President Joe Biden wants to talk about falling inflation. Whether voters believe him could decide the outcome of the 2024 election.
Biden likes to point out that inflation has tumbled from its high of 9% in June 2022, even claiming it was that high when he came into office. But prices are still rising and are far above where they were when Biden entered the White House.
“On Wednesday, the country hit a sad milestone: Inflation under President Biden hit 20%,” Job Creators Network CEO Alfredo Ortiz said following the latest consumer price index report. “As a result, ordinary Americans face a cost-of-living crisis and declining living standards, with price increases outpacing wages.”
With that figure in mind, Republicans are going to harp on “Bidenflation” as an evil force zapping away earnings regardless of what happens from here until Election Day.
“Not one thing is cheaper under Crooked Joe — food, gasoline, cars, trucks, rent, and mortgages are all through the roof,” Trump said in a video released Wednesday morning. “Biden’s price hikes are killing the American dream.”
Biden is still holding out hope the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates before November, giving him a win he can sell on the campaign trail as “Bidenomics.” The April CPI report was a step in the right direction as inflation fell slightly to 3.4% year-over-year.
“Inflation has come down very significantly,” David Madland, an economist with the Center for American Progress, said. “It’s pretty low, and if you look at the latest news, in certain ways, it’s really quite low. The question is what the Fed will do about it.”
The Fed’s target inflation rate is just 2%, meaning prices are still rising faster than the agency would like. But Madland thinks an interest rate cut before the fall is a realistic proposition.
On the wider issue of what spiked inflation in the first place, he pointed to supply chain crunches brought on by lockdowns in 2020 and 2021.
“Inflation rose in every country, no matter what response they had to COVID-19,” he said. “If you compare the U.S. inflation rate to any other country, you’d say we are doing pretty well. So presumably, Biden has something to do with why we are doing better than most other countries. He should get some credit.”
Republicans point to other factors as the cause, especially spending bills like the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, which Congress passed in March 2021 with no Republican votes. Even if consumers don’t blame government spending, most will remember how much things cost four years ago.
The time to change those perceptions may be closing. RealClearPolitics analyst Sean Trende wrote last week that “the political science literature is pretty consistent that this is the time when the electorate’s views about the election start to harden, particularly with respect to the economy.”
Biden is focusing on the positive, which is that inflation is falling. In fact, he has claimed twice that inflation was at 9% the day he took office when it was actually 1.4% and started rising later in the spring.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre defended her boss’s comments during Wednesday’s news briefing.
“The point he was making is that the factors that caused inflation were in place when he walked into the administration,” she said. “The pandemic caused inflation around the world by disrupting our economy and breaking our supply chains.”
A reporter had asked if Biden was deliberately misleading the public or if he just didn’t realize that inflation was at 1.4% when he took office.
“Reopening after the pandemic unavoidably increased inflation by unleashing pent-up demand,” Jean-Pierre continued. “Annualized core CPI in the second term of 2021 was 9%. So he was talking about the factors that were in place that led to that.”
Biden’s approval rating on the economy overall is 39% but falls to 34% when pollsters ask about inflation alone. A recent ABC News-Ipsos poll found that Biden and Trump are neck and neck but that Trump leads on the economy.
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The Biden campaign will continue promoting other economic figures, such as unemployment which remains near historic lows, and the more than 15 million jobs that have been added to the economy since he took office. But it will also be closely watching the monthly inflation reports, as will much of the electorate.
“We want to make sure that we’re fighting inflation and continue to do so,” Jean-Pierre said. “And so we understand we have a lot more work to do. We get that.”
