Last week, Vice President Kamala Harris unveiled her long-awaited economic plan telling supporters, “We were facing one of the worst economic crises in modern history” when she and President Joe Biden took the oath of office. Even liberal economists panned it.

Despite the bad reviews, her new communications director Monday doubled-down, claiming that back then, “the economy was in the ditch.” But was it?  Obviously, the Harris strategy is to offset the economic failures of her administration by blaming greedy corporations and the “other guy.”  But the other guy has plenty of actual data to refute what amounts to economic disinformation if he chooses to use it.  

For starters, voters remain pessimistic about the state of the nation’s economy despite Democratic hyperbole with 27 percent saying it is excellent or good and 72 percent saying it is not so good/poor, according to an Washington Post/ABC News/Ipsos poll conducted Aug. 9-13.

In her remarks, Harris acknowledged the negative impact of inflation, particularly for food and housing, but took no responsibility for it. Who wins this economic argument is likely to win the upcoming presidential debate. When it comes to the data, former President Donald Trump has the better hand.

First up — inflation, voters’ top economic concern.  

For much of the past year, Biden has incorrectly claimed that he inherited a 9 percent inflation rate.  Even a casual look at Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows the rate was actually 1.4 percent in January 2021.

In reality, the Biden-Harris inflation record is one of the worst of any presidential administrations in recent memory.  Since their inaugural month, overall prices have increased 20.2 percent.  At the same point in time in Trump’s presidency (41 months in), prices had increased only 6.7 percent.  Trump’s inflation numbers were actually lower than both Barack Obama’s at 8.5 percent and George W. Bush’s at 8.2 percent. 

During the current administration, prices increased across the board, but some of the most devastating for family budgets have been gas (49.9 percent), electricity (31.7 percent), rent (22.0 percent) and food (22.0 percent). 

There’s no sugar-coating either the data or the likely trigger of this disastrous inflation — the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan in March 2021. Harris cast the key procedural vote to get the bill to Biden’s desk. The following month, the inflation rate rose above 3 percent and stayed there for the next 39 consecutive months. Prior to that, inflation had been under 3 percent for 111 straight months.

January 2021, when Biden and Harris took office, marked the 10th consecutive month of under 2 percent inflation since the bipartisan $2.2 trillion CARES Act was passed in March 2020. The two legislative recovery packages seemed to have had very different impacts on inflation, a distinction that can be an effective element of Trump’s economic message.

The vice president and her team also like to boast about the “16 million new jobs” created over the course of the Biden/Harris administration. But how many were actually new jobs or is re-employment a better description for the majority of the jobs coming back on line?

They also indulge their base with a deceptive comparison of Trump to Herbert Hoover in terms of losing jobs. But 2020 was no ordinary year. It is important to remember that in April 2020, the country lost 20,477,000 jobs after losing 1,411,000 in March for a total of 21,888,000. That is a staggering number caused by the COVID-19 lockdown.

But by January of 2021, 12,495,000 of those jobs had come back under the Trump administration. When the current administration took over, the unemployment rate was 6.4 percent. That was down from 14.8 percent in April of 2020, a drop of 8.4 percent in nine months.

Those numbers represent the largest decrease in the unemployment rate over a nine-month period in the entirety of the BLS database, a historic recovery.

Biden/Harris, on the other hand, took another 17 months to recover the remaining 9.4 million jobs. So of those 15.8 million jobs (actual) she claims, only 6.4 million were new.

Finally, Democrats are trying to paint Trump as the bigger spender in the deficit argument to deflect the Biden-Harris record. The truth is Biden will become the first president to have had deficits of over $1 trillion dollars in every one of his four years in office. For Obama, it was four out of eight; and for Trump, one out of four, the COVID-19 year of 2020. 

The last four years have seen the worst inflation since the early ’80s. A majority of Americans have never experienced this kind of economic calamity, which explains why they have such a negative view of the economy. That gets us to one of the strategic questions of this election: How much do voters believe it was the policies of Democrats that fueled inflation, specifically the American Rescue Plan?

In a CBS News/YouGov survey conducted Aug. 14-16, voters were asked whether the price for food and groceries will go up or go down depending on which candidate wins the election. If Harris were to win, 48 percent thought they would go up, while 22 percent thought they would go down.

For Trump, 37 percent believed prices would go up if he won and 42 percent said down. Among independents, it was 50-17 percent for Harris and 36-41 percent for Trump. That means voters have formed a clearer view of the impact of a Harris win, but the impact of Trump is less clear, which is one of the key reasons the ballot among independents is basically even, with Trump at 50 and Harris at 49. 

The country has come through what has been a uniquely difficult period, a global pandemic with terrible economic and personal consequences. Trump’s economy was doing well until COVID-19 hit and business in America ground to a halt. Shutting down the economy was uncharted territory and people do remember that by the time Trump left office, life in the country was beginning to return to normal. 

It’s true that COVID-19 was still a serious problem when Biden and Harris took the reins but it’s also true that they were handed a recovering economy. That’s the case Trump has to make.

David Winston is the president of The Winston Group and a longtime adviser to congressional Republicans. He previously served as the director of planning for Speaker Newt Gingrich. He advises Fortune 100 companies, foundations and nonprofit organizations on strategic planning and public policy issues, as well as serving as an election analyst for CBS News.