Dem
51
GOP
49
Joe Biden has a problem: The U.S. economy is getting much better but nobody outside the Bureau of Labor Statistics believes it. Here is the problem in one graph.
The horizontal red line indicates the current level of inflation in the data released by the BLS yesterday. For most of the period from 1967 to 1993, inflation was at the current 3.2% or higher. However, since 1993, it has been lower, except after 2021, mostly due to the combined effects of the pandemic and war in Ukraine. Most people don't know (or care) that by historical standards a 3.2% inflation rate would have been considered pretty good much of the time. They have been spoiled by the exceptionally low inflation rate from about 2012 to 2021 and think that is "normal." Their conclusion: Inflation is out of control and it's Biden's fault.
What people also don't see is that unemployment is almost at a 60-year low. Anyone who wants a job now can easily find something. Look.
Despite extremely good news on the unemployment front and real progress on the inflation front, very few people are giving Biden credit for the economy. Instead poll after poll shows that people trust Republicans more than Democrats on the economy, despite the fact that during the Trump administration, the good economy was simply inherited from Barack Obama and Trump didn't have to do anything to keep it like that.
Weeks of private polling have shown that only 35% of Americans trust Democrats on the economy. In fact, 70% of Americans thought the economy was not getting better, despite being told that inflation was way down and unemployment was at a near-historic low. Furthermore, very few people were aware of what Biden has done to get drug prices down and create jobs, both in infrastructure and getting chip-making factories built in the U.S. It is terribly impolite to say it, but a lot of people are badly informed or misinformed. This is not a hopeless situation for Biden, but he really needs to get out there and inform people much better about economic reality. It's not hard. He needs to go to a bunch of sites where infrastructure construction is underway or a chip factory is being built, put on a hard hat, and make a video of him talking to happy workers about what they are doing. He also has to talk about how much he has brought inflation down. But he has to do something.(V)