Important people love to have things named after themselves: art museums, libraries, automobiles, even healthcare policies. Just don’t put their name on something people dislike.
President Joe Biden decided earlier this year to claim ownership of “Bidenomics,” the shorthand term Yahoo Finance and other news outlets use to describe Biden’s economic policies. At first he said of Bidenomics, “I don’t know what the hell it is.” But then, in June, Biden said, “It’s fine, because it is my policy.” For the next several months, Biden declared over and over in speeches on the economy, “Bidenomics is working.”
But now “Bidenomics” is on hiatus. NBC News recently reported that the term hasn’t shown up in a Biden speech since Nov. 1, even though Biden continues to travel the country touting his economic successes. The White House still uses the term to frame Biden’s economic plan, but Biden himself has stopped saying it. So maybe it will return to Biden’s vocabulary. Or maybe it’s gone forever.
It’s no secret why Biden’s team might be torn about “Bidenomics” — the public thinks it’s a failure. Back in June, Biden had good reason to think the nation’s sour outlook on the economy was likely to improve. Inflation was coming down quickly, while the job market remained strong. As price hikes dissipated, paychecks would go further and people would feel better.
Those trends have continued, with the annualized inflation rate dropping from a peak of 9% last year to just 3.2%, which is nearly out of the danger zone. Real income, adjusted for inflation, went from negative to positive over the summer. Families who were losing ground to inflation started regaining it.
But Biden’s weak approval rating hasn’t budged. It sank as inflation was rising, but never rose as inflation was falling. It’s now at around 38%, same as at the nadir of 2022, when inflation peaked. Voters soured on Biden as inflation was wrecking their budgets, but they haven’t forgiven him now that inflation is on the wane.
So Biden seems to have an intractable problem as he campaigns for another four years in office. It’s hard to imagine that banishing a single term, “Bidenomics,” will make any difference to voters fed up with price shocks. But the verbal dilemma reflects the much bigger political problem of how to convince voters with a recessionary mindset that things aren’t all that bad.
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As Biden continually points out, job growth during his term has been the strongest under any president, ever, and the economy just turned in banner GDP growth of 5.2% in the third quarter. Gas prices have fallen into a range that’s arguably normal and every prediction of a recession during Biden’s presidency has turned out to be flat wrong.
All of it to no effect. The most alarming sign to Democrats isn’t Biden’s sagging approval rating, but polls that show him losing to former President Donald Trump in swing states likely to determine the winner of next year’s election. It seems impossible: Trump comes off as increasingly unhinged, he’s facing 91 criminal charges in four different cases, and he trails railcars of baggage from the Jan. 6 riots at the Capitol. Yet he’s polling ahead of a president who can boast about a 3.9% unemployment rate.
So some Democrats think Biden should just stop talking about the economy. As the New Yorker recently pointed out, some strategists think Biden should tone down his economic cheerleading, even though there really is a factory boom, a potent green energy transition, new momentum for labor unions, and rapidly improving inflation.
Instead: Highlight everything bad about Trump, including radical new ideas such as adding a new tax on all imports, firing much of the federal bureaucracy, repealing the Affordable Care Act (again), and pardoning himself. If you can’t persuade people they’d be better off under Biden, then try convincing them they’d be worse off under Trump.
It’s possible and even likely, of course, that inflation will fall even further and the psychic scarring of the last three years will wear off by Election Day 2024. But many thought that would have happened by now. The specter of inflation casts a long and scary shadow, it turns out, and when people hear “Bidenomics,” they seem to conjure $5 gas and a $16 hamburger. So best to dissociate the incumbent from that, with less than 12 months to rehabilitate the name not spoken.
Rick Newman is a senior columnist for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Twitter at @rickjnewman.
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