Summary
President Joe Biden’s economic achievements—lowering inflation, reducing gas prices, creating jobs, and boosting manufacturing—are largely unrecognized by the public, despite his successes.
His tenure saw landmark legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act, CHIPS Act, and major infrastructure investments.
However, Biden’s approval ratings remain low, attributed to inflation backlash, weak communication, and a media landscape prone to misinformation.
Democrats face a “propaganda problem” rather than a policy failure, with many voters likely to credit incoming President Trump for Biden’s accomplishments due to partisan messaging and social media dynamics.
Yeah this “dems bad at messaging” line of excuses is really tired to me. If things are going good in your life you don’t need to be told by someone that it is, you just know it in your bones.
Conversely all the “messaging” in the world won’t convince us things are going fine when our daily life experience is the opposite.
Dems aren’t bad at messaging because they are bad at getting the word out, it’s that decades of messaging without follow-through with measurable, noticeable increase in quality of our daily lives means we don’t believe the message anymore
If you’re someone’s boss and all they ever do when they fuck up is blame others for their failures and when you bring em in your office they hand you a 10 page document explaining all the work they tried to do, pedantically explaining how you’re and idiot that “just doesn’t see all the work they’ve looked into.” ?? You’d fuckin fire em right?
Inflation is really one of these things where people find out much later that the problem is fixed. For instance, Biden inherited a high inflation regime which baked in about 10-15 percent price increases before he could do anything to stop it. By the time he brought inflation down, prices had increased by something like 20 percent. Inflation has now been brought down to 2-3 percent, but most people will simply observe that prices are 20 percent higher than when he started.
Another big issue is counterfactual reasoning. US inflation was lower than in other developed countries, but people only notice that it was higher than they were used to.
In a nutshell, policy is really complicated. You do not feel the consequences of good policy in your bones.
I am certain this bit here is where we may just have to disagree my friend. It has been so long since we have had bones-deep good policy we have forgotten what that might feel like.
Regardless, this is a lesson the DNC must learn, not you or i. All the 10 page excuses are meaningless if you first aren’t elected to push em, and that’s where they are right now
Yes indeed call me a skeptic, but I do not trust my bones (or any other body part that’s not my brain). Bones and their feelings are the target of charlatans and populist (like Trump).
That simply isn’t true. The right propagandizes doom and gloom to their base every chance they get. Many conservatives live very privileged lives and still convince themselves that the country and their way of life is on the edge of oblivion. The wider that propaganda spreads, the harder it is to get anyone to see any of the actual progress in the world.
It is. All the “doom and gloom” rings hollow on satisfied ears. There must be a real problems people see daily. False reasons for those very real problems are where right wing propaganda does its work