“A tariff is a tax on a foreign country. That’s the way it is, whether you like it or not. A lot of people like to say it’s a tax on us. No, no, no. It’s a tax on a foreign country. It’s a tax on a country that’s ripping us off and stealing our jobs. And it’s a tax that doesn’t affect our country.”

— Former president Donald Trump, remarks at a rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., Aug. 17

“I think economists really disagree about the effects of tariffs because there can be a dynamic effect, so what some economists will say is what you just said, that it will actually raise costs for consumers. But what other people say, and I think the record supports what this other view, is that it causes this dynamic effect where more jobs come into the country. Anything that you lose on the tariff from the perspective of the consumer, you gain in higher wages, so you’re ultimately much better off.”

— Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance, interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Aug. 25

“Our corrupt leadership said, ‘If you put tariffs on China, prices will go up.’ Instead, Donald Trump did exactly that, manufacturing came back and prices went down for American citizens. They went up for the Chinese, but they went down for our people.”

— Vance, remarks in Big Rapids, Mich., Aug. 27

Former president Donald Trump has said that, if he is elected for a second term, he will impose an across-the-board tariff on all imported products. As is usual with Trump, he doesn’t offer many specifics — and they can change day-to-day. Sometimes he has suggested it would be a 10 percent tariff; another time he floated it as high as 20 percent. He has also indicated that he would impose a 60 percent tariff on Chinese products.

Officially, the Republican platform calls for “baseline tariffs on foreign-made goods,” without offering a percentage, and Trump’s campaign website more than a year ago promoted “reciprocal tariffs” that match tariffs imposed by other countries.

Trump’s undisciplined messaging has given Vice President Kamala Harris an opening to argue, as she did in her nomination acceptance speech at the Democratic convention, that Trump would harm middle-class voters. “He intends to enact what, in effect, is a national sales tax,” she said. “Call it a Trump tax that would raise prices on middle-class families by almost $4,000 a year.” Her figure is a high estimate from a left-leaning group supportive of Democrats, but other economists agree such tariffs would raise prices for Americans.

To which the Trump campaign says: Wait a minute! The former president flatly says tariffs are a “tax on a foreign country.” His running mate acknowledges that “some economists” might say costs rise for some Americans but suggests this is a matter of dispute among experts. He makes the case that in the long term, even if prices go up, the outcome is a net benefit for Americans.

We challenged the Trump campaign to give us some evidence for these claims. Here’s what we found.

The Facts

First, let’s get this straight: Trump is flat wrong to claim that the entire tariff is paid by a foreign country. And Vance is wrong to suggest there’s a debate among pointy-headed experts about whether tariffs increase prices.

There’s no controversy. Open any introductory economics textbook and you’ll find a standard supply-and-demand graph that shows how prices rise when a tariff is imposed on imported products. (There’s even a T-shirt with the graph for econ geeks.)

Economists agree that tariffs — essentially a tax on domestic consumption — are paid by importers, such as U.S. companies, who in turn pass on most or all of the costs to consumers or producers who may use imported materials in their products. As a matter of demand and supply elasticities, overseas producers will pay part of the tax if there are fewer goods sold to the United States. Domestic producers in effect get a subsidy because they can raise their prices to the level imposed on importers.

Contrary to Vance’s claim, there is little debate over the fact that consumer prices will rise in response to tariffs.

The Kent A. Clark Center for Global Markets at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business frequently surveys prominent economists about issues in the news. In 2018, when Trump imposed steel and aluminum tariffs, the Clark Center asked 44 economists about this statement: “Imposing new U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum will improve Americans’ welfare.”

Not a single economist agreed. The split was over how wrong the statement was: 28 percent disagreed, and 65 percent strongly disagreed.

Similarly, the Clark Center in 2019, after Trump imposed more tariffs, asked 43 economists for their opinion on this statement: “The incidence of the latest round of U.S. import tariffs is likely to fall primarily on American households.” For that answer, 60 percent agreed, 14 strongly agreed, and 14 percent were uncertain.

Finally, this May, after President Joe Biden imposed tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, the Clark Center asked 46 economists about this statement: “The proposed U.S. tariffs on Chinese EVs would lead to measurably higher prices of EVs in the U.S.” This question resulted in the first hint of a dispute: 54 percent agreed and 24 percent strongly agreed, but two of the economists either disagreed or disagreed strongly. Dirk Bergemann of Yale University gave a reason — the electric-vehicle market already was very competitive, so he believed overall prices would not be affected.

But clearly that is a minority opinion. Overall, the surveys show broad agreement among economists that tariffs raise prices — and that American consumers get the bill. If there’s debate, it’s about how big the price impact would be and how long lasting.

Here’s a sampling of studies that looked at the impact of tariffs imposed by Trump when he was president:

• Kadee Russ of the University of California at Davis in 2019 estimated, from various studies, that net losses projected for 2020 from the tariffs imposed by Trump as president would be between about $500 and $1,700 per household.
• The Congressional Budget Office in 2020 estimated that Trump’s tariffs were projected to reduce average real household income by $1,277 in 2020.
• A 2021 study by Alberto Cavallo of Harvard Business School and others found tariffs were only partially passed on to retail consumers, meaning companies reduced their profit margins or they spread the hit across many goods that they sell, including non-tariffed goods. In other words, the costs would still show up to consumers, just not in a way that is readily apparent. (This would be less easy for firms to do if tariffs were increased across the board.)
• The International Trade Commission in 2023 found evidence for near complete pass-through of the steel, aluminum and Chinese tariffs to American consumers. “This implies that a 10 percent ad valorem [at time of transaction] tariff raised the price of U.S. imports from China by about 10 percent,” the report said.
• The Tax Foundation in June estimated that the Trump tariffs, which were retained by Biden, amounted to $79 billion in new taxes on Americans, for an average annual tax increase on U.S. households of $625.

In other words, tariffs cause prices for consumers to increase — but the amount is not always clear or it may be spread through the economy in ways that are not readily apparent. Companies adapt to the new business environment and adjust accordingly.

Even an economist recommended by the Trump campaign, Jeff Ferry, chief economist at the pro-tariff Coalition for a Prosperous America, says a 10 percent tariff would increase prices for consumers. But he argues that this “one-time price increase,” which would last six years, would be mitigated by other positive effects of tariffs, such as higher economic growth and more domestic jobs.

“Trump and Vance are oversimplifying in the quotes you provided,” he wrote in an email. “For any tariff, economic theory holds that the cost is split between the buyer (importer) and the seller (exporter). That theory is correct in the real world.” But he maintains that prices from Trump’s tariffs over time did not go up significantly or even went down, while domestic production increased, “so at a level of simplification it is true to say that Americans did not pay for the tariffs.”

The Trump campaign has cried foul about Harris’s claim that the tariffs are, in effect, a national sales tax. But at least her statement is based on widely accepted economic theory on the immediate impact of tariffs. One could argue over whether the estimate of the impact is correct. As we noted, she embraces a high estimate.

But economist Kimberly Clausing — co-author of a study at the pro-trade Peterson Institute for International Economics with a lower number ($2,600 per household) — says these studies are underestimates because they do not consider the increase in the price of goods that compete with imports. “We have every reason to think U.S. domestic prices would rise in those sectors that compete with imports” and “that effect is very large,” she said in an email. “The true cost I’d guess is roughly twice as high as our number.”

The Pinocchio Test

Trump’s assertion that tariffs are only a “tax on a foreign country” and “doesn’t affect our country” is, of course, ridiculous. Vance tries to muddy the waters by claiming there is a dispute among economists when, in fact, as we have shown, there is no dispute. Tariffs raise prices for consumers, at least in the short run. Vance argues that there is a “dynamic effect” that mitigates those higher prices, such as more jobs coming into the country over time. That might be open to debate — the Tax Foundation says jobs will be lost — but it’s undisputed that most Americans would end up paying more for many goods if Trump’s tariff plan was imposed.

Four Pinocchios

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The nation’s presidential candidates have been so busy politicking that they’ve paid too little attention to their ultimate goal — governing.

Only within the last two weeks have the campaigns of Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris and Republican former president Donald Trump named the leaders of their transition teams. President Joe Biden didn’t have a transition operation in place that Harris could use.

“It’s late in the day,” is Max Stier’s sober assessment of the candidates’ timing.

As president and CEO of the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service, which started the Center for Presidential Transition in 2008, Stier has closely watched and participated in the unglamorous, unseen work of changing the nation’s administrations.

While the candidates are slacking in their transition duties, administration officials say their agencies are meeting government timelines. This week the General Services Administration (GSA), which has a leading role in presidential transitions, offered both candidates office space and services, which will be available when the campaigns are ready to use them.

Although Election Day is more than two months away, time is critical because organizing a new administration is a mammoth task.

The tardiness means transition leaders will have much to accomplish without much time. Harris chose Yohannes Abraham, who directed Biden’s transition into the White House before serving as chief of staff and executive secretary of the National Security Council and then U.S. ambassador to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Trump named two transition co-chairs, Howard Lutnick, chairman and CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, a financial services firm, and Linda McMahon, who led the Small Business Administration when Trump was president.

Since 2012, “modern presidential candidates have started their transition work substantially earlier, in springtime of the election year,” Stier said at a press briefing, “because of a recognition of the lift that is really involved … it is possible to try and catch up. But the reality is that both candidates have a lot to do.”

Neither campaign responded to questions, so we don’t know their excuses for their tardiness.

Not knowing Biden would withdraw his candidacy until last month, Harris had a late start as a presidential candidate and all that comes with it. Unfortunately for her, she couldn’t convert Biden’s transition effort because he didn’t have “a real transition operation to inherit,” Stier said during a phone interview.

Trump should know the importance of an early start, but his two transitions, entering and leaving the White House, after the 2016 and 2020 elections respectively, were examples of what not to do. He had a good transition operation for 2016 led by former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, until Christie was abruptly fired soon after Trump’s electoral college victory. Other staffers quickly were purged. Disruption and delay followed.

No transition, hopefully, will ever be as calamitous as the one following the 2020 vote, when Trump would not admit he lost the election. Even before the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters, a violent attempt to remain in office that Trump has been federally charged with instigating, “there were many instances,” Stier said, of “outright hostility or lack of cooperation” toward the incoming Biden administration.

By being late to the game, “the danger is they’re not going to be prepared on day one,” said Gail Lovelace, a former GSA director presidential transition. “You want them to be able to hit the ground running on January 20th at 12 noon,” Inauguration Day.

To facilitate that, GSA’s Aimee Whiteman, the federal transition coordinator, wrote to Harris and Trump on Tuesday offering “assistance and a variety of services, including office space, furniture, equipment, and other incidental services.”

Office spaces, with laptops and other technology, are ready for both candidates’ teams in GSA’s headquarters on F Street NW, allowing for some potentially politically charged elevator encounters. The space is large enough for at least 100 staffers per candidate, according to a report Whiteman sent to Congress in May. The agency has a $10.4 million budget for pre-election services in fiscal 2024 and requested $11.2 million for fiscal 2025, which includes $7.2 million for post-election, incoming administration expenses.

Noting the expected hiring of 4,000 political appointees, including 1,300 needing Senate confirmation, and the preparation required “to assume the massive responsibility of the operations and management and services of over 400 federal entities,” Center for Presidential Transition Director Valerie Smith Boyd told reporters “the period between the election and the inauguration is just too short to do all of that work.”

Yet, “it’s never too late,” Stier added, “You have the time that you have. It is a much harder task when you effectively … cut it by … four months, in terms of what would be ideal.”

Which are the two most important swing states? Do you see Pennsylvania and Michigan as being more crucial to win than Wisconsin? For example.

The question of which states are most important in the 2024 presidential election came up in a recent live chat we hosted.

In conversations with campaign officials for Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, it is clear that there are three critical swing states: Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. If Harris wins all three of those, plus one electoral vote in Nebraska, and keeps the Democratic strongholds, she wins 270 electoral votes exactly. That pathway, officials believe, is Democrats’ best chance of winning.

That being said, if you are looking only at pure electoral value, Pennsylvania has the most electoral votes with 19, followed by Michigan with 15 and Wisconsin with 10.

But since President Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race, Democrats believe Harris has a better chance of winning some of the other battleground states that would give her an alternate path to 270 electoral votes. In particular, polls show Harris is more competitive than Biden in Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina.

In a memo released July 24, Jen O’Malley Dillon, the Harris campaign chair, wrote this about Harris’s path to 270: “We continue to focus on the Blue Wall states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania — and the Sun Belt states of North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada, where the Vice President’s advantages with young voters, Black voters, and Latino voters will be important to our multiple pathways to 270 electoral votes.”

Republicans also see those seven states — Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada — as the core battlegrounds. Trump campaign officials argue their task is easier because as long as they hold North Carolina they only need to win Georgia and Pennsylvania to surpass 270 electoral votes. “She’s still playing defense,” a senior Trump adviser told reporters in August.

The Trump campaign previously flirted with raids into bluer territory such as Virginia and Minnesota, but those ambitions faded as Harris replaced Biden and polls tightened. Donald Trump himself has publicly mused about winning New York and New Jersey, but his campaign is not seriously contesting those states.

Will Harris appoint an all-new Cabinet? What about less-senior political staff in federal agencies? Are they expected to keep working on the Biden-Harris agenda just to get the boot come January?

This was a question that came up during a recent live chat we hosted. The short answer: Should Vice President Kamala Harris — the Democratic nominee — win, all presidential appointments will be up to her. So if she wanted to retain President Joe Biden’s entire Cabinet, she could, or she could ask all of them to resign. Beyond the Cabinet, there are more than 4,000 political appointees throughout the federal government, all of whom Harris and her team would be able to keep or fire at their discretion.

Harris pledged in an interview that aired on CNN on Thursday that she would appoint a Republican to her Cabinet if elected.

Many Democrats expect that Harris would appoint new Cabinet secretaries, as she will want to put her own stamp on the administration. Moreover, given the relative stability of Biden’s Cabinet — most Cabinet secretaries have served the entire administration — officials expect that many of them would be looking to move on from their roles. But many officials working in the Biden administration in roles below the Cabinet level hope that they could keep their jobs or find new ones, should Harris win.

Harris officials, however, say that no personnel decisions will be made until after Election Day, should Harris win. Still, the Harris campaign has officially begun presidential transition activities, tapping Yohannes Abraham, the U.S. ambassador to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, to lead the effort.

Abraham served as the executive director of Biden’s transition team before joining the White House and working on the National Security Council. Abraham will be working with Covington & Burling, a law firm in Washington, to set up the transition operations. Without making personnel decisions, Abraham and his team will largely be focused on setting up the operational elements that Harris and her team will need to transition into the government should she defeat Donald Trump in November.

The Trump campaign has also created a transition team, led by Linda McMahon, who served as the administrator of the Small Business Administration during Trump’s presidency, and Howard Lutnick, the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald.

The timeline for the presidential transition process is outlined by the General Services Administration, an independent federal agency that helps manage and support the sprawling U.S. government.

Donald Trump on Thursday told NBC News that, if reelected, his administration would ensure that in vitro fertilization (IVF) was free for all Americans. But before we dig into that claim, we should talk about breakfast meat.

At an event in Wisconsin on Thursday, the former president offered a seemingly incongruous argument in support of his return to the White House.

“You take a look at bacon and some of these products, and some people don’t eat bacon anymore,” he said. “And we are going to get the energy prices down. When we get energy down — you know, this was caused by their horrible energy. Wind — they want wind all over the place. But when it doesn’t blow, we have a little problem.”

To a layperson, this is incomprehensible. To someone who has heard Trump speak with any regularity over the past few years, though, what’s happening is clear. In short, Trump claims that the surge in inflation following the emergence of the coronavirus was a function of a spike in energy costs, in part because it lets him blame the Biden administration (and, by extension, Vice President Kamala Harris) for the increase and for higher gasoline costs. This spike in inflation meant an increase in the cost of food, including the one he mentions all the time: bacon. While he’s on the topic of the Biden administration’s approach to energy, why not ding wind power, which Trump has long hated (for golf-course related reasons) and which he likes to suggest doesn’t work if no wind is blowing.

These are all typical elements of his campaign patter. He’s been using them so long that he has little snippets of shorthand for them: no one eats bacon, what if there’s no wind, etc. In Wisconsin, he just sort of mashed all those shorthands together, resulting in something incomprehensible to anyone not well-versed in Trump’s political lore. It’s like presenting someone new to the franchise with the last ten minutes of a recent Marvel movie.

The point is that Trump has a familiar, comfortable and established way of running for president. As well he might; he went from being a political outsider in 2016 to being the American with the most experience at the top of his party’s ticket since Richard Nixon in 1972. So he drops strange riffs on wind power and bacon — and he makes sweeping promises about health care that he can’t or won’t effect once in office.

In 2016, the promise Trump made centered on the Affordable Care Act (ACA), more commonly known as Obamacare. The pledge was often vague: There would be “insurance for everybody” and “everybody’s going to be taken care of much better than they’re taken care of now.” But, as had been the case since the ACA passed, his party had no alternative plan in place and ultimately proved unable to find the votes to overhaul the legislation despite majorities in both chambers of Congress.

This wasn’t entirely a surprise, mind you. It was generally understood that there was no perfect alternative in the wings. Trump’s proclamations that he’d find a perfect alternative yielded widespread skepticism, particularly given his antipathy toward reinforcing his promises with plans.

In 2020, the effort was more egregious. Trump contracted covid-19 that October and credited the drug Regeneron with his recovery. So, speaking to Fox News host Sean Hannity, he made a promise.

“I viewed it as a cure,” he said. “It’s incredible. And we’re going to get it to everybody, free of charge. It’s going to hospitals. It’s starting very soon.”

Regeneron was not a cure and proved to be less effective against later variants of the virus. More importantly, it was not provided to everyone free of charge “very soon.” Coronavirus deaths spiked that winter as Trump was otherwise distracted.

This was even predictable then. He’d done something similar in 2018, promising just before the midterm elections that his party would deliver huge tax cuts by the beginning of November. Not only did that not happen, there was no indication it was ever in process to any significant degree. It was just Trump saying that he would do a thing he thought people would like and keeping his fingers crossed.

It’s important context for the IVF promise.

“We are going to be, under the Trump administration, we are going to be paying for that treatment,” Trump told NBC. “We’re going to be mandating that the insurance company pay.”

You will notice that those are two different things: the administration/we paying, which implies federal funding, or making insurers cover the cost, which would be the insurance companies paying. Or, more precisely, it would likely be insurance companies’ customers paying, since the insurers couldn’t simply absorb the hefty costs of IVF without increasing the money paid by everyone else. The point of the ACA, incidentally, was to increase coverage by mandating that people carry insurance, meaning more healthy people paying for low-cost insurance and increasing the income for the insurers mandated to provide the coverage. Then Trump pushed for that mandate to be removed.

Beyond there being no reason to assume that Trump would actually try to implement free IVF coverage as president, the idea would certainly alienate some of his more fervent supporters. The reason IVF is a subject of discussion in the 2024 campaign is there’s an effort on the right to block the procedure. Between that constituency and those who aren’t thrilled about a promise to spend billions of dollars on personal health care (or to make private companies spend those billions), there will be (and has already been) pressure on Trump and other Republicans to drop this idea.

But, again, we should assume it’s just Trump saying things. We should assume it’s Trump having a sense of what people want to hear and saying those things, even if the context is incomplete, or even if he doesn’t really mean it. Bacon is expensive because of the wind is Trump’s familiar, clumsy effort to bash Harris on prices; IVF will be free for everyone is his familiar, clumsy effort to promise that no one will have to worry about health care if he is elected — just as everyone got free Regeneron, curing the coronavirus in December 2020.

At one point in CNN’s interview of Vice President Kamala Harris on Thursday, journalist Dana Bash asked Harris about her defenses of President Joe Biden’s acuity. Harris, obviously expecting the question, praised the president before pivoting to an argument for her candidacy.

“I am so proud to be running with [Minnesota Gov.] Tim Walz for president of the United States and to bring America what I believe the American people deserve,” Harris said, “which is a new way forward and turn the page on the last decade of what I believe has been contrary to where the spirit of our country really lies.”

“But the last decade, of course, the last three and a half years has been part of your administration,” Bash replied.

“I’m talking about an era that started about a decade ago where there is some suggestion — warped, I believe it to be — that the measure of the strength of a leader is based on who you beat down instead of where I believe most Americans are, which is to believe that the true measure of the strength of a leader is based on who you lift up,” Harris said.

She was talking, very obviously, about her opponent Donald Trump and the approach Trump takes to politics. But in establishing the force she seeks to reverse as having originated a decade ago, Harris is understating the problem. She’s identifying the era in a way that is both too narrow and too short.

The Trump era is about Trump in the way that the War of 1812 was about 1812: a critically important component and a useful touchstone but not all-encompassing. Turning the page on the era requires more than Trump failing to get an electoral vote majority.

Perhaps a more accurate time span to consider is something like 15 years. The election of Barack Obama as president in 2008 was hailed as a signal moment in the evolution of American politics and demography, but it also triggered a remarkable backlash. Ostensibly rooted in concerns about government spending, it was largely centered on the disruption of the economic crisis (which triggered an increase in spending) and that overlapping awareness of how America was changing.

The response focused on a nebulously defined group of elites that was subverting America and harming Americans: to extract money or to secure votes or to otherwise protect their power. The 2010 midterm election was defined by the sharp increase in hostility to Obama and by the Republican base’s belief that leaders in their party were insufficiently attuned — or overtly hostile — to the way these elites were destroying the country by spending money (often meaning on social programs) and allowing people to immigrate to the United States. This hostility was inextricable from the rise of a fervently right-wing media universe in which amplifying those concerns held enormous rewards.

Trump consumed that media and, upon entering the 2016 presidential race, repeated its rhetoric to his benefit. He was a Manhattan billionaire who would target the elites, a former Democrat who would upend the Democrats. In part because he was a consumer of the fringe right’s rhetoric, he understood that the engine of the backlash was far less about spending than culture. Republicans, including many who had simply checked out of the political process, wanted someone who would throw punches. So he threw punches: up, down, left, right.

As the 2012 election neared, Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden, predicted that the “fever” that had seized the GOP would break after his boss’s reelection. It was a prediction that was, in part, about framing Obama as the candidate who could repair the nation’s widening rift. It was also, it seems in retrospect, an assumption that the backlash was centrally about Obama, rather than what Obama represented. But nativist, racist backlashes against changing demography and circumstances are a regular feature of American history, and this one was no more solely about Obama than it was solely leveraged later by Trump.

What Trump added to the mix was decades of serving as the autocratic leader of a private business. He brought a disinterest in tradition and history and a pugilistic style honed on the pages of the New York Post. He brought a sense of entitlement that mirrored the entitlement felt by many of his supporters: that the advantages they enjoyed, if only tacitly, were advantages they earned or weren’t advantages at all. That a country adjusting to the rise of a more-urban, younger and less heavily White population was, instead, a country actively repressing everyone else. And Trump was willing to fight about it.

When Harris talks about turning the page on this, she means Trump, certainly. She means shifting American politics so that it is no longer unsurprising that a presidential candidate’s campaign might use Arlington National Cemetery for a campaign promotion, much less that it do so after accosting a cemetery employee who had reminded the campaign about laws against such activity, much less that no charges would result out of concern over hostile backlash from the candidate’s supporters. She means turning the page on a politician who would feel a sense of entitlement so sweeping that he might treat the military cemetery as something for his use and whose supporters would offer no objection to his doing so.

Turning the page on the energy Trump leveraged is trickier.

The country clearly exists in a moment of flux, in which, as Obama observed at the Democratic convention last week, we are fully testing the idea that a democracy built on pluralism can succeed. But part of the surge in enthusiasm for Harris’s candidacy is clearly rooted in her overtly representing the diversity of America. Conservative White Americans often see America’s non-White population as a unified entity colluding to strip the power of Whites. The shift from Biden to Harris at the top of the Democratic ticket allowed for a shift in strategy, too, from treating Trump as an opposing force to treating him as a historic outlier. Waving off Trump as “weird” has a knock-on effect, uniting those opposed to Trump’s candidacy and politics as the true inheritors of the American tradition.

Post-2020 predictions of Trump’s defeat proved premature. If Harris wins, there would still be frustration at the elites and at changing demographics; many on the right would remain feverish. But the fever might dissipate. It may be that Trump helped bring to fruition the political shift predicted with Obama’s 2008 victory. His win proved to be a potent organizing force for White conservatives.

The election of another Black president in the face of that force, an election powered by a coalition strengthened by opposition to Trump, might in fact turn the page that began being written 15 years ago. It is a page, though, that has appeared in American history books multiple times before.

Fox News divides its daily coverage into two components. There’s the hard-news side, anchored by people like Bret Baier, that offers reporting on what’s unfolding in the world. Then there’s the opinion side, including hosts Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, that offers assessments of those events.

The reality, of course, is that the two sides overlap and bleed into each other. Stories bounce over and run through the putative wall; the difference lies far more in tone than content.

But there is at least one area where there’s no real question of bias: the network’s polling.

Fox’s polls are conducted by two firms, Beacon Research, which does polling for Democratic issues and campaigns, and Shaw & Company Research, which focuses on Republicans. The result is survey research that is consistently reliable — to the extent that the network has at times found itself downplaying its own poll results because they don’t comport with the narrative that’s otherwise driving the day’s shows.

Earlier this week, Fox News released new polling looking at the presidential race in four states: Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina. It found that, since Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee, the race has shifted to the Democrat’s advantage.

Fox News’s pollsters also polled in Arizona and Nevada in June. In Arizona, Trump went from a 5-point lead to a 1-point deficit in a head-to-head polling question. That 6-point shift in the margin was driven heavily by women (where the margin shifted 10 points to Harris) and younger Arizonans (a 13-point shift), mirroring national patterns.

There were similar shifts when respondents were given a broader field of candidates, one that didn’t include recent Trump endorser Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Among White men in Arizona, Trump gained ground with the shift to Harris. That wasn’t the case in Nevada, though, where the overall shift was similar.

In Nevada, there was a shift to the Democrat among both men and women with White men being one of the biggest shifts.

This is the point where we note that the shifts among individual demographic groups in polling are often exaggerated by small sample sizes. The margin of error among White men in Nevada was 5 percent in both June and August, which means that the shift isn’t significant. Nor are the shifts indicated in the Arizona poll. In fact, even the overall shifts aren’t statistically significant.

But they do comport with common sense. The idea that Harris would gain, particularly among women and younger voters, is sensible. That it is happening across polls, along with shifts to Harris in polling averages, reinforces that idea.

The Trump campaign, however, has a different take.

“It’s that time of year again,” it said in a statement on Wednesday. “Fox is releasing atrocious polling.”

Past criticisms of polling from the campaign have relied on the incomprehensible claim that news outlets were intentionally trying to harm Trump’s electoral chances. Perhaps sensing that even Trump supporters probably wouldn’t buy that Fox News wants Trump to lose, the campaign instead identified past Fox News polls that ended up far from the mark.

This is, of course, normal: polling conducted two months prior to an election are often wrong because the state of the race changes over those two months. Campaigns are run. Events unfold. Voters change their minds. The utility of polls like the new ones from Fox are in part that they show how that movement is occurring, not that they are predictive of the outcome.

Even on this point, though, the campaign got out over its skis. The statement includes a line stating that “Fox’s only Georgia poll in 2020 was released in June and that one overstated Joe Biden’s support by 1.7%.” The calculus here is that the Fox News poll, showing Biden with a 47 percent to 45 percent lead, was far from the mark because its 2-point Biden advantage didn’t comport with the 0.3-point win Biden had in the 49.5-percent-to-49.2-percent state.

The motivation here seems to be that the Trump campaign, understanding the vagaries of its candidate, is eager to reinforce the idea that Trump will win in November. These polls from Fox News and others get waved away as invented or dishonest or inept because they run counter to that narrative.

In another sense, though, it’s inevitable. Trump has often complained when Fox News does anything resembling objectivity, like interviewing Democratic elected officials. He’s complained about the channel’s polls before, too — for the same reason. He, like some who work at the channel, believe that its role is to ensure his victory. An objective poll raising questions about that outcome, then, isn’t an unexpected display of fairness by Fox News but, instead, an unacceptable display of disloyalty.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a former environmental activist who ran in the Democratic presidential primary before launching his independent bid and ultimately dropped out to endorse the Republican nominee, has joined forces with former president Donald Trump as an honorary co-chair of his presidential transition team.

The newly forged alliance raises questions about where they align on policy as well as personality, and whether Kennedy’s supporters will back the Republican nominee following their bitter rivalry and contrasting platforms.

On the campaign trail, Kennedy and Trump often traded insults at one another, with personal attacks escalating earlier this year as some polls suggested that Kennedy’s campaign could siphon votes from both Trump and President Joe Biden. Kennedy called Trump a “terrible president” on a podcast just last month, and has ridiculed his policies. Trump meanwhile has repeatedly sought to portray the third-party candidate as a liberal extremist — calling him a “Democratic plant” and a “lunatic.”

Here’s where they may differ on policy.

1. The environment and energy

Kennedy built his career as an environmental lawyer and activist, suing companies to clean up their polluting practices and leading a nonprofit focused on protecting clean waters. Trump, by contrast, has repeatedly called climate change a “hoax” and turned the phrase, “Drill, baby, drill,” into a campaign slogan.

While in office, Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris climate agreement, and his administration rolled back more than 125 environmental safeguards. During a dinner with the country’s top oil executives earlier this year he vowed to immediately reverse dozens of Biden’s environmental rules and policies and stop new ones from being enacted.

“If I were in the offshore wind industry, I would probably be pretty, pretty nervous,” Trump told executives at the dinner. He also claimed that the renewable-energy source is unreliable, unattractive and bad for the environment, and has said he wants to expand domestic oil production.

Kennedy has stood with protesters to block the construction of oil pipelines and criticized the country’s reliance on fossil fuels. His platform proposed allowing Americans to sell energy back to the grid from solar panels and wind and geothermal sources on their land. In 2023, he supported a ban on fracking as part of his plan to combat plastic pollution, but walked back his position days later.

“My position on fracking is that fracking should have to internalize its own costs,” Kennedy said in an interview on CNBC in February 2024. “… So what I say is it’s not an outright ban on it, but let’s make them pay, internalize their costs.”

2. Coronavirus vaccines

Kennedy is an outspoken vaccine critic who has questioned their efficacy and expressed opposition to vaccine mandates. Trump has also tweeted anti-vaccine rhetoric, and has spread the unfounded claim that vaccines are linked to autism in children.

But there is some apparent agreement on vaccines in schools. Kennedy has fought against schools mandating them, and Trump has said repeatedly on the campaign trail he would cut funding for schools that do.

However, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, Trump encouraged Americans to get vaccinated against the virus and repeatedly touted the success of “Operation Warp Speed” — a Trump-era program that aimed to speed up coronavirus vaccine development in 2020.

At a Dallas event in December 2021, after he left office, Trump revealed to a crowd of supporters that he had gotten a booster covid shot and was immediately booed.

“If you don’t want to take it, you shouldn’t be forced to take it. No mandates,” Trump said. “But take credit, because we saved tens of millions of lives.”

Kennedy’s anti-vaccine group, Children’s Health Defense, unsuccessfully brought forward legal action challenging the Food and Drug Administration’s emergency authorization of coronavirus vaccines in December 2020, while Trump was still president. Kennedy has also been critical of Operation Warp Speed and criticized both Trump and Biden for lockdowns during the pandemic, saying in an interview last month that “both of them ravaged American democracy and the republic.”

3. Raising the minimum wage

Trump has held mixed opinions on raising the minimum wage. As a candidate in 2015 and 2016, Trump said in interviews he opposed the hike but later said he was open to raising the federal minimum wage. By August 2016, his campaign had claimed that Trump supported a federal minimum wage increase to $10 an hour, but that states should set their own minimum wage as appropriate.

During a debate against Biden in 2020, Trump initially said minimum wage hikes are an issue that should be left to states to decide, but when pressed by the moderator on the issue, he later said he would consider raising the federal minimum wage.

“He said we have to help our small businesses by raising the minimum wage — that’s not helping,” Trump said of Biden, who committed to a $15 per hour minimum wage, at the time. “I think it should be a state option. Alabama is different than New York. New York is different from Vermont. Every state is different.”

Kennedy campaigned on raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, saying it “will raise the floor on all wages and return a share of productivity growth back to workers.”

4. Student loans

Amid the pandemic in March 2020, the Trump administration temporarily waived interest on federal student loans and allowed student loan borrowers to suspend their payments altogether. The former president and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), have opposed the Biden administration’s efforts to cancel student debt.

Kennedy campaigned to “make student debt dischargeable in bankruptcy and cut interest rates on student loans to zero.”

“Funding higher education is not an entitlement program, it is an investment in America’s future, just as with infrastructure and environment,” Kennedy said on X after Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan was struck down by the Supreme Court. “Let’s invest in America’s young people instead of in the forever wars.”

As a candidate in 2016, Trump supported capping student loan repayments based on income and forgiving loans after payments were made for 15 years, but Trump’s student loan plan for 2024 remains unclear. Trump’s current policy platform does not provide details to address existing student debt.

At a rally in Wisconsin in June, Trump said “students aren’t buying” Biden’s debt forgiveness plan, adding that the president had been “rebuked” by the court system over the plan “and then he did it again.”

5. Abortion and child care

Kennedy and Trump have nuanced views on both abortion access and the role of the federal government to assist with child care.

Trump celebrated the Supreme Court’s decision in 2022 to overturn Roe v. Wade, which gave individual states the power to decide on whether to provide abortions, and called it “a great victory” but the former president has been vague on his abortion position since then.

Earlier this year he announced that abortion should be decided by the states and that he supports exceptions to abortion bans for rape, incest and the life of the mother. Before that, Trump once floated a 15- and 16-week national ban on abortion.

But in an interview with the Daily Mail on Thursday, Trump said Florida’s six-week ban on abortion (which went into effect earlier this year) was too short, and that he wanted “more than six weeks.” Afterward, Trump’s campaign sought to position him in a neutral way with regard to the ballot measure.

Kennedy, who sent mixed signals about his position on abortion during the campaign, had previously said that he thought abortion should be allowed at full term, but he later reversed his position after blowback from conservative supporters and he said he supported abortion until “the baby is viable outside the womb.”

Both Kennedy and Trump have supported increasing the child tax credit, but Trump has not directly stated how he would ease child care costs. During the June presidential debate, Trump declined to answer what he would do to make child care more affordable, instead pivoting to respond to Biden’s criticism about his alleged insults against servicemembers killed in action.

While Trump was president, he signed legislation in 2018 that provided a major increase in child-care block grants to states and has highlighted an increase in the child tax credit that took place in 2017. Trump’s 2024 platform states that Republicans want to make the expanded child tax credit permanent.