President Joe Biden is working to reverse the narrative on what his Republican rivals see as a major weakness: the economy.
The president spent his first two years in office presiding over stubbornly high inflation that Republicans blamed squarely on Democrats’ pandemic-era spending.
Voters remain as skeptical as ever on his handling of the economy — just 39% approve of it, according to the RealClearPolitics average — but as inflation eases and employers continue to add jobs, Biden is touting that very government spending as the core of what the White House has come to call “Bidenomics.”
Instead of the “trickle-down” economics of Republicans, the White House has begun to say, Biden is building an economy from the “middle out and the bottom up” with investments in infrastructure and clean energy projects signed into law when Democrats had unified control of Washington.
“Reaganomics was based on the idea that if you cut taxes for the wealthiest corporations, the wealthiest people in the society, that at some point, the remnants of this will trickle down to the middle class and the working class,” said Anita Dunn, arguably Biden’s top behind-the-scenes adviser, during a Monday MSNBC appearance. “Bidenomics is the exact opposite. Bidenomics says that the way you grow the economy in this country is you grow the middle class.”
Dunn and fellow adviser Mike Donilon released a memo on Monday touting Bidenomics as part of the messaging push, and Biden will deliver a major speech on the economy Wednesday.
The memo prominently mentions the 13 million jobs added to the economy since Biden took office, a figure heavily influenced by the fact that he entered the White House in the middle of pandemic-related restrictions. For the same reason, total job growth was actually negative during the Trump administration.
Biden, like former President Donald Trump, has emphasized manufacturing jobs while in office. But he also signed into law the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that is now resulting in new infrastructure projects across the country, including a $42 billion investment in rural broadband Biden promoted to start the week.
That has not stopped Republicans from hammering Biden over the economy, in particular highlighting the inflation that peaked at 9.1% last summer and more than two years of negative real wages.
“The whispers about Joe Biden’s mental acuity are now confirmed with the release of his plan to run for reelection on the state of the economy,” National Republican Congressional Committee press secretary Will Reinert said. “Americans hate how their finances remain constantly strained by runaway inflation from extreme Democrats’ reckless government spending.”
There’s no question the state of the economy will play an outsize role in the 2024 elections.
Economic factors have helped shape several elections over the last three decades. A recession in the early 1990s helped Bill Clinton unseat George H. W. Bush, the Great Recession helped seal the deal for Barack Obama over John McCain, and the lockdown-plagued economy of 2020 was a major factor in Biden’s own victory over Trump.
“The public cares most about economic issues,” David Madland, an economist at the left-leaning Center for American Progress, said. He believes the issue will eventually be a winner for the president.
“Biden has a clear and distinct economic plan that’s largely about investing in basic goods and the industries of the future, investing in the middle class,” Madland said. “It’s a distinct plan, and it’s different from what most recent presidents have done, both Democrats and Republicans.”
Madland predicts that as inflation continues to fall — the latest figure was 4% year over year — and the projects funded by the infrastructure bill are completed, the public will start feeling more optimistic about the economy just in time for next year’s election.
But the Biden White House has its work cut out for it with his approval rating on the economy underwater.
Some conservatives take particular umbrage at the term “trickle-down economics,” a favorite of Team Biden, as a way to describe Republican economic policy. Job Creators Network CEO Alfredo Ortiz dubbed the term “a strawman caricature of free market policies.”
“Republicans want money to stay in the hands of small businesses and on main streets, where it can be used productively to create economic opportunity rather than being sent off to Washington, where it is wasted,” he said. “Democrats have no solid response to the longstanding successful American economic approach of free markets, so they try to tar it as ‘trickle-down’ to advance their big government alternative. Recent history clearly shows which economic approach is better.”
GOP presidential candidates are ready to make that case as well. Trump frequently touts the healthy economy that marked the first three years of his presidency, while Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) has the added talking point of bucking lockdowns, something that aided Florida’s economy in 2020 and 2021.
“No honest person believes Biden’s reckless spending has done anything but make it harder for families and workers to make ends meet,” said DeSantis campaign spokesman Andrew Romeo. “Ron DeSantis will use reconciliation to repeal Biden’s disastrous agenda and lead our Great American Comeback. No excuses.”
Whether Bidenomics winds up a compliment or an insult remains to be seen, but both parties will work overtime over the next year to make sure their side’s arguments resonate with the voting public.
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“I’m sure there is someone here from the Wall Street Journal and other publications that are talking about Bidenomics,” Biden said last week. “The measure of what we used to call in the United States trickle-down economics, where if the trickle-down economics resulted — in Democratic and Republican administrations for generations — in making sure we found the cheapest labor in the world, sent the product to — sent the work to that neighbor or those neighbors who have the cheapest labor, and they send back their products.”
“Well, I’m not doing that anymore,” he added. “We’re going to make sure that we, in fact, have a flip of that. We’re sending capacity — here in the United States, we’re attracting capacity to build here in the United States to send product overseas, not the reverse.”
