In her acceptance speech, Vice President Kamala Harris seemed to back away from a proposal that may prove fatal to her campaign, her catastrophically bad idea to assuage voter concerns over inflation with price controls. Harris instead promised to create an “opportunity economy.” But she would be wise to more clearly repudiate a concept that has always failed whenever tried.

In a statement last week that was designed to offer a few policy specifics in advance of the Democratic National Convention, Harris’s campaign said the first 100 days of her presidency would include the “first-ever federal ban on price gouging on food and groceries — setting clear rules of the road to make clear that big corporations can’t unfairly exploit consumers to run up excessive corporate profits on food and groceries.”

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Harris also proposed giving first-time home buyers $25,000 and promised to prevent greedy landlords from raising rents more than 5% a year (never mind if municipalities raise taxes more than 5%).

Each of these ideas would exacerbate the inflation problem Biden and Harris helped create. Democrat Larry Summers, who served Presidents Clinton and Obama, warned that Biden’s $5 trillion spending binge would drive up inflation. He was right. In their first three-and-half years in office, inflation was more than three times higher under Biden than Trump.

The better approach to control inflation is to reduce government spending and increase energy abundance. Energy is a master resource. When supplies are abundant, everything else gets cheaper, cleaner and more efficient. When energy supplies are scarce, the planet and its people are imperiled, as the tragic case of Venezuela demonstrates.  

Price controls aren’t just a dangerous idea that can lead to shortages and disruptions that disproportionately hurt lower income workers. They are a tell, a clue that Harris is out of touch with the very voters she needs to win. To people who work in supply chain industries, and who know how they work better than many economists, Harris’s idea is condescending. Harris is asking grown-up swing state voters to believe in a boogeyman and is embracing the politics of fear and demagoguery.

The conventional wisdom in 2024 says that policy issues like price controls don’t matter. It’s all about the “vibes.” That’s mostly true. The “Zeitgeist” – the spirit of the age or mood of the moment – decides elections more than the quality of a campaign website’s issue section. It’s also true that no poll question better predicts the outcome of a presidential race more than “he/she cares about people like me.”

But there is more to “vibes” than good speeches and heartwarming moments. I was touched by Gus Walz’s love for his dad, and I’m glad Tim Walz wants to stay out of my bedroom. But I’m still bothered he wants his fingers in my bank account. I’m also bothered by Harris-Walz’s inflationary energy policies. Policy still matters.

Consider the state of the race. After a well-produced convention, blistering critiques of Trump from Republicans, and a month of good feelings following Biden’s decision to not run, the race is still a toss-up. It might be the case that a major factor influencing the “vibes” is that voters trust Trump more than Harris to manage the economy, inflation, jobs and crime. Among five key issue areas, Democrats only lead on healthcare.

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Some Democrats are in denial mode. In the Atlantic, Zephyr Teachout writes, “Sometimes You Just Have to Ignore the Economists.” She claims Harris’s price control idea “might irritate academics, but it makes sense to everyone else.”

Is that so? Who is the “everyone else” she is sourcing? The “everyone else” who matters most in the 2024 election are the 100,000 people in seven battleground states who will decide the election. Based on the ad spending from both campaigns, the state that is the real prize in 2024 is Pennsylvania.

I own and operate a working farm in Maryland, 45 minutes south of the Pennsylvania border. My wife is from rural western Pennsylvania, an area that is part Rust Belt, part Appalachia.

We have a decent idea how these voters think. In the real world, people without college degrees but with common sense know that what causes prices to get passed on to consumers is not some corporate greed boogeyman but survival instincts. When the farmers I hire give me a bill for contract work they apologize if costs go up, as they did dramatically in 2022 for fertilizer and transportation (both of which are linked to energy supplies). No part of me thinks they’re greedy. I trust that we all want to pay our bills, feed our families, and stay connected to the land. I also don’t have to give them an economics lesson on supply chains. They are the supply chain. If they try to “gouge” me, I can look for other suppliers in the market for the most competitive price. But if those suppliers are hamstrung by government-dictated price controls, there is no market other than a corrupt and chaotic black market.

If Harris doesn’t want “price controls” to do to her campaign what “deplorables” did to Hillary Clinton in 2016, she’ll have to back away from this idea more forcefully. Insulting voters is never a good way to win them over.

The views and opinions expressed are those of the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of C3.