3 upvotes, 2 direct replies (showing 2)
View submission: Casual Questions Thread
I'm not gonna start a thread with this so I'll just ask it here (I'm sure this gets asked frequently). I'm coming at this from the perspective of a Democratic voter who will be voting for Biden next year.
How does he fix his perception issue on the economy?
If you get into actual economic numbers, Joe Biden arguably has a very strong case to make that he's done well with the economy, but that's is not striking a chord with voters.
That NYT Battlegrounds poll just came out, and I understand it's easy to scoff at a poll 12 months out, but it does appear Biden is genuinely losing ground with young voters and minorities largely due to a perception that he's been terrible for the economy (even if that's not actually true).
Which make sense, if someone is picturing 2019 they're going to think about how their rent was $400 cheaper, they were spending $40 less every time they went grocery shopping, $10 less every time they filled up their tank, and their favorite fast food combo that used to cost $8 might now cost $11.
Obviously those issues go well beyond a President, but it does seem most American's are gonna "feel" they were better off during The Trump years than they are now.
Is the hope just that Trump rearing his ugly head into the arena again will scare those voters back to Biden? Is the only hope just an effective negative campaign against an unpopular opponent?
Or is there any chance Joe Biden can actually win over left leaning voters who are ambivalent or displeased with him?
Comment by bl1y at 07/11/2023 at 14:05 UTC
0 upvotes, 3 direct replies
If you get into actual economic numbers, Joe Biden arguably has a very strong case to make that he's done well with the economy
What do you mean by "actual economic numbers"? Because the economy isn't doing that well if you consider these to be the actual economic numbers:
if someone is picturing 2019 they're going to think about how their rent was $400 cheaper, they were spending $40 less every time they went grocery shopping, $10 less every time they filled up their tank, and their favorite fast food combo that used to cost $8 might now cost $11.
The simple answer to "how does he fix his perception issue on the economy?" is "make people's economic situation better." I'm going to assume most people have a better sense of their personal economic situation than the government does. So if there's a disagreement over how well people are doing, I'm starting from a presumption that folks who think Biden's not doing well are right.
Thus the question becomes "How does *Biden* correct his perception on the economy?"
If my rent has gone up 15% and my food bill is up 10% and gas is up 25% while my wages have only gone up 2%, and someone is trying to tell me my economic situation is actually doing really well, who do you think has the perception problem?
Comment by Please_do_not_DM_me at 07/11/2023 at 02:52 UTC
3 upvotes, 0 direct replies
So the survey is here https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/11/06/us/elections/times-siena-battlegrounds-registered-voters.html[1][2] (You need an account to view it.)
I'm not actually seeing anything too strange here. One of the long term trends we've had in the US is for less educated persons to get poorer. This necessarily means poor people, i.e., minorities, get poorer. White men without college degrees in particular have lost more of their real wages since the mid 80s (edit: than other blocks). See, https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/R45090.pdf[3][4] Specifically page 13,
3: https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/R45090.pdf
4: https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/R45090.pdf
At the same time you see small increases for the wage of women, and minorities (presumably because their wages were so much lower to begin with.)
Now this report is using pre-pandemic data. So we'd need more information. I'll look at Michigan (That's where I live and I like to shit on this place so this will be fun for me.) For example real median household income has declined by about 5% since 2020. See, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSMIA672N[5]. Now since that's a median, persons below the median, so minorities disproportionately, have lost more than 5% real income.
5: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSMIA672N
Again, since I live here, I'm familiar with the prevailing minimum wage and I can do a semi-educated guesstimate of how much it's fallen. (Unfortunately as far as I know they don't collect data on this kind of thing so I have to guess.) Using, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL[6] I get about an 25% increase in costs due to inflation (from Aug. 2017 to Sep. 2023.) At the same time the prevailing minimum wage (again from Aug. 2017 to Sep. 2023) went from about $11 an hour to about $13 an hour. So around an 18% increase. So you'd maybe see almost double the percentage decline in real income for a large number of minorities.
6: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL
So what's the theory? The people who are responding negatively are actually being negatively effected by the our current economy. They're loosing real income and there's not enough movement, or rhetoric or whatever, from the administration to account for that.