Kamala Harris, Joe Biden

Matthew A. Winkler, Tribune News Service

“Do you believe Americans are better off than they were four years ago?” That was the initial question neither Vice President Kamala Harris nor former President Donald Trump answered during their staged debate in Philadelphia earlier this month.  Harris could have said with little qualification from fact checkers that the US is in the best shape since she grew up “a middle-class kid” with “hard-working people, you know, construction workers and nurses and teachers.”  Harris was discursive probably because public opinion polls showed Trump with greater approval on the economy than President Joe Biden, even though Harris suddenly erased this seemingly losing issue with voters expressing optimism about their well-being. Consumer net worth as measured by a mixture of housing, equities and bank deposits is up almost 11% this quarter from a year earlier to $167.8 trillion, according to Evercore ISI.

Unlike President Jimmy Carter, who replied “No” after Ronald Reagan introduced the most famous 11 words to every presidential debate since 1980, Harris began her campaign with the inflation rate on the cusp of dropping to the Federal Reserve’s 2% target. The plethora of data showing more favorable gross domestic product, jobs and personal income growth during the past three-and-a-half years puts her in a better position to say Americans are better off than they were in 2020 now that she leads in most of the seven so-called swing states — Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada, North Carolina and Wisconsin — which will determine the 47th occupant of the White House.

The Harris four-point lead over Trump in Wisconsin — the largest in any of the five presidential polls conducted by the Marquette Law School this year — converges with record-low unemployment in 2023, a manufacturing rebound and the transformation of the Badger state’s No. 1 business, agriculture, into a juggernaut during Biden’s presidency. To be sure, corporate media’s relentless focus on Biden’s age and, more recently, the normalization of Trump’s fictitious, racist rants about immigrants eating pet cats and dogs — not to mention his incoherent “child care is child care” response to a serious question at the Economic Club of New York — obscures the recovery of the Wisconsin economy from the Covid-19 pandemic to an extent unprecedented in the 21st century.

The contrast between the Biden-Harris and Trump administrations is specifically revealed in the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia’s US Coincident Indexes that track each state based on nonfarm payroll employment, average hours worked in manufacturing by production workers, the unemployment rate and wage and salary disbursements deflated by the Consumer Price Index. By these metrics, Wisconsin is 11% better than it was at the end of 2020 before Biden took office and progressing at a 3% annual rate, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Under Trump, yearly growth was an anemic 1%.

Even when Wisconsin unemployment has fluctuated after falling to a record low 2.6% last year, its outperformance to the national average continues to widen, to 1.3 percentage points from 1 percentage point, Bloomberg data show. Nonfarm payrolls increased at an annual rate of 1.8% since 2020 after declining 0.74% on average during each year of the former president.

Manufacturing, which accounted for 16% of Wisconsin’s GDP in 2023, increased 5.2% on an annual basis during Biden’s presidency, along with a 1.3% annual gain in factory workers, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Manufacturing jobs declined 0.3% on average each year when Trump was president with GDP from manufacturing expanding just 0.4%.  Regal Rexnord Corp., the $10 billion Milwaukee-based manufacturer of motors and related components, increased its workforce 40% to 32,100, the most in this century, after keeping it stagnant between 2016 and 2020. Revenue rose 115% as exports climbed to 39% of sales from 35%, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Wisconsin, in addition to being a perennial leader growing corn, cranberries, oats, potatoes and carrots among other crops, is No. 1 in the nation producing a quarter of America’s cheese, according to the US Department of Agriculture. Some 95% of the state’s dairy farms, second only to California for milk production, are family-owned. GDP from agriculture, including forestry, fishing and hunting, increased 33% on a yearly basis since Biden became president after limping along at 1.3% per year between 2016 and 2020, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Sargento Foods Inc., the family-owned cheese producer based in Plymouth, the self-described “Cheese Capital of the World,” recently updated two of its plants. “You’d be hard-pressed to walk around any of our facilities and not trip over an ‘Under Construction’ sign,” said Rod Hogan, Sargento’s innovation chief. The company has more than 2,500 employees and net sales of $1.7 billion.  As the Democratic Party’s standard bearer, Harris, like Biden, wants to protect Americans from Trump, whose tariffs on foreign-made goods would hurt Wisconsin and the six other swing states along with the rest of country by making the cost of living more expensive, according to 16 Nobel laureates.

Her policies would extend the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 that ushered in the labor market recovery to the longest period of low unemployment since the 1960s; the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021 that similarly paved the way for road and bridge building; the Chips and Science Act of 2022 subsidizing the manufacturing of semiconductors inside the US; and 2022’s Inflation Reduction Act (Harris cast the deciding vote) that included financing for clean energy projects that are creating even more jobs.

The Trump administration, in contrast, was a dead end for infrastructure and manufacturing jobs. The 45th president never got further than the 2018 groundbreaking in Racine County for electronics giant Foxconn Technology Group, the centerpiece of Trump’s failed promise to bring manufacturing to the US. After the Foxconn deal fizzled, Biden announced a $3.3 billion investment by Microsoft Corp. to build a new artificial intelligence data center on the same site in May.  Trump “came here with your Senator Ron Johnson, literally holding a golden shovel, promising to build the eighth wonder of the world,” Biden said. “They dug a hole with those golden shovels and they fell into it.”  After all the Trump fumbles on the economy and unending chaos of his campaign, Harris happily told the West Allis Central High School in West Allis two months later: “We’re not going back.”