The United States may have never held a presidential election in which the voting public was so badly misinformed. We can blame biased news media, scammers on social media, foreign interference, and politicians who intentionally mislead us. But ultimately, voters must learn to separate fact from falsehood.
Thomas Jefferson said, “Wherever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government.” The good news is that Democrats and Republicans both recognize that democracy is at risk in the upcoming election. Let’s not discover what happens when voters are duped on the issues they care about most.
In the few remaining months before the November election, America’s most trusted experts and organizations should conduct an aggressive public campaign to set the record straight on those issues.
The economy. A new Harris/Guardian poll shows nearly three in five Americans think the economy is in a recession (it’s not — GDP is growing); roughly half think the stock market is down for the year (it’s up more than 12 percent), and half think unemployment is at a 50-year high (it’s near a 50-year low).
Bloomberg points out the number of Americans without health insurance reached an all-time low during President Biden’s first term, and the economy added nearly 15 million jobs during his first three years on the job, more than any president in history, during the same period. Families are wealthier and more financially secure than ever before; income inequality is narrowing, and “family wealth across income groups is more robust than at any point in the new century.”
Although inflation remains a significant concern among voters, Bloomberg says it’s dropping at a speed unmatched in modern history. “America’s cost of living, which surged to a four-decade high during Biden’s first two years, is poised to return to its pre-pandemic level this year,” the company says.
Bloomberg concludes, “Winning a second term should be a cakewalk for (President Joe) Biden given the robust labor market, strengthening household finances, and improving confidence among consumers and businesses.”
Immigration: The Associated Press (AP) points out that former President Trump inflames worries about immigration with falsehoods that trigger “the nation’s deepest fault lines of race and national identity.”
“In his speeches and online posts, Trump has ramped up anti-immigrant rhetoric … casting migrants as dangerous criminals’ poisoning the blood’ of America,” the AP notes. A recent poll shows roughly two-thirds of Americans disapprove of how Biden has dealt with border security.
But as the conservative CATO Institute pointed out in 2021, many of Donald Trump’s talking points are incorrect. Immigrants commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans, for example; immigration into the U.S. is less than that in most other wealthy nations; and the policies Trump employed to discourage immigration were “inherently capricious” and “violate every principle component of the Rule of Law.”
Biden has issued over 500 executive actions to improve immigration policy. Earlier this year, his team and members of Congress reached a bipartisan agreement on the most significant reforms in decades, but Republicans scuttled the deal after Trump voiced disapproval. As ABC News said, “Looking ahead to the November election, it’s not hard to see why Trump doesn’t want immigration reform to pass right now.”
Worsening climate change: Today, twice as many voters are concerned about global warming as those who see it as a non-issue. Their worries are justified. Climate change is a forever threat that already kills Americans and risks the economy. Over the last four decades, major weather disasters have cost nearly $3 trillion. Only five months into the current year, and with experts predicting one of the worst hurricane seasons on record, FEMA already expects its major disaster response budget to have a nearly $1.4 billion deficit by August.
Meanwhile, Biden’s signature climate policy, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), is investing $370 billion in the nation’s shift to clean energy. In the first year after passage, the IRA has resulted in 280 clean energy projects and $282 billion in investments expected to create 175,000 jobs across 44 states.
Mainly because of the IRA, the “energy and climate sector is rapidly evolving” in the United States. The U.S. Energy Information Administration predicts renewable energy, battery storage and nuclear power will account for up to 96 percent of the new power capacity built in the U.S. this year, and solar power production will grow 75 percent in 2025 compared to 2023.
A study published in January concluded that while many voters place issues like the economy higher on their priority lists, the number of people concerned about climate change in both political parties is enough to tip the November election in Biden’s favor. However, a new Associated Press poll shows that the IRA “is not widely known among the general population – and may not be the electoral boost Biden is looking for.”
Worse, one recent poll found a third of voters believe clean energy will have a negative or neutral impact on job growth, the economy and national security. Yet, defense experts point out that climate change is a principal security threat, and job growth in clean energy has outpaced overall U.S. job growth in recent years.
What’s Trump’s position? He still calls climate change “one of the greatest con jobs ever.” He has even offered oil industry executives a deal: he will reverse Biden’s climate-mitigation policies if oil companies donate another $1 billion (about $3 per person in the U.S.) to his campaign.
One of the biggest misconceptions is that Biden has been an ineffective president. Yet historians just issued an “expert survey” that ranks Biden 14th greatest among America’s 46 presidents, behind leaders such as Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, George Washington, Teddy Roosevelt and Thomas Jefferson, but greater than Ronald Reagan and the two Bushes. Trump was last.
America’s democracy is in big trouble if it depends on a well-informed electorate. But a major-party presidential candidate is a serial liar, and the country’s most-watched cable news network has been convicted of it. The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee warns foreign interference in this year’s election will be “more sophisticated and more aggressive in both scale and scope.” Voters can be forgiven for needing some help separating fact from falsehood.
William Becker is executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project (PCAP), a nonpartisan initiative founded in 2007 that works with national thought leaders to develop recommendations on national climate and energy policies. He is a former senior official at the U.S. Department of Energy.