Republican Voters Decide Joe Biden's Economy Pretty Good Now, Thanks Trump!
When Walmart prices increase, they'll like that too.
The conventional wisdom about the 2024 presidential election is that, like voters worldwide, most Americans are still angry and worried about the economic upheavals of the pandemic recession, especially the high inflation resulting from the end of the slump, when suddenly everyone wanted to buy stuff but the stuff wasn’t being produced in sufficient quantities or reaching consumers soon enough. Supply chains tangled by the pandemic were the primary cause, and as they were unkinked, inflation came down.
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris presided over the world’s best economic recovery from the pandemic slump, but enough voters were still convinced we were in a disaster that they went for Trump, or stayed home instead of voting for Harris. And no matter how often Barack Obama reminded us “that was my economy!” too many voters were certain things were much better four years ago when we were dying by the tens of thousands each week but gas was cheap because nobody was driving.
Just as partisan leanings exaggerated a lot of Republicans’ sense that things were terrible, Washington Post data nerd Phillip Bump points out recent polling that seems to show Trump’s win has led many GOP voters to see the US economy in a far better light (WaPo gift link) since November 5, even though Trump has yet to actually have any influence on the economy.
Bump sifted that weird little data nugget out of YouGov’s regular polling — going back 15 years — on how Americans think their own family’s financial position looks, compared to a year before whenever the poll was. The number of people who said they were in worse shape “spiked in 2021 and 2022 — as Biden’s approval ratings fell and as prices surged,” Bump notes, even among respondents who said they were Democrats. The overall numbers of Democrats who thought they were doing better since 2022 steadily rose, and far more Dems thought they were doing roughly the same during Biden’s term.
Among Republicans, however, the percentage of people who said their families were worse off steadily climbed during the first year of the pandemic, when Trump was still in office, and then spiked higher and higher during Biden’s presidency, with the numbers for 2024 at nearly the same level as during the height of inflation in 2022. That’s the dark black line in this chart:
The very tail end of that chart, at the upper right corner, also shows the weird trend over the last month: Following the election, the percentage of Republicans saying they were worse off than a year ago suddenly dips sharply — by 16 points! — and “about the same” jumps higher.
Bump wryly notes that probably had more to do with Trump’s election than with anything that may have happened exactly a year ago to change the comparison.
Not surprisingly, the YouGov surveys show that in 2016, Republicans also felt far better about Barack Obama’s terrible moribund economy in the weeks after Trump won, because after all the economic growth stats were all phony under Obama and then the very same stats became honest once Trump took office.
What’s more, the reality distortion field generated by Trump affects Republicans far more than anything Biden could come up with for Democrats:
It has consistently been the case that Republicans have more extreme views of the change in the state of their own finances than Democrats or Americans overall. Under Trump, Republicans were on average 28 points more likely to say their position had gotten better than worse; Democrats were 16 points more likely to say it had gotten worse. Under Biden, Democrats were only one point more likely to say things had gotten better (across his entire term); Republicans were 41 points more likely to say they’d gotten worse.
The same held for Obama, for all the Republican insistence that Democrats believed he was the Messiah. Clearly, this means that Republicans are far more in touch with their economic feelings than Democrats, who fail to perceive how Trump is flawless and both Obama and Biden ruin everything good and holy. Heh, remember when Barry Bamz ran a budget surplus? Terrible times!
With that in mind, we can confidently predict that within a month of Trump’s second inauguration, the economic stats won’t have changed significantly, but Republicans and probably idiots in the mainstream media will be kvelling about the bright new economy the Great Man has ushered in. Even if he follows through on those inflation-boosting tariffs.
Then Big Brother will increase the chocolate ration to a smaller amount and we’ll all rejoice.
[WaPo (gift link)]
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Well, Republican voters are stupid, so...
One of the Biden administration's accomplishments that was quickly forgotten was untangling the mess of backed-up cargoes and freighters at the Port of Los Angeles.