How the economy is doing ahead of an election may not be as important as how voters perceive the economy, The Cook Political Report’s Amy Walter observed well in advance of the COVID-19 pandemic. Negative partisanship plays an important role in that perception. “Voters are less willing than ever to give the other party any credit for a good economy, or to hold their own party accountable in a downturn,” Walter wrote. Rationality has little to do with it, a 2018 University of Michigan study found, “with Democrats placing heavy emphasis on negative developments and Republican on positive developments.” The gap between those perceptions under the Trump administration grew to three times that under Ronald Reagan.
Nevertheless, despite the economy booming under President Biden, a nagging perception persists that Republicans manage the economy better than Democrats. Heather Cox Richardson explains:
This should not come as a surprise to anyone. The economy has performed better under Democrats than Republicans since at least World War II. CNN Business reports that since 1945, the Standard & Poor’s 500—a market index of 500 leading U.S. publicly traded companies—has averaged an annual gain of 11.2% during years when Democrats controlled the White House, and a 6.9% average gain under Republicans. In the same time period, gross domestic product grew by an average of 4.1% under Democrats, 2.5% under Republicans. Job growth, too, is significantly stronger under Democrats than Republicans.
“[T]here has been a stark pattern in the United States for nearly a century,” wrote David Leonhardt of the New York Times last year, “The economy has grown significantly faster under Democratic presidents than Republican ones.”
The persistence of the myth that Democrats are bad for the economy is an interesting example of the endurance of political rhetoric over reality.
The rhetoric that Democrats advocate socialism dates back to Reconstruction, Richardson writes. Then, socialism meant any form of wealth redistribution from the aristocrats to the commoners.
Finally, after the spectacularly corrupt administration of Republican Benjamin Harrison, which businessmen had called “beyond question the best business administration the country has ever seen,” the unthinkable happened. In the election of 1892, for the first time since the Civil War, Democrats took control of the White House and Congress. They promised to rein in the power of big business by lowering the tariffs and loosening the money supply. This, Republicans insisted, meant financial ruin.
Not unlike today, Republicans worked to sabotage the incoming Democratic administration, that of Grover Cleveland. “Money flowed out of the country as the outgoing Harrison administration poured gasoline on the fires of media fears and refused to act to try to turn the tide.” They provoked a crash.
To Cleveland fell the Panic of 1893, with its strikes, marchers, and despair, all of which opponents insisted was the Democrats’ fault. In the midterm election of 1894, Republicans showed the statistics of Cleveland’s first two years and told voters that Democrats destroyed the economy. Voters could restore the health of the nation’s economy by electing Republicans again. In 1894, voters returned Republicans to control of the government in the biggest midterm landslide in American history, and the image of Democrats as bad for the economy was cemented.
From then on, Republicans portrayed Democrats as weak on the economy. When the next Democratic president to take office, Woodrow Wilson, undermined the tariff as soon as he took office, replacing it with an income tax, opponents insisted the Revenue Act of 1913 was inaugurating the country’s socialistic downfall. When Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt pioneered the New Deal, Republicans saw socialism. Over the past century, that rhetoric has only grown stronger.
Republicans have argued Democratic control means the country’s ruin for 150 years and, so far, the country persists. But they have been disciplined about messaging it until their claims became conventional wisdom.
Since Newt Gingrich made that approach Republican gospel, Republicans with help from conservative talk radio and TV have refined their skills for bending reality to fit their preferences.
In a restaurant in Greenville, SC once, I saw a framed black-and-white photo like the one at the top. It bore the cryptic caption: “Waiting for Grover Cleveland.”
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