just a central challenge, but a challenge that is winnable,” David Plouffe, a senior Harris adviser who served as former President Barack Obama’s campaign manager in 2012, said in an interview.

In fact, Mr. Plouffe and other Harris advisers say, the turnabout has already started.

They point to a number of brightening public polls that show that Mr. Trump’s once-daunting lead is eroding on the critical question of whom voters trust most on the economy. At the same time, there are economic atmospherics working in her favor with the stock market hitting record highs, gas prices dropping and the Federal Reserve slashing interest rates for the first time in four years.

In the battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, Mr. Trump’s edge on the handling of the economy was only two to four percentage points in the most recent set of Quinnipiac University polls. And while individual polls do not universally agree on the size of Mr. Trump’s edge, the trend line across a number of surveys, including from Fox News, CBS and Suffolk University/USA Today, shows Ms. Harris gaining ground with voters on the economy.

Patrick Ruffini, a Republican pollster, dismissed the Harris team’s talk of outright winning on the economy as “a little far fetched” and “bluster.” But he said her gains on the issue were real and substantial.

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