In today’s excellent newsletter, Brian Beutler is absolutely right about this. We know that most of the kvetching about the economy at this point is coming from Republicans and even then they are reporting that their own finances are fine it’s everyone else who is suffering terribly under the horrors of Joe Biden’s economy. There are some independents and Democrats who are complaining as well which is where the real problem lies.
Beutler points out that this phenomenon is asymmetric:
[S]urvey 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.
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.
Knowing that to be true, you would think that Democrats would not succumb to it but there is a raging debate among them about whether Biden should tell the truth about the economy or capitulate to these “vibes” that are telling people it sucks.
I’m with Beutler:
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.”
We obviously don’t know what will work. None of us are soothsayers or oracles. But as Beutler points out, if Biden wins a close election, which seems the likeliest positive scenario, “winning narrowly without popular appeal, and without the will or the mandate to fix what Trump and his loyalists have broken” would be a very bad outcome. The status quo is not sustainable.