What CNN’s Phil Mattingly learned from voters about why the US economy is their top issue in the 2024 election

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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.

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:

1. Clear-cut comeback stories. 
2. Places where specific promises were made by politicians in both parties. 
3. 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.

Rust Belt voters affected by manufacturing collapse weigh their 2024 options

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.

Georgia GOP state lawmaker: Trump’s vow to repeal Inflation Reduction Act ‘will have consequences’

This is a place where the vast majority of residents won’t vote for Vice President Kamala Harris. Many don’t believe in climate change and are extraordinarily skeptical of the green energy transition. But they love the jobs and economic growth.

To me, it’s such a fascinating convergence of factors that, on their face, would seem almost impossible in our current polarized state.

WOLF: One theme I see in your reports is that people who were not helped by Trump’s policies – General Motors workers forced to leave a plant in Lordstown, Ohio, that shut down on his watch and farmers hurt by a trade battle with China – still support him. What’s your take after this trip?

Trump’s promises to auto plant workers fell short. Why some say they’ll still vote for him

MATTINGLY: This isn’t going to be revelatory by any means, but I think the reality is that Trump connects to a certain segment of society – blue-collar, White men in particular – on a visceral level that isn’t easily countered. His blunt-force rhetoric hits all the notes that resonate, even if his policies from his first term don’t match. On its face, it doesn’t make a ton of sense.

But on some level, I have the benefit of being from Ohio, where all of my friends back home are big Trump supporters. So for me, that part wasn’t a surprise.

What was notable, at least in my experience, was talking to the union leaders or farmers who *do* view Trump’s first term as presenting a crystal-clear policy contrast through which voting for him (or voting for him again) is impossible. And their frustration in trying to reach their colleagues is palpable.

One thing I’d note though is that with the way this election is shaping up, every single one of these votes matter in places like Erie or Saginaw. These are places that went (for Barack) Obama twice, then Trump, then back to (Joe) Biden and were only separated by a thousand or few hundred votes.

So we weren’t chasing pockets of Democrats in deep-red counties just to talk to Democrats. We were talking to folks who, if they can peel off enough folks like themselves at the margins, could quite literally decide the election.

The inverse is true as well. In Saginaw, we heard about Black men who were leaning Trump or were fully supporting his candidacy. Immigration and stimulus checks were two of the reasons why. The former – well, you wouldn’t think that would resonate much up in Michigan, and the latter is never going to happen again (so long as we don’t have another once-in-a-century pandemic, fingers crossed!)

In one sense, that’s an opportunity for the Harris campaign on the messaging and outreach front as they work to reverse Trump’s polling gains in that community. But it’s also a window into the “why,” which so many people are having a difficult time explaining.

WOLF: I tend to think we overstate how presidents affect the economy, but you found instances in which the president, arguably, made some difference. Biden and Democrats passed legislation to help kickstart a green-energy economy, which contributed to the opening of the conversion of the plant in Lordstown in the red state of Ohio to battery production. And yet the workers there lean toward Trump. What do they expect from Trump if he’s reelected, since Trump wants the US to focus on oil production, not electric-vehicle development?

MATTINGLY: It’s a huge, open question for the folks working in these industries, that much is clear.

Look, to your point, if Trump is back in the Oval Office, he won’t be all powerful. Lawmakers from both parties see the benefit of certain pillars of Biden’s climate investments. The CHIPS Act was bipartisan.

The infrastructure law money is something a lot of GOP lawmakers have taken credit for on the back end, even though they were almost completely unified in opposition when it was making its way through Congress.

Some of the biggest manufacturers in the country – the kinds of CEOs that carry weight with Trump and his team – are deeply invested in this space as well. So, of course, is China.

That’s not to say the threat of a shift away isn’t real. The Biden-Harris team hasn’t just funneled hundreds of billions of dollars to this sector. They’ve also sent a clear message to the market that companies should dive in because the federal government will have their back. That carries a lot more weight than people probably realize and, in a Trump administration, certainly doesn’t seem like it would be maintained. 

WOLF: On the other hand, Biden and Harris kept tariffs from Trump’s first term largely in place even as they criticize Trump for wanting to impose new across-the-board tariffs. Are voters out there keeping track of the ins and outs of these debates?

MATTINGLY: With the usual caveat that voters are not monolithic, I think I was probably surprised by just how granular of a level the people we spoke with were on weighing certain policies. So that was awesome – the degree to which our conversations were exceedingly thoughtful and rich on that front.

But in terms of who they vote for, one of the people we spoke to in Saginaw put it in the simplest but most clear-cut way.

“Do they care about me? That’s the question.”

That’s the question, and that’s the battle underway between the campaigns.

WOLF: You have a story that features a Harris-supporting farmer holding signs on the roadside in Trump country. I liked that one in part because it may be surprising that there are committed Democrats in a red county or Republicans in a blue city, but it shouldn’t be. There will be more people who vote for Trump in California than Texas, for instance. How were people getting along with each other in the towns you visited?