Numerous issues matter a great deal in this election, but one has consistently been the chief focus of voters: the economy.

Yes, we’ve all been talking a lot about garbage and “fascists” and Donald Trump’s comments about Liz Cheney and the state-sanctioned murder of Peanut the Squirrel. But when the rubber meets the road, the majority of Americans care most about our economic well-being.

This election is not a contest between two unknowns, either. We can look back at Trump’s record as president for four years. Outside of the response to the coronavirus, much of which was outside of his control, Trump’s term was marked by outstanding economic performance.

We can also look back at Kamala Harris’s record as vice president for the last four years. That’s why Trump sometimes echoes Ronald Reagan’s famous 1980 formulation: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” The answer is no (unless you’re a Leftmedia opinion columnist or a Nobel-winning economist with a track record of being wrong).

Joe Biden kicked off inflation in the spring of 2021 with a massive spending bill — and his trusty sidekick, VP Harris, provided the tiebreaking vote for it in the Senate. Throwing far too much taxpayer money into an economy already struggling to meet demand sent inflation soaring to an annual high of 9.1% by June 2022. The cumulative number since the Biden-Harris inflation bomb is over 20%, and many goods and services are 40%, 50%, or 60% more expensive than they were when Trump left office.

Home prices have soared nearly 30%, which helps sellers but crushes buyers, who are paying higher prices and interest rates. Many renters now think they’ll never be able to afford a home.

Compare the candidates’ records, and the economy alone ought to determine the election outcome. Remember Democrat strategist James Carville’s famous statement in 1992: “It’s the economy, stupid.”

(Just to be clear, I also think that other deciding factors include but are not limited to the Supreme Court, the military’s commander-in-chief, and the Democrats’ cultish push for evil things like unlimited abortion and gender mutilation, even for kids.)

With that setup, let’s look back at Friday’s jobs report and other economic barometers ahead of tomorrow’s Election Day.

Just 12,000 jobs were created in October instead of the expected 100,000. Without 40,000 government jobs added, the report would have been negative. It also came with revisions to previous months’ numbers — August and September were revised down by a combined 112,000 jobs, and that’s after August’s eye-popping revision removing 818,000 jobs from the period of April 2023 to March 2024.

As for October, Leftmedia experts blame hurricanes and the Boeing strike, as if the Biden-Harris administration is run by innocent bystanders. Then again, Biden isn’t really running the country anymore, so there’s that. Yet FEMA blew it, and instead of helping in any way with hurricane recovery, Harris was busy picking a fight with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Moreover, as National Review’s Noah Rothman notes, the administration also “all but encouraged the [Boeing] strike and managed only to postpone it until after the election.”

As for the jobs report, I’m certainly not hitting the “panic” button, but I am saying that the economy could use new leadership. Harris may or may not have worked at McDonald’s (60% of Americans doubt it), but we do know that Trump is a businessman with a track record of successfully stewarding the American economy.

He has some, er, unorthodox ideas about taxes, and his tariffs are arguably a 19th-century solution to 21st-century problems. In short, his policy proposals for a second term could be better.

Yet the Biden-Harris administration kept most of his tariffs in place, meaning there’s little difference between their policies on that front. And Harris would be demonstrably worse on taxes because Democrats view them as punitive equalizers in their class war rather than the tread-carefully economic burden they really are. Her socialist price controls would likewise be terrible.

Amidst all of that, however, Harris is actually improving her standing with voters on the economy. She’s gained on Trump in the polls over the last two months on an issue that should clearly be his strength. Conservatives rightly mock her bromides about “growing up a middle-class kid,” but when you have the entire mainstream media campaigning for you, those sorts of things sink in with voters who don’t rely on other news sources.

Roughly 75 million ballots have already been cast, so Friday’s jobs report wouldn’t have factored into any of those votes. There’s also the fact that the stock market, in which 162 million Americans (62% of adults) are invested, is actually doing pretty well, gaining about 75% since just before the 2020 election. That’s mainly because the market has adjusted to bad fiscal policy. Third-quarter GDP was up a relatively healthy 2.8%, too.

It’s not all doom and gloom, to be sure. But if you’re a regular American living paycheck to paycheck, the Biden-Harris economy has not been good. You’re right to be frustrated and even angry about that every time you buy groceries. It’s also no wonder Kamala Harris would rather talk about Liz Cheney and the “fascist” bogeyman.

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