President Joe Biden goes into next year’s election with a vexing challenge: Just as the U.S. economy is getting stronger, people are still feeling horrible about it.
Pollsters and economists say there has never been as wide a gap between the underlying health of the economy and public perception. The divergence could be a decisive factor in whether the Democrat secures a second term next year. Republicans are seizing on the dissatisfaction to skewer Biden, while the White House is finding less success as it tries to highlight economic progress.
“Things are getting better and people think things are going to get worse — and that’s the most dangerous piece of this," said Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, who has worked with Biden. Lake said voters no longer want to just see inflation rates fall — rather, they want an outright decline in prices, something that last happened on a large scale during the Great Depression.
“Honestly, I’m kind of mystified by it,” she said.
An element to this is that there are a lot of different statistics that can tell a lot of different stories depending on what bits of data you pick.
For instance, most people would probably say that the average person had less purchasing power in October of this year compared to October of 2022. They would actually be wrong, as inflation-adjusted hourly wages have actually increased slightly in that time period (by ten cents, admittedly, but the fact remains that wage growth has been outpacing inflation).
This does not mean that every person has seen a growth in purchasing power, and my loose understanding is that most of the growth has been occurring at the bottom of the labor market (which is arguably a good thing from an equity standpoint).
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/realer.pdf
And this story makes a claim that purchasing power is greater in October '23 than October '22 while omitting the 6.5% rate for '22 and the 7% rate the year prior. Inflation is down this year, but that doesn’t dig us out of hole created during the two prior years.