The single most common criticism of President Biden’s reelection campaign is that he made a ghastly error by branding his policies “Bidenomics.” Americans think the economy is terrible, and Democrats have been begging the president to stop branding himself as the architect of something that people hate.
I think this advice is wrong. Biden needs to change the public’s view on the economy if he’s going to win.
There are numerous questions about the economy and the state of public opinion entangled in this debate, so before I go through my argument, I’m going to state my positions on each of them:
1. The public blames Biden for the inflation run-up during his first two years in office, which is the main reason he’s losing to Donald Trump right now.
2. It will be very difficult for Biden to win reelection if he can’t change that.
3. Changing it will be hard, which is why Biden should drop out of the race. A Democrat who wasn’t president during the inflation surge would have a much stronger chance.
4. Given that Biden refuses to drop out of the race, and no big-name Democrats are willing to challenge him, his best chance is to aggressively message the economy in an attempt to turn around public opinion.
5. Fortunately, this may be possible.
The argument for why Biden should deemphasize the economy and stop touring “Bidenomics” is straightforward. Generally speaking, candidates benefit by emphasizing issues where the public agrees with them and avoiding issues where it doesn’t.
But the economy is different. It’s too big an issue to avoid. For an incumbent president to win reelection in an atmosphere where the voters think he’s failed on economic management is a near-impossible task. If your premise is that the public’s view of the economy is immutably negative, then you shouldn’t be trying to persuade Biden to change messages; you should be trying to persuade him to drop out of the race. (And I agree, Biden should drop out of the race.)
The pandemic created a global economic disruption to supply chains and labor that created ripples of inflation everywhere. This has had knock-on political effects of tanking the approval of just about every world leader who was in power during the inflation surge.
Biden has been no exception. But Biden’s approval ratings are not as bad as many other world leaders, probably because the American economy is better than theirs.
When the Federal Reserve started raising interest rates to tamp down inflation, most observers expected it would choke off the recovery. That hasn’t happened. Instead, inflation is descending while growth remains solid, a “soft landing” scenario that seemed optimistic a year ago.
The public remains angry as ever about the economy. It’s possible that won’t change. Prices are still higher than they were before the pandemic, and prices aren’t going to come down — that would require deflation, and deflation would require a recession or some other terrible event.
So actually reversing price increases is out of the question. And obviously Biden can’t go back in time and undo the inflation of 2021–22. What he can do, however, is at least try to change how Americans think about the economy over the next year.
Public sentiment about the economy isn’t a purely rational effect of the state of the economy. Like everything else, it’s subject to partisan bias. Democrats tend to rate the economy more favorably under Democratic presidents, and Republicans do the same for Republican presidents. As Ryan Cummings and Neale Mahoney explain, the partisan-bias effect is asymmetric. “While both Republicans and Democrats view the economy more favorably when their party controls the White House,” they note, “the magnitude of this partisan bias is roughly two and a half times larger for Republicans than for Democrats.”
Paul Krugman adds that consumer sentiment is diverging from spending levels. People say the economy is bad, but they are spending like the economy is good. All this suggests that public opinion on the economy are at least somewhat malleable.
What’s more, people’s basic factual sense of both economic conditions and Biden’s role is woeful. The unemployment rate is at historically low levels, and the U.S. economy is growing faster than most other economies on the world, but polls show most people think the reverse is true. The public has very little awareness of Biden’s main accomplishments, which are (when defined in neutral terms) extremely popular.
I would also speculate that doing more to inform the public about what Biden has done to help the economy would soften up public skepticism about his age. It’s harder to believe he’s a vegetable if you know what he’s accomplished.
If Biden actually devotes time and advertising resources to pounding home the improving state of the economy, and his administration’s role in passing infrastructure and domestic investment, he has a chance to turn around public opinion. These things often take time. A year before the 1996 election, Bill Clinton still was getting more blame than credit for the state of the economy.
I want to emphasize this is absolutely not a foolproof strategy. It’s entirely possible that the inflation surge baked in economic sentiment irrevocably. But a world in which that’s the case is a world in which Biden is going to lose. Biden has to design a strategy fitted to assumptions where he has a chance to win.
