Joe Biden’s campaign is facing a strategic dilemma. Since the president’s job-approval ratings have been consistently low, his path to reelection depends on making 2024 a comparative choice between himself and Donald Trump, his scary, extremist predecessor. That task is becoming more urgent as evidence emerges that a sizable number of voters either don’t remember or misremember the four turbulent years of the Trump administration. But paradoxically, educating voters about the potential consequences of a Biden defeat could annoy and alienate them by pushing Trump fatigue to new heights.
Whenever Biden or his team talks about the economy doing great, voters get confused because they’re not doing so great financially. Then Dem defenders tell them “the economy actually IS doing great so suck it up and vote Biden or you’ll get trump.” Not really a win for voter outreach.
So there’s a really interesting thing that happens with those polls.
If you ask people how the country’s economy is doing, they say it is in the toilet. But, if you ask them how their state is doing compared to that national average, they say it’s well above average.
There are a few different ways to interpret that, but one obvious one is that the situation they can directly observe isn’t as grim as what they see on the news, and so they assume that something weird happened, and the country is terrible (because they trust the news, or memes, or their friends’ Facebook posts, or whatever gives them their information) — BUT that they don’t see it reflected firsthand, because their environment is beating the average.
There are other interpretations of course. It’s impossible to really say. And that is the problem with trying to use indirect qualitative measures to sort out how the economy is doing; you can always (as you did) reframe it into some un-falsifiable emotion based construction that leads only to one inevitable conclusion (things are bad and it’s all Biden’s fault and if you try to tell me numbers for why it’s not, then that makes it his fault even harder). But, I would still assert that measuring the numbers actually is a good way to see what’s happening.
And then people watch videos on YouTube, TikTok, and other social media like this…
Why You’ll Never Achieve The American Dream https://youtu.be/vu7IJ-HDIos
That makes “Trump worse” sound like a “dem defender” problem and not a Biden team problem then.