A hotter-than-expected reading on inflation and a swing state’s moves on abortion appeared to be having an impact on the 2024 White House race on Wednesday — but they were pulling in different directions.
The consumer-price index, a measure of prices for goods and services, rose 3.5% in March from a year earlier, topping forecasts and sending U.S. stocks
SPX
DJIA
lower.
Former President Donald Trump and his allies pounced on the latest CPI figures, with the presumptive 2024 Republican nominee saying in a social-media post: “INFLATION is BACK—and RAGING!”
A super PAC supporting Trump’s 2024 campaign detailed in a statement how prices for a range of products have climbed since President Joe Biden took office in January 2021. The statement also described the state of affairs as ”Biden’s inflation crisis.”
Biden, for his part, said in a statement that the CPI report “shows inflation has fallen more than 60% from its peak, but we have more to do to lower costs for hardworking families.”
“I have a plan to lower costs for housing — by building and renovating more than 2 million homes — and I’m calling on corporations including grocery retailers to use record profits to reduce prices,” the president also said.
Related: Biden lays out plan to lower housing costs ahead of State of the Union, but effort draws criticism
With elevated prices continuing to frustrate Americans, Biden and his administration have been focused on a number of initiatives that could save people money. Those efforts have come as some polls indicate that swing-state voters in the 2024 White House race may trust Trump over the Democratic incumbent when it comes to economic issues.
Meanwhile, analysts said the Arizona Supreme Court’s ruling Tuesday that the state can enforce an 1864 abortion ban could hurt Trump’s chances in that battleground state, as well as weigh on other Republican candidates come November. Abortion rights already were a winning issue for Democratic candidates in 2022’s midterm elections as well as in contests in 2023.
“It’s increasingly likely that abortion will be a dominant issue in the election,” Greg Valliere, the chief U.S. policy strategist at AGF Investments, said in a note on Wednesday. “This is a serious challenge to Trump’s re-election.”
In a similar vein, CNN chief legal correspondent Paula Reid, said the Arizona court’s decision and other cases like it present “an enormous challenge” for Trump in the White House race — “far more so, I would argue, than the criminal cases he’s facing.”
Related: Trump’s financial woes return as criminal trial is set to begin
Despite “historically bad” polling for Biden, Democrats continue to notch wins in nearly all bellwether races since the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 2022 decision that overturned Roe vs Wade, and that’s before the Arizona ruling and an Alabama court’s decision that threatened in vitro fertilization, said Chris Krueger, a strategist and managing director at TD Cowen Washington Research Group.
Trump’s chance of winning November’s presidential election stands at 43%, versus Biden’s 41%, according to betting markets tracked by RealClearPolitics. The Democratic incumbent’s prospects have been improving during the past month, as MarketWatch has noted.
Republican Senate candidate Kari Lake was quick to distance herself from the ruling from her state’s supreme court, saying she opposed it and that Arizona Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs and the state legislature should “come up with an immediate commonsense solution that Arizonans can support.”
Lake is in a race for one of Arizona’s U.S. Senate seats. That race is rated a “toss up” by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. She’s facing Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego. The seat’s current occupant, Sen. Kirsten Sinema, an independent who mostly votes with Democrats, has said she won’t seek re-election.
Republicans are hoping to take control of the U.S. Senate in November’s elections. Cook Political Report has said Democrats are “almost entirely on defense,” with competitive races for a number of the party’s seats, while GOP incumbents are expected to have easier paths to victory.
Republicans, however, could struggle to keep their tenuous hold on the U.S. House of Representatives, as some GOP lawmakers have headed for the exits amid infighting and morale problems.
This post was originally published on Market Watch
