Biden’s Economy Is Great Everywhere Except in the Polls. By Matthew Yglesias

Biden’s Economy Is Great Everywhere Except in the Polls. By Matthew Yglesias

(Source: Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll)

As the US economy continues to improve, President Joe Biden continues to not get credit for it. Only 35% of voters in seven swing states trust Biden on the economy, according to a Bloomberg/Morning Consult poll, with 51% saying it was better under Donald Trump.

This is undoubtedly a frustrating situation for the president, his campaign and Democrats overall. But they can take solace, if that’s the word, from the fact that Biden is doing better than most of his peers around the world. The American public’s discontent may not be about Biden-specific issues such as his age, his party or his dog — it’s just part of a global trend of bitterness and anger toward almost all incumbents.

How’s that for optimistic?

Yes, Biden’s approval rating in another Morning Consult survey is a dismal 40%. But that’s better than Canada’s Justin Trudeau (33%), the UK’s Rishi Sunak (28%), France’s Emmanuel Macron (26%), Germany’s Olaf Scholz (25%) or Japan’s Fumio Kishida (22%). The only leader of a G-7 country with better numbers than Biden is Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, at 44%. Not coincidentally, Meloni took office only about a year ago — mostly after the major inflationary episode of 2021-2022 had begun to improve.

For everyone else, the good news is that the inflation situation is improving. The bad news is that the public is still upset about the inflation that already happened, and is in no mood to forgive and forget.

Consider that in Poland, a coalition of centrist and liberal parties just ousted the country’s long-serving right-populist governing party, while in New Zealand, the right just won a landslide, booting a progressive government that had won global plaudits for its handling of Covid. Just across the Tasman Sea, Australia has one of the most popular incumbent heads of government in the developed world: Anthony Albanese, who took office in spring 2022 after defeating unpopular conservative incumbents.

In other words, the trend is clear: Incumbents of all ideological flavors are losing everywhere and are almost universally unpopular. The only exceptions are newly elected governments that don’t have the stink of inflation on them.

On one level, this makes sense. Why should voters give Biden credit for whipping an episode of inflation that they believe he created in the first place?

On another level, it’s crazy. Fresh data released by the Federal Reserve last week confirms that Americans’ inflation-adjusted net worth surged between 2019 and 2022, and real incomes are up as well. There’s plenty of room to debate and even second-guess the stimulative policies enacted during Covid, but it’s just not the case that inflation has left people worse off than they were before. The labor market recovered rapidly and robustly from pandemic disruptions.

Of course, hectoring the public that they should be more appreciative of what they have is not a great campaign message.

Then again, Biden’s messaging is probably working better than most people realize — and his much-discussed age may be overblown as an issue. The evidence is that essentially everyone else living through the same set of circumstances is doing even worse.

Under the circumstances, probably the best thing that Biden has going for him is that Election Day is more than a year away. It’s at least conceivable that voters will eventually forgive and forget the inflation of the past.

It’s also conceivable — likely, even — that they won’t. The inflation rate will fall, but there will be no reversals of the big price increases of 2021-22.

In which case, Biden’s best shot at winning may be simply being fortunate in his opponent. Republicans aren’t planning to run a fresh-faced outsider onto whom the public can project its hopes and dreams. Donald Trump is a known and disliked quantity who is more plagued with scandals and legal problems than he was at any time during his presidency.

A yearlong campaign focused primarily on criticizing Trump sounds depressing and uninspiring — and it will be. But virtually no incumbents in any rich democracies have found a way to make themselves popular. This reality calls into question the premise that there is any magic messaging solution.

None of this, I concede, is especially comforting to Democrats. But it should be bracing. It’s not just Biden’s poll numbers that are bad — it’s those of incumbent governments across the Western world. Deep, broad and profound forces are pulling them toward defeat, and they are operating with very little margin for error.

The president’s campaign for reelection is bound to be an uphill fight. His campaign is going to need to muster real discipline to defend the administration’s record and avoid getting embroiled in extraneous new controversies. Despite a greatly improved economic situation, the political fundamentals don’t look good for the White House. As they say on Wall Street: Past performance is no guarantee of future results.