A strong economy could work in the president’s favor, but only if consumer attitudes stay positive too.
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A strong economy could work in Joe Biden’s favor in the coming election, but only if consumers’ attitudes stay positive too.
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
A Sentiment Spike
Consumers have been feeling meh about the economy—which by many measures is doing well—for some time now. Blame it on inflation, or the media, or the state of, you know, life in America. But this month, a closely watched consumer survey from the University of Michigan showed the largest two-month spike in consumer sentiment since 1991. “The improvement was seen across age, education, income groups, political groups … The fact that all of these things are moving together is actually quite unusual,” Joanne Hsu, the director of the Michigan consumer surveys, told me.
Consumers are responding in part to inflation remaining lower in recent months than it has been over the past two years, Hsu added. But, she warned, “we’re still not in a good-vibes situation.” Nearly half of the people surveyed are expecting a tough year ahead—and attitudes are still below where they were before the coronavirus pandemic.
Whether or not consumers’ attitudes continue on this recent upward trajectory could be quite meaningful for Joe Biden’s reelection campaign. Experts I interviewed noted that, in general, a strong economy tends to favor the incumbent. Economic recovery ahead of an election can sometimes spell victory: Gabriel Lenz, a political-science professor at UC Berkeley, pointed to Harry Truman as an example of an incumbent who managed to win after a mediocre economy picked up just ahead of the election, in his case in the fall of 1948. In general, Lenz noted, even unpopular presidents have seen their approval ratings rise as the economy improves ahead of elections.
But for a strong economy to help a presidential campaign, voters need to think the economy is good too, Debra Leiter, a political scientist at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, told me. Leiter pointed to George H. W. Bush’s reelection campaign. The economy took a downturn during Bush’s presidency but started recovering in 1992, when he was up for reelection. He lost, she said, in part because voter perception seemed to matter more than the actual state of the economy.
People tend to pay attention to the economy more during election years, and candidates try hard to sell voters on their narrative of what’s going on with the economy and whose fault it is. Political partisanship is not the only factor shaping voter perception, but it does color how Americans report feeling about the economy—as well as what they remember about recent presidencies, Leiter said. Republican-leaning voters may fondly recall strong growth in the early days of the Trump presidency, when he was spending federal money to charge up the economy. Meanwhile, Democrats may associate Donald Trump with the devastation and unemployment of the early COVID economy. Similarly, voters may apply a partisan lens to the ups and downs of the economy under Biden: Do you blame him for high grocery prices, or credit him for getting inflation under control?
Our current situation—with two men who have recently served as president running—is an unusual one. “We’re looking at an election between essentially two incumbents,” Hsu said. That alone would be enough to bedevil comparisons with past elections. But geopolitics and domestic issues could throw curveballs into this cycle too. That consumers seem more upbeat about the economy is certainly not unwelcome news for Biden, but a lot can happen between now and November.
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Evening Read
‘If Exercise Could Cure This, I Would Have Been Cured So Quickly’
By Katherine J. Wu
In the weeks after she caught COVID, in May 2022, Lauren Shoemaker couldn’t wait to return to her usual routine of skiing, backpacking, and pregaming her family’s eight-mile hikes with three-mile jogs. All went fine in the first few weeks after her infection. Then, in July, hours after finishing a hike, Shoemaker started to feel off; two days later, she couldn’t make it to the refrigerator without feeling utterly exhausted. Sure it was a fluke, she tried to hike again—and this time, was out of commission for months. Shoemaker, an ecologist at the University of Wyoming, couldn’t do her alpine fieldwork; she struggled to follow a movie with a complex plot. She was baffled. Exercise, the very thing that had reliably energized her before, had suddenly become a trigger for decline.
Read the full article.
More From The Atlantic
Culture Break
Listen. In an interview with Green Day, Spencer Kornhaber dissects the modern anxieties present in their new album, Saviors (out now), and the role of politics in punk.
Watch. These 25 feel-good movies our critic compiled in 2020 will warm you up during this chilly season.
Play our daily crossword.
P.S.
Speaking of past presidential candidates staying relevant, Hillary Clinton has weighed in on Barbie’s Oscar nominations (Ryan Gosling and America Ferrera were nominated for individual awards; Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie were not). “You’re both so much more than Kenough,” she assured the latter two women, noting that she knows how much it can “sting to win the box office” but lose out on the gold. My personal thoughts on the film—which still got several nods, including for Best Picture—aside, the brain cells I taxed parsing this post served as a reminder that I might need to look away from the screen and, as the kids say, touch grass.
— Lora
Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.
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