Why Have Biden’s Economic Plans Not Made Him More Popular?

The only real concern I have about Biden’s reelection campaign–outside of Joe Manchin potentially throwing the election to Trump through a No Labels Except Being a Moron run–is that his approval ratings are stuck in the low 40s and just don’t move, despite a lot of really good policies out of the White House. Does it mean that policy just doesn’t matter anymore? I mean, maybe it never did, I think people highly overrate how everyday voters–most of whom who have no idea what they are talking about–have ever responded to policy change as a reason to vote for someone. Eric Levitz considers what this means:

None of this is to say that “deliverism” is necessarily a cogent theory of political success. There are many reasons to doubt that progressive economic reform reliably yields electoral benefits. Historically, voters have exhibited a strong status-quo bias, with public opinion growing more liberal in response to conservative policy changes and more conservative in response to liberal ones. When Barack Obama pushed for the Affordable Care Act, support for universal health care fell to its lowest level in modern history. When Donald Trump pushed for restricting immigration, public opinion on that subject turned historically liberal. More recently, the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade has spurred unprecedented support for abortion rights. It is also worth noting that some of the most progressive legislative sessions in American history were followed by conservative backlash. In the first midterm following the enactment of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs, Republicans gained 47 House seats in the House.

Meanwhile, as Bhargava, Shams, and Hanbury suggest, the collapse of trust in government, culture-war polarization, the rise of right-wing media, and a deepening crisis of loneliness and anomie all threaten to reduce the political benefits of progressive economic reform by rendering the impacts of such policies less visible and salient to beneficiaries.

For all these reasons, it seems doubtful that Democrats can build a commanding national majority solely by improving material conditions for working-class Americans (at least in the near-term, or through politically plausible measures). Realizing progressives’ grandest ambitions for economic reform will require radically increasing popular trust in government, along with a good deal of generational replacement.

Nevertheless, delivering broad-based material improvements may still be the Democrats’ best hope for preserving Biden’s narrow Electoral College majority and keeping a dangerously authoritarian Republican Party out of power. In our polarized era, elections are won at the margins. Tiny shifts in voters’ allegiances can decide the balance of power. It remains plausible that economic conditions exert significant influence over such shifts.

To this point, the many virtues of Bidenomics have been obscured by inflation. But that could change in the coming year. Inflation has been falling for months. Between May 2022 and May 2023, real wages increased by 0.2 percent. The manufacturing investments catalyzed by the IRA and CHIPS Act are just starting to make themselves known. If these positive trends continue, then the median voter should enjoy unambiguous material gains in 2024. It’s entirely possible that such a triumph of Bidenomics could be followed by electoral defeat. But we should wait for that to actually happen before putting “deliverism” to rest.

I do think it is worth everyone considering–very much including on the left where people have long tried to argue that big social programs would lead to massive political benefit–that voters just simply do not respond to policy at all. They’d rather considering whether they’d rather have a beer with George W. Bush or Al Gore. Or maybe whether Hillary’s emails are the greatest crime in human history.