Cindy Leonard took a break from the summer heat earlier this month to cool off on the water steps on Pittsburgh’s North Shore. The price was right, she said — free. “With the price of groceries going up, gas, electrical bills, you have to watch what you buy,” she said.
Joe Lyden of Lower Burrell had to scrap plans to take a trip with his wife.
“Vacation is off the table,” he said. “It’s just too much.”
As the country has emerged from the coronavirus pandemic, President Joe Biden has presided over record job growth (more than 13 million jobs) and near-record low unemployment (3.6% in June). He signed legislation to rebuild America’s infrastructure, lower prescription drug prices and encourage companies to open manufacturing plants in the U.S. rather than overseas. Consumer confidence is at its highest level in 18 months. And the government reported Wednesday that annual inflation fell to 3% in June, its lowest level in more than two years.
But ahead of a 2024 reelection campaign where voters say the economy is their top issue, Biden isn’t getting much credit.
Like Leonard and Lyden, 55% of registered voters disapproved of the way Biden was handling the economy, according to a national poll in June by Quinnipiac University. Only 41% approved. In a separate Quinnipiac survey, Biden’s approval rating in the key swing state of Pennsylvania — whose voters could decide which party controls the presidency and the U.S. Senate — languished at 39%, with 57% disapproving of his performance in office.
“If you look at the numbers, a lot of people still feel a lot of economic insecurity, so it's not like people are fat and happy,” said Republican consultant John Feehery, a former aide to two top House GOP leaders. “I find the polls to be unsurprising.”
White House officials acknowledge the problem.
“Just think of what the American people have just been through,” Lael Brainard, director of the National Economic Council, said at a June 29 breakfast in Washington sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor. “They've been through a war that spiked energy prices for the first time in decades, right on top of the longest pandemic, a pandemic that nobody had experienced in their lifetimes. Those are pretty traumatic economic events, and it's going to take a while for people to feel really confident and secure.”
This spring’s fight over the debt ceiling and talk of default didn’t help, Brainard said.
“Don't forget that for three or four months, you know, all the stories were about the threat of default and how Republicans were going to default on the economy and how terrible that was going to be, eight million unemployed,” Brainard said. “The economy actually just continued doing well. But I think having heard about that for three or four months, it may take a while for that to settle in that we've seen the president resolve that in a very positive way.”
Mo Butler, a New Jersey-based Democratic consultant, said that perceptions — and ongoing news coverage of the economy — take a while to change.
“There’s always a lag between what’s happening and what people feel,” he said. “People are still stuck in talking about a narrative that isn’t current and fresh. Once people start covering what's going on today and start feeding people a diet of what's currently happening, you'll start to see perception and reality start to marry. You don’t see that right now.”
The president, vice president, Cabinet secretaries and White House officials have been fanning across the country to tout an improving economy. They even have a name for it: “Bidenomics.” First Lady Jill Biden will visit Pittsburgh next week as part of the administration’s summer economic tour.
“Our plan is working,” Biden said in South Carolina on July 6. “And one of the things I’m proudest of is that it’s working everywhere, not just on the coasts and big cities, like previous recoveries. This time, investment is working, and factories are being built, and jobs are being created — happening in rural America, the heartland, all across America — in communities that have been left out and hollowed out.”
That drew a rebuttal from Ronna McDaniel, chair of the Republican National Committee.
“Pay more, get less — that’s Bidenomics,” she said. “Voters in South Carolina and around the country reject Joe Biden’s failed agenda because they know four more years of Biden means four more years of higher prices, falling wages, and Democrats raising taxes."
Harrisburg-based Republican consultant Christopher Nicholas said Democrats are showing “a lot of gumption to spin a negative into a positive” when it comes to the economy.
“People’s pessimistic feelings about the economy are already baked into (Biden’s) job approval numbers,” he said. “People are being force-fed Bidenomics and saying, ‘I’m still paying a lot for gas, the interest rate on my credit cards is still going up.’ Everyone is still unsettled about this economy.”
Some Western Pennsylvania residents said they don’t see a settled economy either.
“A lot of jobs (are) available, but not the type of jobs you can live on,” said John A. Thompson, a retiree and artist in Wilkinsburg. “The minimum wage should be much more than what it is.”
Jason Cable of Carnegie looked around Mellon Square in Downtown Pittsburgh earlier this month and noticed fewer office workers milling about.
“It’s horrible, it’s depressing,” Cable said. “Where are they? Where’s the people?”
And things still cost more, he said.
“Sometimes it does make you wonder if someone is trying to squeeze out a few extra cents here and there for profitability,” he said. “I thought (the economy) was on the rebound but the inflation came out of nowhere.”
Republicans emphasize inflation to rebut claims that the economy is improving.
“Inflation has outpaced wages for 26 months in a row,” U.S. Rep. Guy Reschenthaler, R-Peters, tweeted last month. “The Biden economy is broken. Americans agree.”
On a conference call with reporters late last month, Bharat Ramamurti, deputy director of the National Economic Council, refuted that characterization. He said wage increases and the $1,400 direct payments in Biden’s 2021 stimulus law passed over unanimous Republican opposition have put the average American family on a stronger financial footing post-pandemic.
“If you just look at the data, it's pretty clear your typical American household has come out ahead in the last two-plus years,” Ramamurti said.
And inflation continues to subside — though it remains to be seen if and how much that will dent ongoing Republican attacks on the issue. The inflation rate, while still above pre-pandemic levels, dropped by more than two-thirds from 9.1% in June 2022 to 3% in June of this year. And the Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index in June rose to its highest level since January 2022.
“You are starting to see that in some of the surveys that refer to people's personal financial well being,” Brainard said. “There, the numbers are actually pretty good. So people are making a distinction. Their own personal financial situations, they're starting to feel good about.”
Nicholas said he expects Democrats to “go back to what helped them last year — talk about abortion more, because they don’t have a clear and unifying message on (the) economy.”
But J.J. Balaban, a longtime Philadelphia-based Democratic strategist and ad maker, said his party has a good story to tell on the economy. By the time voters go to the polls next November, another year will have passed with more shovels in the ground as federal funding enacted by Biden and Congress flows to communities across the country.
It’s incumbent on Democrats “to highlight the good economic statistics so people feel it, because it’s very clear Republicans will try to present America as a hellscape,” he said.
The problem is that unlike former Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, Biden isn’t that good a salesman, Feehery said.
“He’s not a very good messenger,” Feehery said. “Biden doesn't really get credit for being a job creator. He’s a politician and people don't like giving credit to politicians.”
Still, even Reagan initially struggled to tell his story of an improving economy, said New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy — who, like Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, is a member of the Biden campaign’s national advisory board.
“I look back at 40 years ago this summer, even the Great Communicator himself, Ronald Reagan, was struggling to get the message through that the economy had already begun its recovery in the previous year,” Murphy said last Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press. “Ultimately, he went on to a landslide victory the next year. I'm not sure it's going to it's a landslide, but the facts are on the side of the president and his administration. And I think eventually that seeps into the general sense of how the economy is.”
Butler, the New Jersey Democratic consultant, said it all comes down to messaging.
“They need to be more forceful and more cogent in the argument that the economy is humming and moving along,” he said. “You have to crystallize your message and make your messages as simple as possible and repeat it over and over and over again. You hear fragments of a compelling message but you don’t have the message yet.”
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