Most voters cite the economy as their top concern, but it’s impossible to pin down since it affects every voter in a personal, situational and unique way.
Contradictions abound.
The massive and expensive effort to kickstart American manufacturing with a green industry is paying off in places that reject the lawmakers who passed it.
Both presidential candidates are making bold promises about tax cuts they likely can’t keep in an effort to appeal to voters who feel pinched.
Voters, still shocked by inflation, have a nostalgia for lower prices they experienced during the Donald Trump years, but his promise to raise tariffs will, according to most economists, raise prices.
CNN’s chief domestic correspondent Phil Mattingly set out on a whirlwind road trip to look at the economy. It’s an interesting series and yielded multiple engaging video reports.
I talked to Mattingly by email about what he was trying to do and what he learned. Our conversation is below.
What’s going on in the ‘Show Me the Money’ series
WOLF: I heard you say you went to five states in seven days and talked to dozens of people about the economy, which also happens to be the No. 1 issue in the coming election. Where did you go, and what were you trying to find out?
MATTINGLY: I’ve been thinking about the basic outlines of this project for the better part of the last eight or nine months, believe it or not.
The genesis was actually my time as chief White House correspondent, where I was intensely focused on the Biden-Harris administration’s economic policy and implementation of its sweeping legislative wins. The scale – and the ideological shift toward embracing industrial policy in certain sectors – has long been fascinating to me.
But more fascinating to me has been the disconnect between the consistently positive and robust macroeconomic numbers and the reality that in poll after poll, people on the ground either weren’t feeling it or weren’t buying it.
Over several months, I’ve been quietly collecting examples of communities in key electoral states that kind of fit into a few key buckets:
- Clear-cut comeback stories.
- Places where specific promises were made by politicians in both parties.
- Places that carry a ton of political importance but are lagging in their recovery compared with similar regions.
From there, we picked Lordstown, Ohio (bucket No. 2); Erie, Pennsylvania, and Saginaw, Michigan (bucket No. 3); and Dalton and Cartersville, Georgia (bucket No. 1.).
Honestly – and I had a lot of conversations with my stellar producer, Andrew Seger, Jeremy Moorhead and our great team of photojournalists about this throughout – we didn’t land in these places with any kind of a baked story or outline. Quite the opposite.
My whole goal was to just talk to people I thought had unique but tangible perspectives about their personal experiences and their communities. Only then would I have an idea of how I wanted to thread those together with what I’ve long reported on in the policy, economy and political space.
Green investment in red counties
WOLF: We have the unfortunate tendency to talk about “the economy” in a monolithic way, but everyone’s economy is different. How did the different people you talked to view the economy right now?
MATTINGLY: This is a great question because it contains such an important piece of what we found in every single place.
There is no “story of the economy.” There are *stories* about people’s individual experiences. Those stories fit into the *stories* about the experiences of a community.
The community’s stories aren’t unfurling in a vacuum – they are deeply connected, for better or worse, in the global economic trends over decades and the policy decisions made at the federal, state and local levels over that same period.
Look, it’s no secret that on the individual level, inflation has had a significant effect on how people make decisions. For the lower end of the income scale, they’ve in many cases been crippling. That’s a through line in every conversation we’ve had.
But on the community level, these anecdotal windows into how the policy decisions made at the federal, state and local level knit together – or don’t – are so important to understanding why some regions are doing better than others.
Take our third piece, which takes place in northwest Georgia. This is Trump country, right? Like 75-80% Trump counties. But these counties had local governments that, after being decimated by the Great Recession, started thinking through what was needed to diversify their local economies. Infrastructure, housing, utilities – all of it.
That was taking place as a very conservative Republican governor, Brian Kemp, made incentivizing a new era of manufacturing a central component of his economic agenda.
Add in the Biden-Harris administration’s hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure, green technology and semiconductor investments, and all of a sudden you have a recipe for a major breakthrough.