Biden’s powerful electoral message emerges

President Joe Biden delivered what the New York Times described as a “ferocious condemnation” of Donald Trump on Friday at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. Biden framed the stakes in the coming election as deciding whether our freedoms will continue in a constitutional republic whose future is on the line.

Biden argued that America can’t afford to have a president like Donald Trump, whose Supreme Court appointees have already taken away reproductive freedom, and who could well put on the chopping block other rights that have been constitutionally guaranteed since 1789.

Plainly, however, democracy will not be his only theme in the months ahead. Over time, Biden’s campaign will emphasize its belief that voters are still bound by the traditional political gravity of a good economy.

Regarding Biden’s focus on the fight for American democracy, the president raised the curtain on his campaign by declaring that American “democracy is on the ballot. Your freedom is on the ballot.”

On the same day that the Supreme Court decided to review the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling that Trump should be removed from the state’s primary ballot as an insurrectionist, Biden in effect brought that characterization forward, comparing what Trump did after the 2020 election to what lies ahead: “Trump is trying to steal history, the same way he tried to steal the election,” Biden said. “It was on television. We saw it with our own eyes.”

The president put the question before the voters in easy-to-grasp moral terms: “We all know who Donald Trump is. The question is: Who are we?”

In elections, of course, even the starkest moral choices live within a context of our tangible lives, most importantly our ability to put food on the table and pay the bills. That is where, down the line, Biden will hammer just as ferociously on his second theme: He has presided over a robust economic recovery that is producing real wage increases and growing consumer confidence.

As Axios Markets summarized it on January 3, “The U.S. boasts the strongest economy of any rich nation. The much-predicted 2023 recession failed to appear, employment has remained robust, real wages have been rising, and the outlook for 2024 is similarly healthy.”

Let’s look at five areas where that success, presuming it continues, will be impossible for voters to ignore.

1. A full recovery from the pandemic economic downturn. Economist Paul Krugman put it this way in his January 1 New York Times column: “The big question in the years that followed [the pandemic] was whether America would ever fully recover from that shock. In 2023 we got the answer: yes.”

The Treasury Department reported in October that the percentage of increase in America’s second quarter GDP in 2023 compared to 2019 was 6 percent, more than double that of every major country in Europe and of Japan.

How did that happen? Any objective economist would recognize the role of Biden’s success in getting Congress to pass measures like the Bipartisan Infrastructure and Jobs Act; the Chips and Science Act, aimed at reducing reliance on foreign microprocessor supply chains; and the Inflation Reduction Act, focused on creating 9 million jobs and investing billions in clean energy production. These bills have expanded America’s manufacturing capacity, stoking sustained economic growth.

2. Rapidly cooling inflation. It is remarkable to have inflation down to near normal at a time of full employment and robust economic growth. The latest report had annual inflation dropping to 3.1 percent, dramatically down from its 9 percent peak in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and supply-chain disruptions. Current annual price increases are only slightly above the 2.5 percent annual average for the 30 years before the pandemic.

All of this shows up at gas stations and grocery stores. Prices at the pump are down to $3 per gallon for the majority of Americans. Don’t look now, but people are noticing — a turnaround has begun in what Americans tell pollsters about the economy.

One more thing we shouldn’t forget: Biden’s success in pressuring drug companies to lower prices on insulin to $35 per month for the growing number of Americans with diabetes.

3. Real wage gains for workers. When rising pay exceeds inflation, workers experience “real earnings increases.” From November 2022 to November 2023, real earning increases averaged 1.4 percent.

Growth in purchasing power helps explain why Americans spent 3 percent more this holiday season than last, a telling sign of consumer optimism on the rise. That confidence is likely the leading indicator for good economic news in 2024.

4. The “soft landing.” Predictions of a recession in 2023 were a bust, and the consensus outlook is that there will be no recession in 2024. While the Federal Reserve’s management of monetary policy deserves major credit here, Biden’s policies are a key part of the success.

5. A predicted start to recovery in the housing market. Greg McBride, chief financial analyst for Bankrate, a personal finance publisher for the banking industry, says, “We’ve turned a corner [in mortgage rates], with the Fed done raising interest rates, inflation coming down and modest economic growth expected in 2024.”

According to Forbes reporting on January 4, the Mortgage Bankers Association predicts that “total mortgage origination volume will increase” nearly 20 percent by the end of 2024, and “the home-builder outlook, which had been on a downslide, is trending back up.”

Given the important place that the housing market occupies in the American economy, a slow and steady recovery bodes well for the country’s economic well-being in 2024.

It’s unfortunate that our view of the election is skewed by too-early “horserace” polls that often report results not from likely voters but from registered voters, including those who tend not to vote at all. According to the great election prognosticator Larry Sabato and his University of Virginia Center for Politics, Biden appears to be in better shape than Trump in the Electoral College, with 260 electoral votes deemed safe or lean Dem states, 235 safe or lean Republican, and 43 toss-up votes in states that were all won by Biden in 2020.

Placing bets 10 months before an election is best left to those who believe their next ticket will win the lottery. The election winner will depend on unpredictable events, on what we citizens do and say between now and then — and especially on which candidate gets their voters to the polls.

But don’t count out Bidenomics just yet.

Dennis Aftergut is a former federal prosecutor and civil litigator, currently of counsel to Lawyers Defending American Democracy.