It's the Economy, Stupid
It's the Economy, Stupid
The ebb and flow of a largely ungovernable phenomenon is about to screw us all over once again.
I am not going to sit here and pretend that I really understand what is going on in the U.S. economy. That doesn’t make me stupid (I hope), but rather puts me largely in line with the vast majority of the country. I understand when gas prices go up, and it is pretty wild that a dozen eggs can cost like seven dollars, and I understand that when things get really bad there are concepts like “interest rates” that make it so that I will probably never own my own home. Alas.
From what I can tell right now, however, people who actually understand the economy think that things are pretty good, thanks in no small part to the actions of President Joe Biden. The Dow Jones — a common benchmark for the esoteric art of economy-divination — is over 41,000 points right now for the first time in history. That’s good, they tell me: it means that the 30 massive companies that the Dow tracks are all doing pretty well. The bad news, of course, is that the president who could be claiming credit for all that is incapable of communicating complete thoughts, and the team responsible for helping him do so is consumed entirely by the gargantuan task of making him seem “alive” and “awake” for more than 3 hours a day.
Which leads us, as Semafor’s Dave Weigel pointed out, to a very possible nightmare scenario: Biden gets crushed, and Donald Trump wanders right into a surging economy and Good Times in America. You can see it happening: interest rates and inflation come down, gas prices come down, it’s 2025, Donald Trump is inaugurated for the second time, asylum seekers start to just outright vanish while in CBP custody, and there are lines at the borders of blue states for people seeking abortion access.
I’m not complaining about the prospect of a few years of “good economy,” of course. I would love that. Maybe I could get a rate bump at a few of the cash-strapped publications that I write for. What I’m complaining about is the fact that Donald Trump could take credit for this—and that thus far, no one is really capable of challenging his narrative.
In order to run on economic gains, you have to be able to brag about them, which the Biden campaign’s crippling messaging problem makes incredibly difficult. Sure, they’ve tried touting the Inflation Reduction Act that helped turn this whole thing around, but without constant, consistent, and clear messaging coming out of the administration all of that is going to get lost in the fact that while Biden was president a dozen eggs got really expensive. I mean seriously. Seven dollars!
This isn’t a new prediction to make. We’ve seen this happen for years. Republicans take office, crush the economy with tax breaks that funnel money to the speculating rich, prices go wild, and people lose jobs right as a Democrat takes over. Said Democrat spends their term in office cleaning up that mess, only to get blamed for it because in order to fix the mess you have to be in power while the mess is actually there. The economy works on a perfectly delayed cycle, and unless you have a clear, efficient communicator with a bunch of other issues to run on, you are probably going to get creamed on it at some point in a national election cycle (Obama, for instance, was able to largely pin the blame on his predecessor.) And that is not what we have right now. Right now we have a president who is so unpopular and so unfit for office that two-thirds of his own party want him to drop out.
I don’t have the expertise to craft an economic messaging strategy for the Biden campaign. I’m not here to tell them what they should be doing better, because there’s no point. It’s moot! The president can’t talk, and the fact that the Democrats are going to spend every single second from now until November playing defense on that means that there’s very little we can do. If Trump wins, he gets the keys to the Good Time Money Car. Better strap in, because we all know he’s driving that thing straight at a wall.
Counterpoint: What's gets reported on as "the economy" doesn't matter to most people. Most people can't afford a few hundred dollar unexpected expense let alone afford stocks. Unless they consider themselves temporarily embarrassed billionaires, the DOW doesn't matter to them. There are very much 2 economies in the US, it is why there can be massive, and growing, homeless populations in the richest cities in the richest county. I remember from 2020 someone posted a screenshot of a Jim Kramer segment where the graphics on screen simultaneously said stocks hit record highs and unemployment hits a record high. It is why there have been articles at this site about how the fed is going to combat inflation by increasing unemployment. Voting for "the line"/"the economy" to go up is voting against most people's self-interest.
I also wouldn't praise Obama's dealing with the financial crisis by giving tons of money to the banks that created it, didn't take any action against those banks, and let the banks then steal people's houses (the banks messed up chain of title documentation so their legal claims to be able to foreclose were often dubious/non-existent). This is one of the driving reasons why Black wealth shrank so much during his presidency. Note: None of the above is a defense of Bush, or any of the other administrations, that fueled & turned a blind eye to what was being done to housing & financial markets.
Trump is such a weak, unpopular, flawed, beatable candidate. And President Biden is losing to him.
The economy is doing better than it should be. Yet many Americans blame Biden for a bad economy so they won’t vote for him.
Joe Biden has failed to convey an anti-Trump message. He has failed at getting the message out about his own successes.