President Joe Biden goes into next year’s election with a vexing challenge: Just as the U.S. economy is getting stronger, people are still feeling horrible about it.
Pollsters and economists say there has never been as wide a gap between the underlying health of the economy and public perception. The divergence could be a decisive factor in whether the Democrat secures a second term next year. Republicans are seizing on the dissatisfaction to skewer Biden, while the White House is finding less success as it tries to highlight economic progress.
“Things are getting better and people think things are going to get worse — and that’s the most dangerous piece of this," said Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, who has worked with Biden. Lake said voters no longer want to just see inflation rates fall — rather, they want an outright decline in prices, something that last happened on a large scale during the Great Depression.
“Honestly, I’m kind of mystified by it,” she said.
Given that I find the economists roughly on par with weather forecasters, I really think we have to treat it that way. Like Climate change has thrown a huge wrench in existing weather models causing the forecasts to be much worse - I think if the models ever worked(and that’s a big if), things have sufficiently changed to break them pretty badly now.
A lot of our systems, both physical and governmental, were developed for a world that no longer exists.