The economic populism that Democrats have used, frequently successfully, for decades is being used as a framework for President Joe Biden’s fight with former President Donald Trump as he barnstorms battleground states this week. The likely Republican presidential nominee, Trump, however, may be harder to pin down than your average GOP contender.
As he campaigns, Biden is painting himself as someone who will defend regular people from affluent special interests. Yet, more Americans—including large numbers of Black and Hispanic voters—perceive personal advantage from Trump’s ideas than from Biden’s, according to polls.
Even if Biden succeeds in persuading voters that Trump’s policies benefited the wealthy and companies the most, they might not care as much if they feel they also gained more from Trump than from Biden, thereby undermining his populist claims.
The big challenge for Biden, who met with Teamsters leaders on Tuesday and will visit Wisconsin and Michigan the following two days, could be if voters can put aside their dissatisfaction with his economic policies and support for important ideals in his platform. “You are really hitting on the crux of what a lot of swing votes will be [weighing] going into the election,” said Democratic pollster Danielle Deiseroth.
When confronted with Trump, Biden may use his ample ammunition to present a classic populist argument. A huge tax cut, the former president’s crowning legislative achievement, mostly benefited corporations and the extremely wealthy. The Affordable Care Act (ACA), which has greatly expanded health insurance coverage for working Americans with lower incomes, was almost repealed by Trump in the Senate by a single vote. Under heavy pressure from the pharmaceutical industry, Trump withdrew his 2016 campaign plan to seek legislative power for Medicare to negotiate lower prescription drug prices. His government unwaveringly supported corporate interests on numerous regulatory matters, spanning from consumer protection to environmental safeguards.
Biden has taken a completely new approach. He successfully lobbied for Medicare to have the power to negotiate lower drug prices for seniors. His administration is currently in the process of negotiating lower prices for the first 10 drugs under this programme. Additionally, he had the power to cap yearly out-of-pocket expenses for all drugs at $2,000 and to limit insulin costs for seniors to $35 per month. The enrollment rate has reached historic highs, thanks in large part to the bigger subsidies he approved to assist the uninsured in purchasing coverage under the ACA. A multi-pronged regulatory offensive against what he terms garbage fees has been launched by his administration, which has been the most vigorous enforcement of antitrust laws in recent memory. The extension of the tax credit for families with children was a part of the COVID-19 stimulus plan that was passed in 2021. It was intended to cut youngster poverty in half, but the benefit was removed in the Inflation Reduction Act by West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, therefore it lapsed. A new corporate minimum tax of 15% was included in the measure by Biden.
Meanwhile, administration figures show that since Biden took office, nearly 1.6 million jobs have been created in construction and manufacturing alone. This is due in large part to the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which has funded thousands of projects, and the Inflation Reduction Act, which includes tax incentives for domestic clean energy manufacturing. Separate legislation has also been introduced to encourage more domestic production of semiconductors. During the UAW’s strike against the three biggest manufacturers in the country, Biden became the first president to walk a picket line by joining the union.
Last week’s State of the Union address by Biden and Monday’s federal budget proposal both rely significantly on economic populism. “Overall, President Biden validated issues that economic populists have worked for years to bring into the political mainstream,” commented Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. Among Biden’s proposed policies are an increase to the corporate tax rate, a minimum tax of 25% on billionaires, and the repeal of the Trump tax cuts for families with incomes exceeding $400,000 (while keeping them in place for those with lower incomes). A national paid family leave programme, expanded children’s tax credits, larger health insurance subsidies, a $10,000 tax credit for first-time homebuyers, universal preschool, and subsidies for family child care expenses are all on his agenda. Not only that, but he demanded that Medicare negotiate five times as many pharmaceuticals each year and that all Americans, not just seniors, be subject to caps on insulin and out-of-pocket medication prices.
To further their narrative of Democrats as defenders of working-class families and Republicans as pawns of the rich, Democrats may point to Biden’s programme and the contrast it draws with Trump’s policy objectives. “Our economic contrast is going to be that of Scranton, Pennsylvania, versus Park Avenue,” stated Michael Tyler, the communications director for the Biden team. Since we are challenging a de facto incumbent in this race, we also have the necessary receipts. We must make it crystal obvious to the public what his economic policies were like while he was in government and reiterate his priorities.
For example, the campaign wasted little time in condemning Trump’s Monday remarks on CNBC, in which he hinted at a willingness to reduce Medicare and Social Security. (Defence counsel for Trump countered by pointing out that throughout his lengthy tenure in the Senate, Biden had likewise advocated for cuts to deficit reduction programmes.)
The challenge for Biden in defeating Trump in a traditional populist debate has been significantly exacerbated by inflation and its effects on working families’ capacity to pay their expenses. Prices have slowed considerably from their peak just after the COVID-19 outbreak, but they are still over 18% higher than when Biden became president, and they are even higher for necessities like food, petrol, and rent. And while wages have been rising faster than prices since spring 2023, the cumulative increase in pay has not yet surpassed the cumulative increase in prices during Biden’s presidency, leaving many workers feeling squeezed. “What’s the disconnect between people’s experience and the [positive] economic movement that we’ve seen in the last four or five months?” asked Republican pollster Micah Roberts. The term is “in-fla-tion” in three words. I’m done. It’s not difficult.
According to pollsters from both parties, it is typical for focus group participants to mention feeling like they had more money at the end of the week under Trump’s presidency. “Right before Covid, people were telling us it was the best economy they had seen in their lifetime,” said Jim McLaughlin, a pollster for Trump. He now claims that “They specifically blame Joe Biden for” their heightened financial struggles. If you stand outside a grocery shop, they will tell you that the economy is booming, as McLaughlin said.
Surveys cast little doubt Not only is Biden falling behind Trump economically, but he is also encountering significant scepticism from the same groups whom populist Democratic economic messages often aim to win over. In a CNBC poll last October, not only did White voters say they were better off financially under Trump than Biden by a margin of more than 4-to-1, but so did non-white voters by a margin of nearly 2-to-1, according to figures provided by Roberts, whose firm conducts the survey with a Democratic partner. In the latest national NBC News poll, conducted by the same Republican-Democratic partnership, voters who identified as low-income and working-class trusted Trump over Biden on the economy by a crushing margin of 61% to 25%.
Biden’s problems on the economy are especially acute with Hispanics. In a recent New York Times/Siena College poll, the Hispanic share of voters who said Trump’s policies had helped them personally was more than double the share who said that about Biden’s agenda. In the latest CBS News/YouGov national survey, the share of Hispanics who said the economy was excellent or good under Trump was 20 percentage points higher than the share who said the same about it under Biden. In 2020, Biden won about three-fifths of Hispanics, but in the CBS poll the share of Hispanics who said Trump fights for people like them virtually equaled the percentage that said Biden did. A majority of Hispanics, and even a plurality of Black voters, said Biden’s policies would cause inflation to rise, the survey found.
Roberts said a major part of Biden’s problem on the economy is voters have such a concrete comparison available in their memories of the Trump record before the pandemic.
“I think Trump’s messaging is really simple: we had a policy of creating domestic energy and becoming energy leaders; Biden on day one changed that and look what happened,” Roberts said. “We weren’t spending three trillion dollars on amorphous things that nobody can really put their fingers on. Biden did that, and look what happened to inflation. We had a policy that was strong on the border and immigration. On day one, Biden changed that and look what happened to our border – and by the way, that has economic impact. You can’t not make the contrast and comparison.”
These negative retrospective assessments of the Biden and Trump economic records create huge headwinds for the president. His campaign, and Democrats more broadly, hope to overcome them primarily by stressing their prospective priorities for a second term. “This is not simply a retrospective comparison; this is also a comparison about the competing visions of the future,” Tyler said.
Democrats point out that multiple polls show broad public support for almost all of the key agenda items Biden highlighted in the State of the Union and resistance to many Republican priorities, such as extending tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations or repealing the Affordable Care Act. “Voters—even past Biden voters who disapprove of his economic record—clearly reject what Trump and Republicans are offering,” Democratic pollster Margie Omero said in an email.
In a report released last week, the Winning Jobs Narrative Project, a consortium of liberal advocacy groups, concluded that Democrats’ best chance to overcome voters’ continuing concerns about meeting their bills is to hammer home the populist case Biden sketched out in the State of the Union. By framing the election as a choice between “middle-out” versus “top down” and “trickle down” economics, “we think the president is absolutely on to something central to the direction Democrats should take in this election – which is who gets prioritized and how,” said Bobby Clark, a senior adviser to the group.
After voters were exposed to Biden’s populist arguments, assessments of his economic record improved in the group’s polling, Clark said. But even after hearing that case, most voters in the group’s surveys still gave Biden negative marks for his economic performance, the study found.
That finding may suggest the limits on how much Biden’s prospective agenda can offset voters’ discontent over their actual economic experience during his presidency. To win in November, most strategists in both parties agree, Biden doesn’t need to completely erase Trump’s advantage on the economy because so many voters resist the former president on other grounds, such as democracy, abortion rights, and the general chaos and conflict that he ignites.
Still, Democrats would feel much better about the odds of those other concerns tipping the election in Biden’s favor if he can reduce his deficit on the economy to a more manageable level. To do that, Biden needs positive trends on the economy to persist – in particular, for wages to continue rising faster than prices, as they have since last spring.
But he also needs to persuade enough voters that his agenda will do more than Trump’s to help them make ends meet in the future – even if they mostly believe the opposite has so far been true of Biden’s time in the White House.
Crucial Move: Biden’s Plan to Reconnect with Inflation-Hit Voters…
