U.S. President Joe Biden waits to speak during a meeting of his Competition Council in the State Dining Room of the White House in Washington, DC, on March 5.BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/Getty Images
John Rapley is an author and academic who divides his time among London, Johannesburg and Ottawa. His books include Why Empires Fall (Yale University Press, 2023) and Twilight of the Money Gods (Simon and Schuster, 2017).
There’s a handy little metric that political scientists sometimes use to gauge a president’s likely re-election prospects. It’s called the misery index, and it’s calculated by adding the unemployment and inflation rates – the lower the index, the better an incumbent’s prospects. U.S. President Joe Biden’s problem is that even though it’s come down a lot in the past two years, it’s still higher than it was in the later stages of the Trump presidency.
Whether he deserves credit or not, the fact is that under Donald Trump’s watch the economy grew. What did it in for Mr. Trump in 2020 was the pandemic, which sent the misery index soaring just as he was bungling the crisis (as memorably chronicled by comedian Sarah Cooper). Now that the worst has passed, many voters are looking back fondly to the pre-COVID days and wondering why things can’t be like they were then.
So, despite Mr. Biden’s economic boasts at his combative State of the Union address, he can’t hope to win this election on a straight ‘are you better off than you were four years ago’ question, because too many will feel they aren’t.
However, by looking to the future, he may yet have a path to victory. That’s because of a curious paradox revealed in the polls. When asked about the state of the economy and the direction of the country, people say it’s bad. But when asked about their own condition, they report themselves to be doing well.
Former president Bill Clinton’s triangulation strategy in his 1992 election – “It’s the economy, stupid,” as his strategist James Carville famously put it – was rooted in neoclassical economic theory and assumed people to be self-interested. The key to electoral success was to gather as much data about voters, figure out what various groups wanted for themselves, then produce policies with something for enough of them to assemble a winning coalition.
But it may be that Americans aren’t as selfish as Mr. Clinton thought, or at least not as selfish as they were then. The same economic boom that produced AI, the Magnificent Seven and Tesla has led to a corporate concentration that has drained the life from many of the towns and small cities where Mr. Trump built his base. In place of the diners and malt shops they grew up with, people now see box stores, chain restaurants and boarded-up buildings. Instead of Sunday gatherings with the family, there are Zoom calls, since the children have moved to the big cities where the jobs are.
When Mr. Trump spoke of American carnage, he struck a chord with these people who, even if they felt well-off, feared their children wouldn’t inherit the country they loved. Mr. Biden needs to persuade them that the new industrial revolution under way will address these ills – by reviving the life of their neighbourhoods, and by limiting the rise of the corporate behemoths that are starting to dominate the country and its politics. His recent advocacy of a so-called billionaire’s tax seems to have gone down well with the electorate, but he also needs to reassure them about the levels of debt the country is accumulating, because Americans are growing increasingly alarmed at a sum that rises by a trillion dollars every 100 days.
The United States is in the midst of a profound transformation of its economy, with a massive investment in renewable energy, artificial intelligence and a new economic model built around remote working. By their nature, such industrial revolutions are highly disruptive to the existing order. But they also herald a new future that could, if properly harnessed, improve ordinary people’s lives. Mr. Biden needs to tell the story of how this will happen, to make the bold new future feel present, so that voters opt to stay the course and not turn back.
One time-honoured rule in American politics is that an optimistic message beats a gloomy one. However, statistics won’t do it, stories will, and the President must tell one with a happy ending. If he can do that, he’s still in with a chance.