Can Biden's Economic Message Break Through the 2024 Noise?

Is the economy under Joe Biden in “shambles,” as his likely 2024 opponent insisted Thursday? Not according to the latest jobs report: Employers added 199,000 new jobs in November, Labor Department statistics released Friday showed, and unemployment fell to 3.7 percent. Wages, meanwhile, ticked up 0.4 percent.

The president’s reelection campaign seized on the stronger-than-expected numbers as further evidence his economic agenda is working. “Joe Biden has now created more jobs in less than three years than any president created in four, cleaning up the economic disaster [Donald Trump] left behind,” Biden campaign spokesperson Seth Schuster said in a statement Friday.

The question for the Biden campaign is whether that message can break through the noise and reach the voting public, which seems to remain pessimistic about the economy and skeptical of “Bidenomics.”

Indeed, Biden isn’t only suffering rough job approval numbers overall; he and his party are polling poorly on the economy specifically. In an ABC News/Ipsos poll last month, 35 percent of respondents said they trusted Republicans more with the economy, compared with 25 percent who said they trusted Democrats more on the issue. An NBC News poll earlier this fall suggested the GOP led Democrats by more than 20 points on the economy: 49 percent to 28 percent. You can only tell so much from polls, of course. But, as MSNBC’s Chris Hayes pointed out Thursday, there does seem to be a real gulf between the way Americans feel about the economy and how it is actually performing.

“People just don’t know the record,” as California Governor Gavin Newsom, a key Biden surrogate, told the New York Times. “They don’t hear it. They never see it.”

It’s not necessarily that the president and his allies have shied away from victory laps. “On my watch we have achieved better growth and lower inflation than any other advanced country,” Biden said in a statement on Friday’s jobs report. But he’s had to balance touting real successes with acknowledging Americans’ legitimate economic anxieties, and his GOP critics have drowned out his measured optimism with much louder messages of gloom. “Just three years ago, our economy was booming, the world was safe, and America was strong,” Trump wrote on social media Thursday. “Under Crooked Joe Biden, the economy is in shambles and the world is going up in flames.”

That’s a dubious claim, of course: Three years ago, the world was in the throes of a deadly pandemic, the nation was in turmoil, and unemployment was near seven percent. But the ennui has lingered nevertheless and been exacerbated by new uncertainties at home and crises abroad. Trump is seeking to exploit all of this to advance his authoritarian agenda, and Biden has been more aggressive of late in trying to counter the right-wing messaging, traveling to the Colorado district of MAGA Representative Lauren Boebert to tout his economic program that she has deemed a “failure”: “You all know you’re part of a massive failure?” Biden said at a manufacturing facility in Pueblo. He should do more of that. Biden can’t ignore the legitimate economic anxiety Americans feel that isn’t soothed by a good jobs report. But that doesn’t mean he can’t brag a little, too.