How Joe Biden Can Improve Perceptions Of The Economy
It's a tall order given early mistakes, but it's doable, and it starts with challenging false conventional wisdom.
The good news is that at least some people in Joe Biden’s orbit understand what’s so strange about his persistent unpopularity.
“Inside Biden’s orbit, the fear is that there’s little new the administration can do to change the perceptions of a stubborn electorate that’s living through an upswing—yet simply refusing to believe it,” Politico reported this weekend.
“If half of the people think that unemployment is at a 50-year high when it’s actually close to a 50-year low, this is a problem of misinformation, it’s a problem of perception,” said Ben Harris, a former senior Treasury Department official who helped craft Biden’s economic agenda. “I think, unfortunately, it’ll have a major impact on the election.”
Presidents who serve through periods of rapid productivity and job growth are supposed to become more popular, not less so. And typically they do. The pattern of incumbents reaping the political spoils of strong economies is at the root of a pre-Biden assumption that voters will know they’re living in a strong economy whether their news outlets tell them so or not. This assumption, we now see, is false. And it should rattle the many Democratic Party strategists who’ve outsourced so much of their critical thinking to academics and analysts selling a worldview in which politics is mostly mechanistic: Make the economy hum and most of your political problems will solve themselves.
Disabusing Democrats of this formulaic view is surely an essential step toward turning Biden’s fortunes around. But it still leaves the biggest question unanswered: What can Biden do to change the perceptions of a stubborn electorate?
I gestured at a few ideas a couple weeks ago, but it’s worth establishing how we got here, and what the nature of public opinion today is, to make the nature of the challenge clearer.
FORGETTING AWAY WITH MURDER
My sense of what happened is: