String a few more of these together, and we might be cooking with gas:
You know how this will be spun by the RW media:
That damn Biden knows just exactly when to manipulate the economy so inflation will slow down just before the election.
The notion that a new report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics is going to change the minds of folks that are already ignoring reports from the Bureau of Labor Statistics amuses me.
Well, yeah … but if it keeps being couched broadly as “inflation going down” and is repeated and amplified with enough constancy, maybe it will stick with at least some voters.
Today’s mockery is tomorrow’s reality.
Induction.
If Biden wins, we’ll be cooking with induction…
I, for one, cannot wait for the induction revolution!
This will help around the margins. It won’t change much by itself, for all the reasons that have been talked about in this thread, with chief among them (IMO) the partisan divide and the bullshit parade of disinformation that goes halfway around the world while the truth is putting its pants on.
But as more and more real - actual - good news comes in about the economy, a few more folks move their views a little more to the positive. Maybe by October, it’ll be a more neutral approval number for Biden, although I have my doubts.
I do think that Biden needs to be honest about his economic record when he talks to voters & groups of people around the country. He shouldn’t pretend something that we know isn’t true. But he’s a naturally empathetic guy, and I’m certain he will let people know he cares about the rise in prices that occurred chiefly in 2021 and 2022, and try to point out things that he’s doing or done that will help. He’s taken concrete steps on things like Insulin prices. He’s brought OPEC to their knees, as was mentioned above. And for fuck-sake, I hope he can point out in a meaningful way that the inflation rate has GREATLY eased.
As I wrote a few months back in this post, The American Economy Is Strong. Period. Stop The [BS], I think it is time that we stop saying that Americans are down on the economy or not feeling the recovery. If people believe things are better in their states, better for them and their families, if life satisfaction, income satisfaction, job satisfaction rates are higher today, then how you can say people are down on the economy? Let’s return to the chart I’ve been sharing here a lot lately:
Are people in the battleground states down on the economy? No. They aren’t. They be down one measure of how we understand the economy, but if they feel this way - like things are good where I am, my own finances and prospects are good - then they are not down on the economy. This is what [Pennsylvania governor] Josh Shapiro is getting at in his comments, and something we talk about here a lot. There is a vast propaganda machine in America working really hard, every day, to convince the American people that things are worse then they appear - that red waves are coming; that crime is rising when it is falling; that gas prices are soaring when they are dropping; that all these elections wins we’ve had across the country since Dobbs means we are losing not winning; that the economy is terrible when it is booming; that immigrants are poisoning the blood of America when their hard work, grit and ingenuity is making the US economy the “envy of the world” …
Wow, that graph is really something.
The point is it’s easier to fool people about how America is doing than their own state, where they can see for themselves new employers, salaries rising, new infrastructure etc.
Especially in red states…states governed by Republicans obviously can’t claim that they are completely falling apart. Instead they show up for ribbon cuttings (for infrastructure they voted against).
But let me ask you: If it’s not disinformation, why the discrepancy between people in every state thinking their state is flourishing but America as a whole is failing?
People always claim every time is especially bad. A lot fewer dollars are being spent on foreign wars than the last couple of decades. And, as I say, most people are happy to say the economy was good under Trump despite the catastrophic effects of the pandemic.
I’ve cited plenty in this thread. I need to go to bed now but I’ll repost it again for you tomorrow.
Possibly they are assigning different things to the “economy” in each case.
For instance, the US has a large revenue deficit. All the states added up do not have nearly the same deficit (and many have a surplus).
Or, take the trade deficit. It’s largely worse under Biden than previous years. But most people don’t much pay attention to state-level trade deficits and so it might not factor into people’s views when they think about how their state is doing.
I think, in general, you really need to see the polling questions at a minimum.
Earlier I linked a poll saying that only 16% of respondents viewed themselves as living comfortably, a majority were scraping by or worse and a majority felt that they were doing worse now than pre-Biden (vs 20% who felt they were doing better). So how do you reconcile that to people saying that their state’s economy is doing awesome? Maybe it’s possible but it seems hard to swallow.
One has to be very careful about this in general.
Krugman’s piece above linked to a paper that compared people’s personal situations vs. the rest of the economy. But the personal graph was thresholded on “at least okay”, while the state/fed graphs were “good or excellent”. Those are not remotely in the same ballpark.
But even when the wording is the same, people might have a different interpretation depending on the context. Not to mention push-polling effects like how simply negating the wording of something doesn’t give you the inverse of the result.
I can’t find those but we’ve linked polls that said the opposite – that the majority of people thought they were doing as well or better under Biden. Your response was “no one gives a shit about your poll”.
I literally posted it as a response to your post a few days ago.
I believe I posted a while back about the increasing separation of where people get their news, and the polarization of politics into distinct information “camps”.
In the past most people got their information from large newspapers and TV networks, who (although slanted one way or another) generally reported facts.
Now, most people get news from niche websites and their social media contacts. The “news” coming from the right-leaning sources are completely absent of facts, and consist of memes and outright fabrications. This is where the right wing public is getting their “news” about the economy of the country - from their friend charlie who posts memes reposted from foriegn sources and from info-wars or other sources who post outright lies.
What’s the case for this? I dismiss this out of hand without some extraordinary and copious data. A handful of polls won’t cut it.
Well that’s level 2. Level 1 is just an acknowledgement that when 49% of the public believes the polar opposite of reality – e.g. that America’s unemployment is at a 50-year high – that the disinformation saying exactly that is likely a big part of where that misapprehension has come from.
Then we can talk about what’s different now (which @ Euphonious_Polemic has already described very well, but I don’t want to get deflected. We’re almost 800 posts in, still many here don’t want to acknowledge the role of disinformation in all this).