The Information Problem

 Ron Brownstein has a solid analysis of the state of the presidential campaign at this moment. This paragraph stood out to me:

Biden may have an easier time recapturing more of those somewhat negative voters by raising doubts about Trump than by resolving their doubts about his own record. Doug Sosnik, the chief White House political adviser for Bill Clinton during his 1996 reelection campaign, told me that it would be difficult for Biden to prevail against Trump if he can’t improve his approval ratings at least somewhat from their current anemic level. But if Biden can lift his own approval just to 46 or 47 percent, Sosnik said, “he can get the remaining points” he would need to win “pretty damn easily off of” resistance to Trump.

This is not necessarily a bad strategy. Negative polarization should, in the end, help him overcome resistance from his own 2020 voters who have now soured on his presidency.

The problem, for me, is how and why many of the Democratic coalition voters have soured on Biden.

I look at Biden's presidency, and I see a remarkably successful one. I see truly impressive legislative achievements on climate and infrastructure. I see the successful sponsoring of the defense of Ukraine and the beginnings of an industrial policy that will return high tech manufacturing to our shores. While inflation is high, it's lower than just about anywhere else in the G20 group of nations. 

Biden has enjoyed a truly impressive substantive agenda and I think if/when he wins a second term, he would see the benefit of that. Things like infrastructure spending or a successful war on inflation don't show up for a few years. When I see that people trust Trump on the economy more than Biden, it drives me insane, and it shows how problematic the way people view things like the economy is, when making electoral decisions. Trump didn't do shit for the economy, except inherit the Obama Recovery. 

When I read this take on the Reagan Revolution, it makes me fear more than I have been for Biden's electoral prospects. There were a lot of reasons why the economy of the '70s was no problematic, but the decision to embrace Reaganomics was ultimately detrimental to American society. Embracing Trump would be catastrophic, and if people did so because they thought the economy was better under Trump...Jesus.

Yes, inflation is high, but the proximate causes of that inflation were the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. If we are going to blame Biden for pandemic related inflation, then we should blame Trump for pandemic related unemployment. The fact that we are sitting on full employment should outweigh inflation, and the fact that it doesn't is genuinely concerning for the prospect of making an informed choice on who the next president should be.

There's some pretty clear indications that Biden's support for Israel is hurting him with young voters. Hopefully, the Hamas war ends in the next month or two and Biden can use some of his accumulated leverage in Israel to negotiate something better for Palestinians, not that I think that will help him exactly. Some of it is the myopia of leftists. You have Arab Americans saying that they can never vote for Biden...when the alternative is a man who would gleefully lock them into concentration camps before deporting them. Maybe that changes. 

The striking thing, though, is that it seems that Biden is being held responsible for things like Dobbs and the Supreme Court striking down his student loan programs. My guess is that people want him to "do something" about Dobbs, but since he can't, they downgrade his job approval but will vote for him next year anyway. Biden is losing the "vibes" war, and he's uniquely poorly suited to fight on that front as the public facing parts of the presidency are what he's worst at. 

How Americans feel about the economy is fundamentally divorced from how president's actually impact the economy. Yet it makes a massive difference in how they vote. Biden's economic record is probably superior to any other head of government in the period from 2021 until today. The fact that it doesn't seem to matter is distressing.

ADDITION: The fact that Biden engineered a hostage exchange and cease fire in Gaza is something that he will get absolutely zero credit for among the class of voters who are threatening to tacitly destroy American democracy by allowing Trump to win the White House.