How Do We Know The Economy Is Strong? Republicans Are Starting To Change Their Tune
Donald Trump has changed the way he talks about the U.S. economy, an admission that Joe Biden has overseen a successful recovery. It could prove an asset to Biden in November.
As the new year begins, President Biden’s economy by all accounts is booming. There is historically low unemployment, rising real wages, strong growth, and a record stock market.
Even on the inflation front, the news is quite good. As the White House recently touted, while costs still remain too high, inflation is down by two-thirds from its peak, producer prices remained flat in November, and gas is under $3 in most stations around the country.
Over on the Fox Network, this provided liberal commentator Jessica Tarlov with some strong talking points on the economy to counter her co-hosts’ doom and gloom.
Despite these economic gains under Biden, however, voters continue to view his stewardship of the economy unfavorably, in large measure because of persistently high prices. But as the new election year kicks off, we’re starting to see a shift in how Republicans are talking about the economy, a seeming acknowledgment that the economy may just be an asset for Democrats come November after all.
In this edition of The Big Picture, I’ll take a look at how Republicans are beginning to reframe Biden’s economy now that it is humming along quite nicely, and what that might mean for Biden in 2024.
The Bidenomics Disconnect
Despite strong economic data, polls show that voters are not feeling bullish on the economy, and they are holding President Biden accountable for it.
According to a Gallup poll released just before Christmas,
…about four in five U.S. adults rate current economic conditions in the country as only fair (33%) or poor (45%), with few describing conditions as excellent (3%) or good (19%).
And perhaps most distressing of all:
68% of Americans say the economy is getting worse…
Biden’s approval rating in this same poll? A paltry 39%, which is historically low for a president at this point in his first term.
So, why the disconnect?
President Biden recently suggested who might be to blame. When asked by a reporter for a sense of his outlook on the economy for 2024, he responded:
“All good. Take a look. Start reporting it the right way."
This implied, of course, that a good part of the blame lay with the media for not adequately reporting the good news.
The White House’s frustration is certainly understandable.
Take a look at this clip from CNN from this weekend discussing caps on the cost of insulin for seniors. This policy went into effect on January 1, 2023, was advocated by Democrats, signed by Joe Biden as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, and universally opposed by Republicans. But none of that got mentioned.
When journalist Meg Tirrel, who is featured in the clip, shared it on X, she was instantly fact-checked by users, including this community note:
Facts like this flooded her replies before she turned them off for most users.
This tendency of the media to simply ignore accomplishments by Biden, while at the same time diluting the awfulness of Trump, was summarized by Robert Reich in his recent Substack.
Reich observed:
A recent Washington Post article was headlined: “In a swing Wisconsin county, everyone is tired of politics.”
“How do Americans feel about politics?” The New York Times asked recently, answering: “Disgust isn’t a strong enough word.”
But where is it reported that the mainstream media have contributed to making people tired and disgusted with politics?
And where is it acknowledged that this helps Trump and his Republican allies?
He concluded,
They want voters to be so turned off of politics that they’re unaware of Biden’s accomplishments, such as an economy that continues to generate a large number of new jobs, with real (adjusted for inflation) wages finally trending upward, inflation dropping, and no recession in sight.
In other words, the media’s obsession with “both sides-ing” politics, as though both parties are equal, and even as though Biden and Trump are equal, is blinding voters to the very real improvements being made by this President.
The Republican Pivot Has Begun
Despite the media’s refusal to give President Biden credit for his successes, Democrats have been shouting from the rooftops all of Biden’s accomplishments. And now it appears facts are a tricky thing for even the GOP to continue to spin away.
We are starting to see Republicans shift their messaging in light of the fact that we actually are experiencing a very strong economy.
Interest Rates
In one instance, as Ron Filipowski noted on X, Tucker Carlson recently tried to make the case that the Federal Reserve is somehow doing Biden’s bidding, implying that the Fed might be lowering rates to get Joe Biden reelected.
Filipkowski described the pivot succinctly:
“The pivot has begun from ‘the economy is shit!’ to ‘they’re rigging the economy!’”
Rather than acknowledge that the Fed’s policies throughout 2023 have successfully managed to avoid a recession, and that the economy now looks poised for a post-Covid “soft landing,” Tucker has a new theory altogether.
“Last week…with no warning at all, [Fed Chairman] Jay Powell seemed to pivot dramatically to say…actually, cutting interest rates that ‘begins to come into view’…
“In other words, we are lowering rates. So many people who are paying attention concluded that this was political. Joe Biden is losing the race and the Fed is trying to save him.
“But what if it’s even worse than that? What if it’s not just Joe Biden they’re trying to save but the U.S. economy. What if the fundamentals are so weak underneath that the Fed is desperately scrambling groping in the dark trying to figure out what to do? You have to think that’s possible.”
So, by Tucker’s logic, the strength of the economy actually signals “weak fundamentals.”
Got it.
The Stock Market
This up-is-down and down-is-up rhetoric is straight out of the Trump playbook. Trump also shamelessly insists that anything positive is in fact his doing, and anything bad is his opponents’ fault.
Now that Biden’s economy is clearly thriving, Trump is at pains to figure out how to message what can no longer credibly be called a bad economy.
Take the stock market. Yahoo Finance tracked a distinct shift in Trump’s rhetoric on the topic. At the start of 2023, he eagerly would ask crowds how their 401ks were doing, but by the end of the year, according to their analysis of Trump speeches, “Trump has talked about the stock market less and less.”
At a recent rally, Trump tried a novel approach, trying to spin the rising stock market as a negative:
“The stock market is making rich people richer,” Trump disapprovingly told a crowd on Dec. 16 in Durham, N.H., before quickly moving on to other topics.
In a December 29th Truth Social post, he seemed to have landed on a new message entirely: that he is in fact responsible for the soaring stock market.
“THE ONLY THING THAT IS KEEPING THE ECONOMY ‘ALIVE’ IS THE FUMES OF WHAT WE ACCOMPLISHED DURING THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION. THE STOCK MARKET IS ONLY HIGH BECAUSE PEOPLE, & INSTITUTIONS, BELIEVE & EXPECT ME TO WIN THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 2024.”
Gas Prices
The trajectory of gas prices poses yet another inconvenient data point for Republicans.
The reality is that, since their peak in June of 2022, gas prices have come down 38% from an average of $5 per gallon to an average of $3.10 now.
On this topic, Trump seems to have chosen to simply lie his way through it, telling his crowds that gas prices are “5, 6, 7 and even 8 dollars a gallon.”
An X community note helpfully clarifies:
The highest gas prices come in at $4.71 per gallon in California.
What’s ironic is that Trump doesn’t even need to lie, since gas prices under Biden are still well above the low of $1.77 reached during his presidency. But there is an awkward asterisk on that number: that low gas price was from April 2020 at the height of Covid, when demand plummeted because no one was driving.
Which leads us to Trump’s biggest pivot of all.
“Are You Better Off…?”
Perhaps Trump’s biggest rhetorical sleight of hand when messaging about the economy is, per Chris Hayes of MSNBC, “a really amazing tell.”
While on the campaign trail, Trump has begun to adapt Ronald Reagan’s famous “were you better off 4 years ago…?” line. But for Trump, it goes slightly differently:
“Were you better off five years ago or are you better off today?”
That’s right! Trump doesn’t want to be held accountable for 2020 when Covid sent the economy into a tailspin on his watch. So he’s trying to freeze his economy squarely in 2019.
You can watch Trump making this “five years ago…” ask beginning at 1:25 in the video clip below:
As Hayes bluntly states:
“Four years ago it was 2020. You remember 2020? You and I were both here. We were in the midst of the worst pandemic in 100 years. Thousands of Americans were dying every day. Hospitals were overflowing. Morgues were overwhelmed. The dead bodies were being piled up in refrigerated trucks they had to bring in. We had mass graves being dug in New York City and the President was suggesting that people treat the deadly virus by injecting bleach or shining UV light inside their body or taking a horse dewormer.
Tens of millions of people lost their jobs. The worst unemployment rate since the Great Depression. Across the country, millions of people turned to foodbanks waiting in miles long lines…There was a genuine palpable ever-present sense of chaos and social unraveling…”
Now almost three years into his presidency, Joe Biden has successfully ushered us through that chaos and brought us out the other side, both health-wise and, yes, economically.
But Donald Trump and Republicans would like you to forget all about 2020 and who was president. And Trump now wants you to compare 2024 to 2019, not that pesky 2020.
Except that’s not how it works. And in three short months, Joe Biden will begin to campaign on just how good things are four years later after Trump presided over a disastrous pandemic that, understandably, people seem to be trying to put out of their heads altogether.
Is The Media Pivoting As Well?
So, why are Republicans starting to shift their messaging on the state of the nation?
Perhaps because they sense that the media itself is showing signs of pivoting, unable to ignore Biden’s successes any longer.
Take a look at Axios:
The big picture: The U.S. boasts the strongest economy of any rich nation. The much-predicted 2023 recession failed to appear, employment has remained robust, real wages have been rising, and the outlook for 2024 is similarly healthy.
Crime is also down substantially, with homicides falling at a near-record rate in 2023.
“The astoundingly strong labor market is arguably the White House’s biggest victory.
“…the rapid job gains in recent years have blown past economists’ expectations and have fueled the economy’s blockbuster growth.
“Employers have created 14 million jobs during the Biden administration, with a monthly average of more than 400,000 positions. Recently, though, the pace of job creation has slowed, with 199,000 new jobs in November.
“By contrast, the economy added an average 176,000 jobs a month during Trump’s first three years, before coronavirus-related closures and layoffs resulted in the sudden loss of more than 20 million jobs.”
All told, 2023 ended with the Dow rising 13.7% for the year. The S&P is up over 24% with the tech-heavy Nasdaq composite rising 43.4%.
Even the conservative The Wall Street Journal:
It sure looks as though the media is finally taking President Biden’s advice and reporting the real state of the economy—and actually giving him some credit for it.
The question is, will it translate to voter sentiment as we approach the November election? Republican attempts to pivot their messaging on the economy indicate that they certainly believe it will.
And they sure seem afraid of the question “Are you better off now than you were FOUR years ago?” because we all know how that answer is going to go.
It isn't possible to write without any bias because the English language is full of synonyms, words that basically mean the same thing but for which there are nuanced implications (stubborn vs determined). Anyone writing tends to use a certain vocabulary built up over a long period of time. Sometimes word choice is deliberate, sometimes it's unintentional. However, I do believe that the media has a responsibility to write about the facts, including headlines, and to work very hard at not biasing their reporting. Proof reading to avoid bias should be done more diligently. Writing in a "both sides" style betrays news reporting, as it becomes opinion, which is an entirely different type of writing. I'd also like to mention, as Robert Reich has been adamant about, that corporations took advantage of inflation to raise prices to increase profits. Most corporate profits rose at a much faster rate than inflation and these corporations should be called out. I haven't seen too many news articles that have looked at the fast increase in the prices of many consumer goods, even after supply chain issues were resolved, and call out specific industries with examples. This also corresponds with the increase in CEO salaries.
The MSM doesn’t report on Biden’s successes because, despite them being great for Americans, it’s not clickbait. Trump allows for lazy journalism. So little effort is needed to get a clickable story because he does countless stupid and outrageous things. MSM has to work a bit harder to make a good economy exciting. Biden is dull when it comes to exciting stories. Trump’s headlines write themselves.
It’s lazy journalism. All done for clicks (revenue).