Jack Herrera, a reporter who specialises in covering the Latino community, reported early on Thursday that he had “spoken to plenty of Latino Trump voters, and many basically said: ‘The economy sucked for me under Biden. Covid shutdowns, inflation, housing costs going up. Entonces — he’s fired. Time for something new.’ Sometimes it’s not more deep than that.”
I think that’s correct, and it’s hard for me to acknowledge.
Last year I argued that Joe Biden would likely win re-election because incumbents presiding over low unemployment, healthy growth in gross domestic product, and rising disposable incomes (adjusted for inflation) have always been re-elected. All those metrics stayed positive through 2024.
I had a caveat: “If Biden will say or do something so jarring that voters question his capacity to do the job” then all bets were off. That happened in the June debate. But I retained my optimism when Kamala Harris was called off the bench.
I saw the polls showing continued disapproval of the economy and heard anecdotes from people complaining about lingering high prices. Harris obviously did, too. She didn’t defend the Biden–Harris record on inflation; she pledged to tackle corporate price-gouging. I thought her approach would be sufficient when inflation was no longer red hot. But the exit polls suggest otherwise. In 2020, on the question of which candidate you think would handle the economy best, Biden and Trump tied at 49 per cent. This year, Trump bested Harris 52 to 46 per cent.
Where did this political logic go wrong? The perception of the economy never caught up with the reality.
In August last year I noted that presidents usually experience a lag between growing the economy and getting credit for growing the economy. I should have remembered my own words. We’re still lagging.
The reasons for the perception lag are partially substantive. Real disposable income shot up to record highs during the pandemic because of government relief, peaking in March 2021 soon after Biden’s inauguration and the passage of the American Rescue Plan Act. One year later, as inflation took off and ate into pay cheques, per capita real disposable income had fallen by 20 per cent.
Since June 2022, with the pandemic almost entirely behind us, real disposable income has grown by 9 per cent, a very good rate for two years. (During Barack Obama’s second term and Trump’s first three years in office, before the pandemic, real disposable income grew for each by about 8.5 per cent.) But if your reference point is the higher disposable income during the pandemic — courtesy of Uncle Sam — much of which was enjoyed during the last year of the Trump presidency, you are probably less impressed.
The reasons are also partially political. Perhaps an incumbent president with great vigour and sharp communication skills could have consistently explained to the public — well before the 2024 campaign kicked into high gear — not only how Trump caused the economic mess with his mishandling of the pandemic but how his successor’s economic team had successfully cleaned up the mess.
Biden did this periodically — he was at his best during State of the Union addresses — but he was well off his A-game, and the June 2024 debate sadly made clear the A-game was never coming back. For the months before that point, Trump could romanticise the economy on his watch, memory hole much of 2020 when unemployment shot up to a post–second world war high, and blame Biden for everything that followed.
That left much of the public believing we were all better off four years ago. Harris implicitly agreed when she emphasised her plan to cut prices.
Harris also had to contend with a widespread belief that Trump single-handedly gave out all the pandemic relief cheques. Last week on the Club Shay Shay podcast, she was compelled to correct the record and note that the Democratic-led Congress passed legislation that provided those cheques. That fact-check was too little, too late. The perceptions had long taken root.
Did sexism play a role in Harris’s defeat? Almost certainly. For some, no amount of buffoonery, bigotry or criminal fraud convictions could strip away Trump’s veneer of economic savvy. Harris received no such deference, as Trump baselessly demeaned Harris as “dumb” and “low IQ.”
CNN’s Van Jones memorably summed up the double standard, “He gets to be lawless, she has to be flawless.” Harris had more economic plans and was perfectly capable of discussing them despite unfair characterisations of her ability to answer questions. Trump mainly peddled high across-the-board tariffs, which would raise prices, and, in the rare event he sat for an interview outside of the conservative media silo, steamrolled anyone who tried to point that out. But I submit to you that without the public holding a warped perception of how the economy has fared over the last eight years, Trump’s misogynistic smoke-and-mirror ploys would have been less potent.
As despondent as many of us feel, this diagnosis does point to a path forward.
Despite the bravado, Trump is no economic mastermind. If he follows through on his across-the-board tariff plan, he may jack up prices high enough to cause a major political backlash like the one that happened to his beloved William McKinley. An immigration crackdown or mass deportation can also disrupt the labour market, causing negative economic consequences. Considering that Trump can never run for president again, doesn’t care about anyone but himself, doesn’t have to worry about the future of the Republican Party and rarely listens to sane advice, I see the chances of Trump implementing self-indulgent, economically foolish policies to be high, especially with a cowed GOP-controlled Senate and, possible, a GOP House, to boot.
For Democrats, the time is now to correct the narrative and not wait for when Trump screws up. Democrats can and should tell the true story of the Biden–Harris economic record, how they cleaned up Trump’s mess and handed him back a humming economy — just as Barack Obama cleaned up George W. Bush’s mess and handed it to Trump in the first place. They should start now and repeat it often to help regain lost credibility.
Running on the Biden–Harris record was politically dicey in the past few months because the true story ran counter to public perception, and there was an imminent election to win. Now that there isn’t an imminent election to win, Democrats can invest more time changing perceptions.
Older Democrats can remember a similar predicament. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan won with big margins by selling unabashed conservatism. This was deeply unsettling to Democrats. The same was true with George W. Bush in the 2000s. But after much soul-searching, failing, and not a small amount of losing, Democrats were finally able to bounce back following economic recessions in 1992 and 2008. They could not have done so if they embraced the GOP narrative about what does and doesn’t cause economic woes.
Such a moment of opportunity will come again, possibly as soon as 2028, when the likely Republican nominee will be J.D. Vance. Let the campaign begin by making it clear that Trump 2.0 is being handed a powerful economy courtesy of the Biden–Harris administration and that when it goes south, it’s the Republicans’ fault. •
