Why Conceding To Lies About The Economy Is A Big Mistake

It's not just about voter sentiment ahead of the election, it's about what kind of party we want Democrats to be in a post-Trump future.

(Photo by jayk7)

Before going solo almost a year ago, I hosted an interview show that was essentially about finding the good in the bad. Societies around the world are toying with the idea of abandoning democracy, climate anomalies have become less anomalous, and thus more haunting—and whether things are getting better or worse along any dimension, a set of horrible incentives has saturated our media with more negativity than ever. 

In the very near term (as in, possibly by the time you read this) the Republican-controlled Supreme Court might make it impossible to try Donald Trump for attempting to steal the 2020 election in time for the 2024 election; we also face the medium-term prospect that Trump will win that election. The idea behind the show was to face those kinds of realities head on, assess them without soothing gloss, to better understand what the next day’s fight might look like. 

If we grasp the many ways the Supreme Court as currently constituted is corrupt and illegitimate, we can clarify our thinking about accountability and reform, distant as they seem. If we wrap our heads around what life in a second Trump administration might look like, we can brace for it, and for rebuilding all over again, long as that might take.

So: Not typical media doom and gloom, where the news is always bad, or dark clouds always hover, and not the inverse, where copium flows and things are always better than they seem. This was meant, much like Off Message, to be more like realism undergirded by resilience.

But not every social or economic and political trend is headed in the wrong direction. Confronted with a remarkable run of economic good fortune, as we’ve seen in the past year, we might have probed reasons public sentiment and economic fundamentals had decoupled, and how to align them again. We wouldn’t go looking for obscure metrics to explain why the strong economy is secretly weak. We’d never convince ourselves that sources of promise were merely fools’ gold, in order to align ourselves with the country’s dour mood. 

Yet that’s what much of the political establishment has chosen to do—and not just MAGA.

MONMOUTH OF MADNESS

A new Monmouth poll finds “45% of Americans report having stable finances and another 9% say their financial situation is actually improving. Among voters who say they are stable or improving, 58% support Joe Biden in the upcoming presidential election and 32% support Donald Trump. Among voters who are struggling, 60% support Trump and 25% support Biden.”

This is consistent with, if perhaps a bit weaker than, similar data: Most people, in some polls a large majority, report their finances are fine or great, even as they’re convinced the broader economy is in shambles. 

One can interpret Monmouth’s data to imply that people really are just voting their pocket books. People doing better are for Biden, people doing worse are for Trump, and the race is so close because there’s a similar number of people on each side of that divide. A tidy symmetry. 

But that would be a naive conclusion to draw. It would require stipulating that all these survey respondents are giving objective and accurate answers to questions like, “Thinking about your current financial situation, would you say you are struggling to remain where you are financially, basically stable in your current financial situation, or is your financial situation improving?”

It would be similarly naive to imagine that Americans never provide survey takers with accurate assessments of their finances. That it’s all just bullshit partisanship. But it’s crystal clear that many Americans do characterize their wallets in ways that align with their politics, rather than their material circumstances. 

Other survey data reliably shows that Republican economic sentiment is much, much more sensitive to partisan control of the White House than Democratic sentiment. Republican voters are trained by their media, or acculturated by their communities, to dissemble about their economic sentiments depending on who’s president—or, more generously, to feel so invested in who holds power in America that they lose touch with reality.

Every poll like this one from Monmouth will sweep in voters whose responses are tethered to facts, and others, mostly Republicans, whose responses are shaped by partisanship and tribalism. What we have here is evidence that Biden is fighting the issue to a draw despite that handicap. If people really just voted their pocketbooks, Biden would be winning handily. If Trump were to become president tomorrow, Republicans would experience catharsis, and economic sentiment would shoot above the waterline.

APPEASE IN A POD

Political professionals should be able to see that coming miles away: Those same tribal poll responders will become big fans of the economy if Trump wins the election. They will outnumber their tribal opposites in the Democratic Party, and sentiment will invert before policy has changed at all.

Which means we know Biden doesn’t have a major economy problem—he has a Republican shit-talking problem.

It’s impossible to say what economic sentiment should be. The macrodata is very strong, though imperfect as always. We’ve careened between a depressed economy, an overheated economy, and a goldilocks economy much faster than in previous periods of turmoil, and that may be disorienting. It may be reasonable to suspect the picture’s not quite as rosy as the macrodata suggests.

But it’s impossible to argue honestly that economic sentiment belongs in the toilet where we find it. And yet many influential Democrats are reasoning themselves fallaciously into conceding false despair. They’ve taken cues from survey and focus-group participants whose impressions of the economy are highly mediated. They’re swayed by manipulators left, right, and center, who treat telling the truth about the economy as a mortal sin against the suffering masses—often the same people who lie about or misrepresent what the data actually says.

The masses are in fact suffering less than they have in most people’s lifetimes. 

Conceding to the shit talkers can’t be right as a matter of strategy or basic self-respect. Biden’s domestic policy agenda should be a source of pride, not embarrassment. It’s also troubling in a larger sense: If we ever mean to become a society where politics is bound by empirical reality, it’s not good enough to recruit good-faith actors with solid epistemic habits who abhor fanning lies. We need the bad guys to pay a price for their deceptions. That can not happen if Democrats concede to living in a MAGA-inflected, topsy-turvy world, where prosperity is deprivation, “help wanted” signs are evidence of unemployment, and the most expensive gas station in America reflects the real price per gallon. 

Democrats might still win the election from a defensive crouch. But they’ll have a much harder time winning the battle for consensus about the economy or Biden’s record if they accept conventional-wisdom pessimism. We’ll be told they won despite poor economic sentiment, not that Republicans lost because their campaign was based fundamentally on mass- and self-deception. And if this is the mindset Democrats have about Biden’s policy triumphs, they are not going to do much better when they have the power to impose real accountability, and all the contention it will stir.

This is why it was so jarring to hear Democratic strategists (and seemingly only Democratic strategists) respond to Trump’s felony convictions by cautioning that calling Trump a felon might backfire, because it would feed Trump’s false claims of “politicization.” It’s why Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin responds to demands that he investigate the biggest corruption scandals in the history of the judiciary by saying “it’s not gonna happen.” It’s their world, we just live in it.

I can’t know if this is a recipe for losing the election. The race is close. But it is a recipe for something quite bad: winning narrowly without popular appeal, and without the will or the mandate to fix what Trump and his loyalists have broken.