Democrats Need To Tell Better Stories

Facts are on their side, but voters believe Trump's lies because they add up to a simple story.

(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

In an appearance on MSNBC this week, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi articulated her theory of the election, which in her mind will depend on emphasizing the real economic contrast between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

“There are those who have real, legitimate concerns about immigration, globalization, innovation, and what does that mean for their job and their family’s future,” she said. “And we have to address those concerns. And Joe Biden is doing that—[he] created nine-million jobs in his term in office. Donald Trump has the worst record of job loss of any president.”

Regular readers know I doubt whether any recitation of facts, stripped from a larger storyline or contrast of character, will sway the kinds of voters she has in mind. And as if to prove my point, Pelosi’s interviewer, Katy Tur, chimed in to provide that kind of context—it just wasn’t the context Pelosi wanted to hear. 

“That was a global pandemic,” she stipulated. 

“He had the worst record of any president!” Pelosi shot back. “We’ve had other concerns in our country. If you want to be an apologist for Donald Trump, that may be your role, but it ain’t mine.”

The bitter exchange fits neatly into a larger story about Democrats reassessing their relationship with the mainstream media. Pelosi wanted voters to hear this unflattering contrast between Trump and Biden, Tur countered with mitigating context, and so Pelosi, instead of defending the point, pounded the table.

Many liberals found Pelosi’s response cathartic. But I think it would’ve been more effective and persuasive if she had demonstrated greater contextual fluency—if she knew how to tell a plausible story rather than recite a set of facts. I’m less interested in the exchange for what it reveals about the professional habits of mainstream media than for what it reveals about how people process information to form political opinions.

TUR-ING TEST

That the country lost jobs on net under Trump is a fact. That Trump’s jobs record would have been net-positive but for the pandemic is also a fact. That the pandemic hit the United States harder economically and mortally than peer countries due to Trump’s derelictions of duty is also, to fair-minded people, indisputable. That peer countries, with more robust safety nets, had an easier time absorbing the initial economic shock of the pandemic is also true, and an embarrassment to the United States that predates Trump. On the fifth hand, Trump is the leader of a party that seeks to decimate our existing patchwork of social-insurance programs, and even tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act—a health-care system Democrats established over a decade ago specifically for working-age people who don’t or can’t get insurance from their employers. The ones that were shedding jobs by the million four years ago.

All of that context is valid. Most of it reflects poorly on Trump. Pelosi didn’t draw on any of it. Tur only drew on the exculpatory bits. Why is that? Why couldn’t Pelosi marshal more evidence that Trump failed the country in 2020, and why was Tur armed only with Trump-friendly spin?

I think it has something to do with the fact that Democrats chose to wash their hands of pandemic politics (and of narrative-building generally) many years ago, while Trump has consistently exploited the pandemic to sidestep accountability for his many failures. “Biden has created a bunch of jobs” and “Trump’s jobs record isn’t really his fault because of the pandemic” are the two brickbats the parties bring to this particular fight, and so they were close at hand. But Pelosi’s weapon of choice was a fact, and Tur’s counterpoint was a story. A simple, legible story. And so to me it’s sort of no wonder Trump continues to whoop Biden in economic-stewardship polling, even as, under a full accounting of his record, it’d be insane to entrust him with the economy (to say nothing of another pandemic) ever again. 

If Pelosi had been more nimble, she would’ve compared Trump to his peers overseeing advanced economies. That Trump had a worse jobs record than any president before him is a bit of a non-sequitur—most presidents don’t oversee pandemics! That Trump did a worse job than other leaders at the time is very relevant. She might also have insisted on some consistency: If reporters intend to give Trump a pass on his job-loss record, because the pandemic was a global phenomenon, they should also give Biden a pass on inflation, which was also a global, pandemic-induced phenomenon, too. And they should note that Biden’s inflation-fighting record outshined his peers, while during the acute phase of the pandemic under Trump, the U.S. was an international disgrace. 

But it would be better if she, and Democrats in general, had stories of their own to tell. 

SLOB STORY

The story I would tell if I were Biden is pretty simple, and Biden occasionally gestures at it. When the White House press corps recently assembled to grill Biden about (what else) his age and memory, he reminded them. “I am well-meaning, and I’m an elderly man, and I know what the hell I’m doing,” he said. “I’ve been president. I put this country back on its feet.”

The story is that he inherited a country that Trump left in shambles, and did the painstaking work of rebuilding an economy that’s now stronger and more equitable than the one Trump wrecked. He could also pin inflation on Trump: it was, after all, an inevitable part of the difficult process of digging out from under the rubble Trump left behind. He could describe inflation as the endpoint of a cascade of events that began when Trump disbanded the government’s pandemic-response directorate and (thus) failed to contain the virus before it spread out of control.

That is a story people are more likely to absorb in full meaning than any recitation of raw fact. 

And it’s at least as credible as Trump’s story, in which he bears no responsibility for anything after January 2020. Moreover, it explains both facts that Pelosi let speak for themselves: why Trump’s jobs record was so bad and why Biden’s economic record is better than most people believe. The U.S. did experience inflation starting in 2021, when Biden was president. But so did the rest of the world. Biden passed a big stimulus bill in his first weeks in office, which may have exacerbated inflation on the margin, but the U.S. also got inflation under control faster than peer nations and had a much better jobs recovery. If Trump bears no responsibility for his job losses, then Biden at least bears no responsibility for the emergence of inflation and can arguably, if tendentiously, claim we could have avoided much of it if Trump hadn’t ignored warnings and lied about the looming pandemic threat as he chased a vaporwear soybean deal (or at least headlines about a soybean deal) with China. 

Does anyone doubt Biden would be better off today if he’d been telling this story, or something like it, all along? If he hadn’t tried to turn the page on Trump and the pandemic in the hope that steady leadership and good data (nine-million jobs!!!) would do the difficult work of politics for him?

The liberal writer Jonathan Chait seems to think the formation of public opinion around these issues is mechanistic: that the public is mad at Biden because of inflation, but doesn’t credit Biden with improving economy because he’s old. 

“The causes of Biden’s lagging campaign are banal,” Chait explained this week. “The inflation run-up of 2021–22 tanked his approval ratings, and his aged demeanor makes it harder for people to believe he is fixing the problem. That run-up has simultaneously made Trump’s presidency appear retrospectively better — a CNN poll found 55 percent of respondents consider Trump’s term a success.”

He calls this explanation “banal,” as though it follows inevitably from the inputs—inflation, age, time. Plug them into a model, and the model will spit out a popularity level, and in Biden’s case it’s very low.

I think this is anything but banal. It was certainly not inevitable. If it were, we could easily answer a silly question like: how young would Biden have to be, or seem, to have benefited from the slowdown in inflation, an increase in real wages, the historic levels of overall prosperity, etc?

It may be that voters really do deny him credit for the recovery because of his age, but the public didn’t materialize fully formed with a built-in presumption that old men with halting gaits are incompetent leaders. That idea was presented to them, over and over again. Nearly everything about how they see the contrast between Trump and Biden is mediated. 

There are surely political consequences for economic downturns, or hardships like inflation, and, ceteris paribus, no politician hopes to preside over crises, let alone ones of their own creation. 

But everything from there is negotiable. Trump didn’t luck into some iron rule that says voters hold presidents harmless for the consequences of global phenomena—he made his own luck by claiming blamelessness over and over again, usually uncontested.

There’s likewise no empirical reason to expect voters to be more forgiving of Trump for overseeing the complete collapse of the economy than of Biden for overseeing a brief bout of moderate inflation. That was mediated, too. In the absence of mediation and storytelling, rising prices would surely make people grumpy. Perhaps some of them would grow hostile to incumbent leaders, or overwhelmed by a taste for reactionary politics. But other people would simply substitute cheaper goods for more expensive ones until their purchasing power returned to normal, without thinking to blame anyone. Maybe they’d go searching for an explanation, and if that explanation were “global markets all reopened at once after the pandemic” they’d be satisfied. Instead, in the real world, the explanation they typically hear is “BIDEN INFLATION BIDEN INFLATION BIDEN INFLATION.”

The idea that inflation is the president’s fault, and he deserves blame for it when it happens, is just that—an idea. And it’s not an idea that occurs to millions of individuals independently on a population scale, because that’s not how ideas work, particularly complicated ones.

Voters think Trump was a good steward of the economy because he repeats endlessly that he built the greatest economy in history until the pandemic wrecked it. They almost never hear the truer counterstory: that Trump coasted on the economy he inherited from Barack Obama until he was confronted with his only real crisis and showed himself to be completely outmatched. They think Biden has been a bad steward of the economy because Republicans and the news media—to say nothing of social-media and the broader culture—harp on endlessly about inflation, and how the buck stops with the president, and how Americans are struggling, when, empirically, they are struggling less now than at any point in recorded history. 

Americans started searching the internet for “stagflation” these past few days not because of some major, detectable shift in economic fundamentals, but because Republicans are telling a new, false story about Biden’s economy.

For the most part, it’s the only story they’re hearing.

Democrats have six months to tell a different, better one. They have all the resources they need to get the good word out. We just have to hope that the stories Republicans have been telling with little pushback these past three-and-a-half years haven’t cemented impressions of the candidates irreversibly.