Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump engaged in their first presidential debate on Tuesday, addressing a range of national issues. To analyze the debate’s impact, UBS Global Wealth Management Co-Lead of ElectionWatch Tom McLoughlin joins Catalysts.
McLoughlin notes that the debate provided Vice President Harris an opportunity to reach undecided voters, but questions the lasting effect of this exposure. He identifies the key issues influencing undecided voters as reproductive rights, US-Mexico border policies, and economic concerns, particularly around inflation.
Regarding post-debate polling and overall election cycle trends, McLoughlin highlights a unique challenge in interpreting poll data. “One of the issues with polling is that Donald Trump brings out people that have not voted or will never vote in any of the elections, but will vote for the former president.”
He states this makes Trump an “unusual candidate” and complicates the accuracy of traditional polling methods.
For more expert insight and the latest market action, click here to watch this full episode of Catalysts.
This post was written by Angel Smith
Video Transcript
The presidential debate last night covering a wide range of topics concerning everyday Americans, including the economy, inflation, health care, and immigration.
But for still undecided voters in swing states should either candidate do enough to hammer home their policy promises and sway opinions here to discuss that in the state of the race with less than two months to go.
We want to bring in Tom mclaughlin.
He’s U BS Global Wealth Management.
We Management Election watch Cole and uh sorry, a mouthful there when we go through your title.
Talk to me about last night because when you take a look at the market’s reaction, yes, we did see a bit of a reaction in the dollar although much of that fading on the heels of the CP I, is there anything last night that you think was significant for investors to latch on to?
Well, there’s very few undecided voters left.
So both candidates were pitching uh to make their play with the two or 3% in the seven pivotal states that will make the difference.
Did it help?
Uh Vice President Harris?
Yes.
Is it gonna last?
That’s the key question.
I think she comes out of the debate with momentum that she’s effectively restored, which she had initially when she got the nomination and then it kind of plateaued.
So she probably in the next week is going to see more momentum.
It probably did help her a little bit.
The real question is in a week, will the undecided voters who might have been shading towards her?
Basically think again, is it clear what the top issue is for those undecided voters?
Well, it, it depends uh where you are and who you are.
It’s gonna be reproductive rights.
Its border inflation.
But inflation, I think as a um as a campaign platform is probably dissipating just a bit.
So it’s, it’s, it comes back to the things we’ve been talking about for six months.
It’s the border, you know, it’s reproductive rights.
Um The economy is always gonna be important.
I think the last time we had spoken, uh there’s a lot of research out there that suggests that uh Americans tend to vote for the president, they believe is gonna help them on the economy.
And that’s been true for 5060 years.
Uh to the extent that the inflation rate is basically, you know, we saw the print this morning.
It’s coming in pretty much as expected.
Inflation is becoming less of an issue.
Now there’s a six month lag.
Here’s the other thing, when you see an inflation number come down, it tends to take six months and this is a lot of research suggests that it takes that long for individuals to appreciate the fact that the inflation rate is not what it was half a year ago to how your conversations changed with your clients.
Just as we have seen the polling between Harris and Trump be so close.
And then I don’t know if you had the chance to speak with yet this morning, but on the heels of her performance last night when we did get maybe a slightly better sense, although it wasn’t very concrete in terms of a policy initiatives, but a better sense of what a Harris Harris presidency could potentially look like in terms of what the polls are gonna react to.
So, um polling in the presidential election years has been tricky.
So if you look at the accuracy of polls in 2016 to 2020 we know that we were not particularly accurate.
They underestimated Trump in 2016, they overestimated Biden, he still won, but he won by a much smaller margin.
But in 2018 and 2022 they were actually quite accurate, which leads you to believe or at least speculate that one of the issues with polling has been that Donald Trump brings people out who otherwise have never voted or will not vote in any of the election but will vote for the former president.
And so when you think about the impact of, of polls, you have to keep in mind that this is, this is an unusual candidate.
He has the ability to bring out voters who otherwise would not be part active participants in the market.
Uh And, and basically say I’m gonna vote for the former president and that makes it very difficult for pollsters to really bring in, bring in accuracy to the level that we had seen prior to 2016.
And we still see in the midterm contest, one of the issues that came up numerous times was fracking, which is actually important to a swing state like Pennsylvania here.
I wanna take a quick listen to what the two candidates had to say and play that and then get your reaction on the other side here.
Do you believe in things that the American people don’t believe in?
You believe in things like we’re not gonna frack, we’re not gonna take fossil fuel, we’re not gonna do things that are going to make this country strong whether you like it or not.
I will not ban fracking.
I have not banned fracking as vice president United States.
And in fact, I was the tiebreaking vote on the inflation reduction Act which opened new leases for fracking.
And, and so we have an excellent write up on Yahoo Finance right now from our own Ben Wo who, who mentions within his headline, did Harris just join the all of the Above Energy Club here?
And, and I think that’s the, that’s a great way to put it, question to put to you here.
So to some degree, I think what we saw is that the vice president had tacked to the left, uh four years ago when she was running for president and she’s trying to back away from some of those positions.
Uh She was very clear and I think she has to be clear if she’s gonna basically win Pennsylvania, which is the most critical state of the seven that are in play.
Uh So the president meanwhile was basically trying to re emphasize the fact that she, she going back now 456 years was a bit more progressive than she’s basically portraying herself now in the presidential election.
So they were both basically following the script they went in with, I mean, when you think about presidential debates, we’re always remembering, you know, the clever rebuttal, you know, the sound bite that everybody’s looking for because it gets replayed on social media constantly.
So they each had their talking points and they wanted to drive those home.
That’s what you saw in that clip.
And I think the vice president did a reasonably good job of basically making it very clear that our position today is that there’s, there’s no uh banning of fracking.
We also heard a little bit more about their plans for tariffs.
We’ve heard a lot from the Trump side.
Uh It’s something that came up in the debate last night.
Let’s play a quick bite from that.
And we’ll get your reaction, Tom.
When we come back, China was paying us hundreds of billions of dollars.
And so were other countries and you know, if she doesn’t like him, they should have gone out and they should have immediately cut the tariffs.
But those tariffs are there 3.5 years now under their administration, you want to talk about his deal with China?
What he ended up doing is under Donald Trump’s presidency, he ended up selling American chips to China to help them improve and modernize their military.
Basically sold us out when a policy about China should be in making sure the United States of America wins the competition for the 21st century to the far reaching tariffs that we’ve been talking about, both sides have really been talking about is that shaping up to be obviously under a Trump administration would be a little bit more.
But is that shaping up to be one of the biggest risks in the markets?
Yes.
So in a Trump administration, you’d see tariffs be applied applied very broadly in Harris administration, you would see tariffs basically put in place but they’d be more targeted.
Uh And the, the, the challenge here is that tariffs are inflationary full stop.
This is not a debatable point.
Um But when it goes in what happens if you have a broad tariff versus a targeted tariff in truth?
Yes, the Biden administration did not roll off most of the tariffs that Trump had put in that was basically directed primarily towards China on national security grounds.
You’d see more of that under Harris administration.
Tom mclaughlin.
Always great to have you.
Thanks for joining us back here on set.
We hope to have you back again soon.
U BS Global Wealth Management Election watch Co lead.
Thanks so much, Tom.
Thanks.
