Republicans only have former President Donald Trump to blame for a presidential election they should be primed to win but could easily lose, wrote New York Times analyst Matt Yglesias Monday.
The idea that Trump should be "running away with" the election is hard to swallow, Yglesias noted, because the conventional wisdom is exactly the opposite.
"The presumption is that Kamala Harris is — or at least might be — blowing it, either by being too liberal or too centrist, too welcoming of the Liz Cheneys of the world or not welcoming enough or that there is something fundamentally off-kilter about the American electorate or American society," he wrote.
However, throughout the rest of the developed democratic world, incumbent parties have been obliterated, driven by public anger over inflation and international turmoil. "The question of why, exactly, voters so hate inflation — which increases wages and prices symmetrically — has long puzzled economists," he wrote.
"But the basic psychology seems to be: My pay increase reflects my hard work and talent, while the higher prices I am paying are the fault of the government."
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So really, it should have been Republicans' race to lose — why, then, is it so close, he asked.
Yglesias suspects a big part of it is that Trump blew his credibility on the issue by making his flagship policy proposal to enact broad-based tariffs across everything consumers buy — which both the Harris campaign and economists across the board warned would spike the cost of everything from groceries to gas. One study even suggested it would sabotage economic growth for more than a decade.
"Republicans talk extensively about the cost of living and wield it as a political cudgel. But the policy agenda of higher budget deficits and higher tariffs are clearly interpreted by financial markets as implying more inflation, not less," wrote Yglesias. "It should not have been hard for an opposition candidate, no matter what his other flaws, to put together some kind of inflation-busting or cost-cutting (or both) policy platform in an election season when voters around the world are demanding help with costs."
Yet Trump chose to hammer a policy that would clearly raise prices instead of lower them, Yglesias wrote — and in doing so, he crippled the tailor-made case for electing him.