Green shoots of hope at WaMo
From Washington Monthly, November 7, 2024
Donald Trump is no economic mastermind, and all it takes is one bad economy to turn the political tables.
Jack Herrera, a reporter who specializes in covering the Latino community, posted on X early yesterday that he had “spoken to plenty of Latino Trump voters, and many basically said: ‘The economy sucked for me under Biden. Covid shutdowns, inflation, housing costs going up. Entonces—he’s fired. Time for something new.’ Sometimes it’s not more deep than that.”
I think that’s correct, and it’s hard for me to acknowledge.
You may recall that last year, I argued that President Joe Biden would likely win re-election, as incumbents presiding over low unemployment, healthy growth in Gross Domestic Product, and real disposable income (which accounts for inflation) have always been re-elected. All those metrics stayed positive through 2024.
I had a caveat: “If Biden will say or do something so jarring that voters question his capacity to do the job,” all bets were off. That happened in the June debate. But I retained my optimism when Vice President Kamala Harris was called off the bench.
I saw the polls showing continued disapproval of the economy and heard anecdotes from people complaining about lingering high prices. Harris obviously did, too. She didn’t defend the Biden-Harris record on inflation; she pledged to tackle corporate price-gouging. I thought her approach would be sufficient when inflation was no longer red hot. But the exit polls suggest otherwise. In 2020, on the question of which candidate you think would handle the economy best, Biden and Trump tied at 49 percent. This year, Trump bested Harris 52 to 46 percent.
Where did this political logic go wrong? The perception of the economy never caught up with the reality.
In August 2023, I noted that presidents usually experience a lag between growing the economy and getting credit for growing the economy. I should have remembered my own words. We’re still lagging.
The reasons for the perception lag are partially substantive. Real disposable income actually shot up to record highs during the pandemic because of government relief, peaking in March 2021, soon after Biden’s inauguration and the passage of the American Rescue Plan Act. One year later, as inflation took off and ate into paychecks, per capita real disposable income had fallen by 20 percent....
*****
....For Democrats, the time is now to correct the narrative and not wait for when Trump screws up. Democrats can and should tell the true story of the Biden-Harris economic record, how they cleaned up Trump’s mess and handed him back a humming economy—just as Barack Obama cleaned up George W. Bush’s mess and handed it to Trump in the first place. They should start now and repeat it often to help regain lost credibility.
Running on the Biden-Harris record was politically dicey in the past few months because the true story ran counter to public perception, and there was an imminent election to win. Now that there isn’t an imminent election to win, Democrats can invest more time changing perceptions....
....MUCH MORE
Also at WaMo:
After Election Day, Fight Back with Ideas
Blue Wall Turns to Rubble; Democrats Despondent; Harris Speaks at 4:00 p.m.
