Biden’s team optimistic about improving economy: Polls don’t reveal everything.
The Refashioning of President Joe Biden’s Economic Platform
The refashioning of President Joe Biden’s economic platform comes as consumer sentiment has finally emerged from the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Both the University of Michigan consumer sentiment index and the consumer confidence index, the two chief gauges for personal economic confidence, show that the public’s current feelings about their economic stability are once again rising.
Biden Takes New Action on Junk Fees, Food Prices, and Corporate Mergers
Michigan’s preliminary results for July 2023 showed consumer sentiment reaching 72.6%, up 12.7% from the month prior and up 41.0% from the summer of 2022.
The CCI has not yet published data for July 2023, but the index’s June report increased from 102.5 in May to 109.7 in June. CCI also showed that fears of a recession in the next 12 months dropped precipitously in June for the first time since August of 2022.
However, “Bidenomics,” White House officials’ new name for the president’s economic policies, is not yielding a boost in Biden’s own polling, economic or otherwise.
As of Wednesday, just 38.4% of respondents approve of Biden’s economic stewardship, compared to 58% who disapprove, according to RealClearPolitics’ polling aggregate. The president entered the White House with roughly half of the country approving of his economic policies, yet that figure has continued to fall as prices skyrocketed across his first two and a half years in office.
Still, Biden officials, both those working at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. and the president’s 2024 reelection effort, aren’t sweating his negative polls.
There is a sense inside the White House that some of the negative sentiment is being driven by Republican respondents who will always say the economy is suffering unless there’s a Republican in the White House. One senior White House official suggested to the Washington Examiner that the president’s team is focused on its “long-term” vision for the country.
“Americans are feeling the impact of Bidenomics because investing in America is investing in an economy built from the bottom up and middle out. President Biden has a real record of delivering on the issues Americans care about: beating Big Pharma to lower costs, securing bipartisan funding to repair our roads and bridges, and has brought manufacturing jobs back to the United States. And we’re just getting started,” Kevin Munoz, a spokesperson for the Biden reelection campaign, added. “MAGA Republicans would rather talk about divisive culture war issues than the fact that they’ve made their bed with special interests and empty promises. That’s a record Americans have rejected over and over and will again in 2024.”
For months, top White House officials have stressed that Biden’s poor economic polling is only temporary. Those figures will rise, they say, as more of the president’s landmark spending packages, including the bipartisan infrastructure law, CHIPS and Science Act, and Inflation Reduction Act, are implemented, extending savings and lowering costs for families in the process.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre touched on those themes during Wednesday’s White House press briefing.
“The polls don’t tell the full story, and we don’t understand that. The data shows the combination of unemployment and inflation is near historic lows. That’s what we have seen. Consumer confidence is increasing, and also wages are rising. That’s what certainly the data is showing,” she told reporters when asked about Biden’s polls. “The polls don’t tell the entire story, and so we’re gonna continue to have the conversation. We’re going to continue to have a conversation with the American people.”
National Economic Council Director Lael Brainard similarly voiced optimism in a speech before the Economic Club of New York last week.
“From the data alone, it would be hard to find clues that the U.S. economy was in the midst of a protracted global pandemic just two years ago and a war-driven shock to energy and food prices just one year ago,” she stated. “In the weeks and months ahead, we will continue working diligently to support growth that benefits the middle class through smart public investments, educating and empowering workers, and lowering the cost of living. This approach will allow us to achieve growth that is more resilient and broadly shared, where economic gains flow to hard-working Americans.”
There is anecdotal evidence to suggest that Biden’s poor economic polling won’t affect his performance in the 2024 election. Heading into the 2022 midterm elections, virtually the same number of people viewed the president’s economic stewardship unfavorably as today, yet Democrats managed to hold on to their Senate majority and minimize their losses in the House.
And there are positive data points the president can hang his hat on heading into the general cycle. Inflation continues to decline, and unemployment has held below 4% for 17 straight months.
Still, the election won’t take place for 15 months, and the president could encounter economic dissatisfaction centered on two key constituencies: younger voters and unions.
The Supreme Court struck down Biden’s efforts to forgive billions in student loan debt in June, and though the president quickly enacted a ”Plan B” to extend debt forgiveness through different avenues, progressives and student loan borrowers have expressed serious concern over his handling of the issue.
Several national labor unions, including the United Auto Workers UPS Teamsters, are also threatening strikes in the near future, posing a political headache for the self-billed “most pro-union president” in U.S. history.
The president generally sides with unions in labor disputes but has received criticism from the Left for signing a bill into law in 2022 that blocked a national rail workers strike over concerns the protest would have on U.S. shipping and supply chains.
Neither the UAW nor UPS strikes threaten to totally undo the post-COVID-19 economic recovery, but they could delay the positive growth and recovery trends the Biden team is touting and call his economic guidance into further question.
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