Famous line by James Carville, during the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign. I was living in Little Rock during that time and met Carville at lunch one day at a downtown eatery. Interesting man and strategist. He was right, and I believe his axiom still holds a lot of water. If so, I don’t believe it’s going to bode well for Biden.
““Our economy is the lowest it’s been in god knows how long,” said a Hispanic respondent who lives in New Jersey. “We keep [sending] money to Ukraine and other countries rather than helping ourselves.””
" A survey from Quinnipiac University on Wednesday found nearly six in ten Americans — 58 percent — disapprove of his handling of the economy. Biden is above water with Black voters on the economy, but 35 percent of Black voters still say they disapprove — a far cry from how he performed with this group in 2020. His marks with Hispanic voters are even worse, with 50 percent disapproving of his handling of the economy."
“I’m definitely not happy with where America was when Trump was president. And I’m not happy with where America is, now that Biden’s president,” said an African American man from Cleveland, though he did say he remains a registered Democrat. “We’ve already had years of both of them being president and with no kind of good results. So I’m hoping there’s some other you know, candidate or alternative besides these two.”
While the statements of many of the voters polled in this article may not be accurate, it is their perception and perception is reality, especially in the voting booth.
While unemployment continues to be low, it’s primarily due to an aging population and fewer people in the working age due to lower birth rates in the US which began after the Great Recession. The economy is expected to continue to slow down through 2024.
This will continue to be an issue throughout the entire 2024 election cycle. Biden campaign team will need to find a way to change the narrative if he wants a chance at another term.
Amazing ignorance if true. As one side is trying to raise minimum wage and improve the social safety net and get health care for all and the other side is against all 3.
Also, quoting the Faux talking point “We keep sending money to Ukraine” makes me question the survey a lot.
“Trying” is the problem word here. On the one hand, Biden has done a great job bringing back manufacturing jobs to the US, and getting commitments from companies to invest more in US jobs.
But those new jobs aren’t making anything better for the large majority of people who can’t get those particular jobs. Everywhere else, wages are still stagnant, employment laws are still weighted heavily in the employer’s favor, creating unions is still far more difficult than it should be, and prices for everything are still going up. And that’s the economic reality that’s biting him in the ass.
Of course, voting GOP won’t fix any of those problems, either, and will most likely make most of them worse, but that’s another argument entirely.
Cite? The economy is actually doing pretty well under Biden. The Inflation Reduction Act has driven a huge boost in American manufacturing and is bringing manufacturing back from overseas (the CEO of US Steel called it the “Manufacturing Renaissance Act”), and despite entrenched Republican opposition in public, the same members of the GOP are contacting Biden to ask for investment in their districts or simply claiming credit for the benefits of a bill they opposed wholeheartedly.
Inflation is significantly down (although consumer prices remain high, thanks more to corporate gouging than inflation itself), especially compared to the US’s economic peers, and fuel prices have been falling for months. Deficit spending is way down. And as for the job market: if you adjust the job market for age, it’s doing really well.
Which brings us to the “perception” issue. Why do so many people view Biden’s handling of the economy so negatively when his policies have been so successful? The answer is: because while Republicans are terrible at managing the economy (or, well, anything), the one thing they are highly skilled at is lying. So Biden gets blamed for the inflation (and corporate gouging) he didn’t cause, even as the GOP oppose every effort to address those problems. They repeat the “Democrats are profligate spenders!” narrative even though Democrats spend far more responsibly than Republicans do. And they handwave the job numbers and all the other indicators of an economy that is actually increasingly healthy.
So there have been plenty of “good results”. But you’re right that the Biden campaign team will need to find a way to change that false narrative to a true one. And they’re working on it.
Yeah, in spite of what the right wing echo chamber regurgitates, there is no equivalent Democratic media organ drilled into the brains of a significant part of the population countering the “the economy is sh*t because of Biden” narrative.
Facts don’t matter, messaging does, and Biden is fighting a firehose on that front.
People’s opinions are shaped most by what they see right in front of them. And inflation slowing down doesn’t mean prices go down, it just means they go up less quickly. So if you struggle to buy groceries, you might be pissed off that you’re probably never going to see that 2020 price on your favorite cut of meat again – and if you don’t understand macroeconomics it’s easy to make that Biden’s fault.
This. For most individuals, “it’s the economy” means “I (and/or my family and friends) am struggling economically, more so than I was when some other guy was President.”
"Trump’s pre-COVID years ended with the unemployment rate at 3.5% in February 2020; it has been essentially at that level since March of 2022 under Biden, with the economy still adding roughly 200,000 jobs per month.
It isn’t sustainable, said Dana Peterson, chief economist at the Conference Board think tank. Driven by government tax and spending policies, the run of above-potential growth doesn’t reflect any underlying shift in economic performance - at least not yet - and now faces two obstacles, she said."
“In the next six to 12 months you probably have a recession and that is a function of the Fed,” the Conference Board’s Peterson said. “After that is done we will shift to a phase of slower growth.”
By just about any measurement, the economy is better off than when it was Morning in America under Reagan – lower unemployment, lower inflation, rising real wages. And, the workforce has rebounded to where it should have been, pre-pandemic, so there don’t seem to be many permanent pandemic scars.
This is a perception problem, which is definitely still a problem.
I believe it’s caused by one set of media being relentlessly negative when a Democrat is president and relentlessly positive when it’s a Republican, combined with another set of media that is always trying to find some kind of balance.
So, inflation comes down and right-wing media ignores the news, while normal, truth-telling media reports something like “inflation is down, but not all is well”.
Hopefully, inflation continues to come down and employment stays low, and the slowdown, if it happens, is shallow.
That’s just one snapshot in time, and doesn’t account for how much people lost in the last several years. While wages may be “up”, the purchasing power of that money has declined, which is what really matters. Also, this is talking about average wages, which includes those good-paying jobs I mentioned - the ones most employees aren’t getting. Far too many people are still stuck in minimum- or low-wage jobs, with part time hours, and no benefits. Those people likely outnumber the ones who are better off now, which is what matters in elections.
Americans’ paychecks have gotten bigger in the last two years, but not enough to keep up with inflation. Now, lower inflation means the average worker is seeing rising purchasing power.
By the numbers: Real average hourly earnings are up 1.2% in the 12 months ended in June, the Labor Department said Wednesday following the release of the latest inflation data.
It had ticked higher in May, but before that had been in negative territory for nearly two years, as workers’ raises were not enough to keep up with sky-high inflation.
For production and nonsupervisory workers, that number was even stronger, with a 2.2% year-over-year gain in real average hourly earnings.
I agree that there’s lots of inequality in America.
However, I disagree that the current economy is bad or that wages are stagnating right now.
It’s amazing to me that, even on this quite liberal site, the perception of the economy is so bad. The economy is so red-hot that the Fed can’t slow it down even with record increases in short-term rates. The 10 year treasury is hitting new recent highs today, because the market is perceiving less of a risk.
So, perception is a big issue, for sure, but the reality is that it’s a good economy, with falling inflation and rising real wages.
The forecasted growth in working age population per the chart in your link is highly dependent upon net migration into the US. That alone is a huge assumption. And given Congress’s hesitancy to touch our immigration laws, highly suspect. Without it the working age population is expected to continue to decline into the 2030’s.
I’m not saying that the economy is actually bad, I’m explaining why so many people can still legitimately think that the economy is bad. Do you really think that people working at McDonalds, or pissing in bottles at an Amazon warehouse, are thinking about what the Fed or the market is doing when they wonder about the size of their paycheck?