Why Isn't Biden Getting Credit for a Good Economy?
It may take a while for the sting of inflation to ease, but in the meantime, Biden should borrow a page from Harry Truman's playbook
It’s a general rule of American politics that voters judge presidents on their economic record. If the economy is doing well, they’ll keep that president or the president’s party in the White House. If the economy is dragging, they’ll switch presidents or parties. Of course, the rule isn’t quite that straightforward. To put it more precisely, actual economic conditions matter less than if voters feel the economy is better than it was four years ago; in other words, presidents stand a good chance at getting re-elected even if economic metrics are bad so long as the economy is showing signs of improvement. At other times, major events or crises, like war or scandal, can supersede the economy in voters’ electoral calculations. And voters are more open to switching parties when an incumbent isn’t on the ticket. (I’d also note that evaluating presidents based on the performance of the economy during their term in office overstates the actual influence they exert over the economy.) Other than that, though, yeah, if voters feel good about the economy, they’ll probably feel good about the president and the president’s party as well.
Yet this rule seems to be broken, as Joe Biden isn’t benefitting from the nation’s economic upswing. That’s got Democrats worried. The current unemployment rate is 3.8%, down from just over 6% when Biden took office and close to the low point set on the eve of the pandemic during the Trump administration. Inflation is down significantly as well: Inflation (measured by comparing prices to where they were one year ago) peaked in June 2022 at 9.1% and is currently sitting at 3.7%. That’s higher than the 2% economists would like, but it’s a marked improvement over where we were a year ago. Additionally, wage growth began outpacing inflation in June, meaning consumers are regaining their purchasing power. With other economic indicators pointing up, the Fed recently doubled its projected 2023 GNP growth rate to 4.25-4.5%. On paper at least, this is a very good economy.
Yet not only aren’t voters giving Biden credit for the economy, they also hold negative views of the economy. According to a Wall Street Journal poll released a couple weeks ago, 60% of voters disapprove of Biden’s handling of the economy, with only 36% describing the state of the economy as strong or good (although that’s up nine points since October 2022.) A recent AP-NORC poll echoed those results, finding only 36% of voters felt Biden was doing a good job on the economy.
Those numbers have unnerved Democrats. Again, raw economic indicators matter less to voter choice in elections than voters’ perceptions of the nation’s economic health, particularly their feelings about whether the economy is getting better or worse. Right now, economic optimism is in short supply, which would presumably hurt the incumbent president and his party. Furthermore, there’s a growing sense among the voting public that the pre-pandemic Trump-era economy was better than the current economy. That contrast will be made stark if Republicans re-nominate the one-term president who presided over that economy. Liberals fear swing voters hoping for a restoration of the late 2010s economy will brush aside concerns about Trump’s autocratic tendencies and cast their votes for him.
So how worried should Democrats be? First of all, it’s important to remember how poll results are shaped by today’s polarized politics. If a partisan is asked a question that scans as an opportunity to comment on their approval of the president, they’ll probably follow their partisan inclinations rather than provide a more dispassionate assessment. This is why views of the economy among Republicans and Democrats tend to flip overnight when a new president from a different party takes office. Consider this chart from FiveThirtyEight, which tracks the difference in views among partisans from June 2016 to May 2021 as to whether they thought the economy was getting worse:
As you can see, Republican views of the economy improved almost as soon as Trump took office (and not only before his economic policies took hold, but before he even had the chance to implement them!) The shift among Democrats is also present, just less pronounced. But views completely flip among partisans on Inauguration Day 2021. As the chart below from the Washington Post illustrates, a similar pattern was at play during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, when members of the president’s party rated the economy better than members of the opposition.
Partisans simply assume the economy is moving in the right direction when their guy is behind the economic wheel. While partisans always tend to behave this way, this is probably truer today than it was just a few decades ago, when there were more cross-pressured partisan voters and the political temperature of the country was somewhat lower. (Amazingly, in the late 90s, when Democrat Bill Clinton was in office, there was a moment when more Republicans thought the economy was performing well than Democrats.) Consequently, Biden can’t bank on getting any help from Republicans and Republican-leaning voters when it comes to lifting impressions of the economy.
Still, dissatisfaction with the economy is higher among Democrats and independents than Biden would like it to be. Not only doesn’t Biden want independents drifting toward Trump’s camp, but he also can’t afford to have Democrats disappointed with his stewardship of the economy staying home on Election Day. Some of that may be a matter of lag time: Wages only began growing faster than inflation at the start of summer, and analysts think it may take until near the end of 2024 for purchasing power to return to what it was before this last round of inflation took off about two years ago. Consequently, many consumers are probably still feeling the squeeze in the checkout line. As Catherine Rampell argued in the Washington Post last week, Americans may also be anticipating a period of deflation that would correct for inflation. While that may happen with goods whose prices rose due to shortages (think eggs, gas, and products with microchips in them) we should neither expect nor want that to happen, since price drops would compel companies to either cut wages or lay-off workers, which in turn would result in a deflationary spiral the likes of which the country hasn’t seen since the Great Depression. As much as we may want to go back to paying 2019 prices, it’s better for wages to catch up to rising prices.
But as rosy as those economic numbers look on paper, Democrats shouldn’t allow them to obscure the real economic distress many are experiencing at the moment. Gas and groceries—which are typically excluded from basic measures of inflation—continue to take a big bite out of peoples’ paychecks. Even if the price of eggs comes down as chicken flocks decimated by bird flu are repopulated, egg prices will still be higher than before on account of higher costs now associated with production, transport, and retail. Until raises come along, workers are going to feel the pinch, and even then, they’ll probably still experience sticker shock as they imagine what more they could have bought four years ago with today’s wages. It’s hard for Biden to alleviate this pain with policy, but by empathizing with those who are struggling to make ends meet, he can at least signal that their concerns are his administration’s chief priorities. Biden can’t get caught cheerleading statistics; he needs to be cheerleading people.
Additionally, Biden and the Democrats should develop a greater appreciation for the way many voters inclined to support their party now assess the health of the economy. Rerunning the Bill Clinton playbook—in which the president uses stellar economic metrics to hammer home how good the economy is for Americans right now—may work on the dwindling number of independent voters who vote according to the state of the economy, but it won’t resonate with voters whose political views were shaped by the Great Recession, the Occupy Wall Street movement, and the political crusades of Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. What matters most for these voters is the structure of the economy, particularly as it relates to economic inequality and standards of living. Leaning on positive monthly unemployment, inflation, and GDP numbers won’t win over voters who think the bigger issue is the nature of the economic system itself.
Biden runs the risk of leaving gettable voters behind if he doesn’t emphasize the longer-term progressive aspects of his agenda. These voters—many of whom are young—need to know Biden isn’t merely squeezing the most out of a system they feel is rigged but is actually working to overhaul the system and make it fairer. He could accomplish this by running harder on his environmental record, which is his administration’s major legislative achievement. It’s good to see he’ll be joining striking UAW workers on the picket line this week; he should use the opportunity to explain to the nation that the workers’ cause is righteous because it is a response to unacceptable levels of income inequality in this country (autoworkers are asking for a 36% wage increase, which is close to the 34% salary increase GM’s CEO received four years ago). He can also draw a contrast between his economic vision for the country (which he could enact if voters delivered him legislative majorities that didn’t depend on conservative Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin’s vote) and that of Donald Trump, whose most significant legislative accomplishment was a tax cut that primarily benefited millionaires and billionaires. If Biden doesn’t double-down on that message, the voters he’ll need to prevail a year from now may not give him the credit he’s earned.
That said, I don’t think Democrats have reason to panic yet. There’s still a lot of time for an improving economy to make its effects felt. If you revisit that second chart above, you’ll notice Democrats never warmed to the Obama-era economy but still turned out for him in 2012. And if you’re looking for an historical parallel, may I recommend 1948. A major crisis—not a pandemic, but the Second World War—had ended three years prior. As the economy transitioned to regular peacetime production, it experienced a recession in 1946-47 during which GDP dropped 12% and inflation rose 15%. Republicans used the economic turmoil to take control of Congress in the 1946 midterms, and then re-nominated the New York Republican they put at the top of the ticket four years earlier. The Democratic incumbent—a former senator who rose to the presidency from the vice presidency—looked dead in the water. Breakaway progressive and conservative candidates would siphon off votes from both the left and right wings of his party. But the president ran hard on his populist appeal and against a do-nothing Republican Congress and won the popular vote by 4.5 points, a result that gave us this memorable photograph:
Biden’s team is banking on the reality of a low unemployment/low inflation/high GDP economy eventually altering voter’s perceptions of the economy. His confidence in the nation’s short-term economic trajectory is probably why the president rolled out his “Bidenomics” messaging so far in advance of the 2024 election: Give it time to sink in and then let it take on the aura of prophecy. But that won’t be enough. Biden will need to take a page out of Harry Truman’s playbook and campaign hard to make sure the American people know he’s doing everything he can to make the economy work for them.
Signals and Noise
For Democrats worried about their prospects in the 2024 election, here’s Nathaniel Rakich writing for ABC News after a Democrat defeated a Republican in a New Hampshire legislative special election by 12 points in a district that leans 6 points Republican: “Democrats have been posting special-election overperformances of that magnitude all year long, in all kinds of districts. And on average, they have won by margins 11 points higher than the weighted relative partisanship of their districts. That’s more than just an impressive streak — it’s a potential sign of a Democratic wave election in 2024. In each of the past three election cycles, a party’s average overperformance in all special elections in a given cycle has been a close match for the eventual House popular vote in the eventual general election — albeit a couple of points better for Democrats.”
By Ben Jacobs in The New Republic: “Are ‘Never Trump’ Republicans Actually Just Democrats Now?”
Unable satisfy the demands of a small group of MAGA Republicans led by Rep. Matt Gaetz, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy sent the House home for the weekend, leaving him with only a week to figure out how to keep the government funded.
Jordan Weissmann headline in Semafor: “Is Kevin McCarthy Even Really Still Speaker?”
Henry Olsen of the Washington Post thinks it’s time for Kevin McCarthy to use the power of the House leadership to punish rebellious House Republicans.
Dan Balz of the Washington Post notes the reason House Republicans are opening an impeachment inquiry is because they can’t figure out how to keep the government funded.
Moderate House Republicans who initially opposed an impeachment inquiry are changing their tune, which comes with political risk in their swing districts.
The last time Republicans shut down the government on the eve of an election in Virginia, it cost Republicans control of the state government.
Democratic New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez was charged with taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes. In some cases, he was paid in bars of gold bullion. Many New Jersey Democrats have called for his resignation, but Menendez—who was tried but not convicted for corruption in 2017—has vowed to stay on.
Glenn Thrush of the New York Times points out Menendez’s indictment undercuts Republican claims of a two-tiered justice system.
Corbin Boiles of The Daily Beast wonders what NBC and new Meet the Press host Kristen Welker were thinking by teeing up an interview with Don Trump. (You think they would have learned their lesson from this year’s disastrous CNN town hall…)
In that interview with Welker, Trump said Florida’s six-week abortion ban was “a terrible thing and a terrible mistake” and that he would be able as president to sit down with both sides in the debate and come up with a “number” that would satisfy everyone. Later in the week, he told a rally in Iowa that Republicans “must learn how to properly talk about abortion.” His rivals jumped all over his comments and not a few pro-life activists expressed disappointment in his remarks. But Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times understands what Trump his doing: He’s running a shell game.
Weird, I thought the question went, “Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?”, not “Do you swear to stay loyal to Don Trump, the whole Don Trump, and nothing but Don Trump?”.
Anna Massoglia of Open Secrets reports prosecutors are investigating Trump’s political operation for paying $44 million to lawyers and law firms that are representing Trump’s co-defendants and potential witnesses in his trials. There is a concern Trump is potentially trying to influence witnesses.
As Charlie Savage of the New York Times writes, prosecutors in Trump’s federal election interference case want the judge to place a gag order on the former president to prevent him from intimidating witnesses and spurring violence, but there is little precedent for putting a gag order on a candidate running for president.
ABC News reports one of Trump’s longtime assistants used to receive to-do lists in the White House written on the back of classified documents. When the FBI asked to interview the assistant about Trump’s handling of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, Trump allegedly told her, “You don’t know anything about the boxes.”
For Mark Meadows aide Cassidy Hutchinson has a book out that claims Meadows and Trump joked about sharing a stage during the first debate with Joe Biden even though both men knew Trump had COVID. (Trump’s bout with COVID almost killed him.) Trump didn’t want to wear masks because the makeup he wore would rub off onto the straps. Cassidy also wrote that Meadows burnt so many documents in the final days of Trump’s presidency that his wife complained about the cost of the dry cleaning needed to get the “bonfire” smell out of his suits. I’d love to see prosecutors question Meadows about that one. Prosecutor: “Why do your suits smell like a campfire?” Meadows: “I was making smores. In my office.”
Outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley told The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg that Trump did not want wounded veterans to attend public events because “No one wants to see that, the wounded.”
According to Gary Fineout and Kimberly Leonard of Politico, Ron DeSantis’s disastrous presidential campaign has ruined his political standing in Florida.
Julie Bykowicz and Tedd Mann of the Wall Street Journal observe how many Republican politicians—including a few running for president—run hard against their Ivy League alma maters.
From a recent Pew survey:
I would hope the Biden campaign would take note of this survey. Trump’s greatest political vulnerability is directly connected to how nearly 2 out of every 3 Americans feels about politics: He is exhausting. His entire political career has been an unending torrent of political and personal drama dialed up to 11. If you ignore it, you either feel guilty for turning away or get drawn back in regardless; if you engage it, it’s a no-holds barred cage match. He constantly pits Americans against one another, and we always feel like we need to have our guard up when we talk politics. The American people shouldn’t have to wake up every day afraid to turn on the morning news and learn about some new crazy thing involving Donald Trump that happened overnight.
Noam Scheiber of the New York Times has a good breakdown of the risks and rewards inherent to the UAW strike not only for autoworkers but the labor movement as a whole.
Biden and Trump have taken different lines on the autoworkers’ strike, with Biden backing workers demanding higher pay and Trump attacking the UAW’s president and insisting Biden’s push for EVs will put union jobs at risk.
Despite billing himself the most pro-union president ever, Biden finds himself struggling to build support within the UAW.
Ron Brownstein writes in The Atlantic about how the massive EV subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act are further shifting car production to non-union states and potentially undermining the position of the UAW. (Again, thank Joe Manchin for stripping out the union requirement for EV production.)
Before anyone thinks about handing Republican Governor Brian Kemp a Profile in Courage Award, here’s what he told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution when asked if he still backed Trump for president: “Despite all of that, despite all of his other trials and tribulations, [Trump] would still be a lot better than Biden. And the people serving in the administration would be a lot better than Joe Biden. And it has nothing to do with being a coward. It has everything to do with winning and reversing the ridiculous, obscene positions of Joe Biden and this administration that literally, in a lot of ways, are destroying our country.” Speaking of “literally, in a lot of ways, destroying our country”:
According to a report by the States United Democracy Center, 23 statewide elected officials tasked with overseeing elections in 17 states are election deniers. (Fortunately, none of those states are critical for Democrats’ chances in 2024, but Democrats have their eyes on Texas.)
David A. Graham writes in The Atlantic about how Republican legislatures in Wisconsin and North Carolina are attempting to undermine the power of left-leaning state supreme courts.
Greg Sargent of the Washington Post looks at Pennsylvania’s shift to automatic voter registration.
In the wake of the pandemic and with the school choice movement barreling forward in many states, Democrats fear they have lost their political edge on the issue of education.
An article in The Economist notes many Americans in the past few decades have moved to places like Florida that are highly susceptible to natural disasters (the risk of which is increasing with climate change.) The result is that parts of the country are becoming uninsurable.
The Washington Post reports political pressure originating with Republican Rep. Jim Jordan has compelled many programs that study online misinformation and the quality of medical information to either scale back their operations of close down.
Labour leader Keir Starmer wants a major rewrite of the Brexit deal when it comes up for review in 2025. Only 30% of UK citizens think it was right to leave the EU, and the UK economy is 5% smaller than anticipated on account of Brexit.
Ukrainian tanks have breached the three layers of Russian defensive lines in the Zaporizhzhia region near Robotyne. It’s a small but potentially promising breakthrough for Ukrainian forces.