This Chart Helps Explain Why Americans Are So Mad About the Economy

by Zaid Jilani

You can’t spin your way out of the economic pain Americans have experienced

“The economy is doing well. Americans just don’t believe it,” wrote an ABC News/Five Thirty Eight article from earlier this year.

The article was one of many over the past year that has contrasted positive economic indicators – like the low unemployment rate and strong consumer spending – with surveys that show deep pessimism about the economy among the American public.

“The Economy Is Great. Why Are Americans in Such a Rotten Mood?” read one headline from The Wall Street Journal.

“If the economic statistics are good, why do Americans feel so bad?” was another headline from USA Today.

Some of these articles have a more explicitly partisan bent, associating a strong economy with President Biden.

“US economy going strong under Biden – Americans don’t believe it,” wrote a headline from the Guardian.

The title of a Bloomberg Opinion piece by pundit Matt Yglesias was even more blunt: “Biden’s Economy Is Great Everywhere Except in the Polls.”

All of these articles are correct to notice that there are some strong economic indicators like the low unemployment rate. But to understand why so many Americans are so upset about the economy, it might be worth looking at what’s happened to their wages the past few years.

Matt Bruenig, who runs the left-leaning People’s Policy Project, did just that.

He used data from the Atlanta Federal Reserve to track what’s called “wage growth” – basically, did your wages go up or down – over the past few years, adjusted for inflation.

“In 2021 and 2022, wage growth got to about negative 3 percent there for a while,” Bruenig told me in an interview.

 
He noted that only in February of this year had wage growth become positive for most Americans. That means that during most of Biden’s tenure, people have had a negative experience with their real wages.

This doesn’t mean that everything that happened with wages is Biden’s fault. The economy is complicated, and no president simply has a button they can press to improve things – their policies matter but so do economic cycles, global events and other factors that are not completely in their control.

But it’s easy to understand why Americans, when faced with positive wage trends for virtually all of Trump’s presidency, might view Biden’s presidency as much worse for their pocketbooks.

Polling bears this view out. A recent New York Times poll found that when it came to who they trusted on the economy, 59% of voters chose Trump and 37% chose Biden.

There may be other factors, too, driving the economic pessimism among Americans. Higher interest rates – deployed to tame inflation – are making it more difficult for Americans to purchase items like housing and cars; nearly half of young adults are living with their parents.

Meanwhile, many pandemic-era social support programs – like expanded Medicaid – have lapsed while President Biden’s student loan pause has finally come to an end. Put together, these factors may be creating a particularly gloomy mood among young voters.

One poll released in September found that just 8% said that the national economy is “excellent” or “good.”  63% of respondents in that survey aren’t confident they will be able to own a home.

This isn’t to say that every respondent to national surveys is well-informed about the latest economic trends, some of which are positive. The average American isn’t an economist who can recall the latest unemployment numbers by memory.

But the overall pessimistic mood may reflect the reality of most voters’ lives over the past three years more than pundits are willing to admit. Why then do the media insist everything’s fine?

A Partisan Media Leads To A Lack Of Trust

A recent article by The Economist offers some insight into why so many media outlets have been determined to spin the economy positively while failing to consider the stressors that have created such a negative mood among Americans as a whole.

Researchers at the publication curated a list of terminology that leading politicians use to create a dictionary of Democratic-linked terms and Republican-linked terms. As one example, a Republican-linked term would be “unborn baby.” A Democratic-linked term, on the other hand, would be “reproductive care.”

They then used this dictionary to analyze leading news media outlets to see which set of terms they were using more often. They found that “of the 20-most read news websites with available data, 17 use Democratic-linked terms more than Republican-linked ones.” They found the same trend at all of “America’s six leading news sources on TV, of which Fox is the only one where conservative language predominates.”

They found that this trend had intensified over time. In 2017, MSNBC used about 1.5 Democratic-linked phrases per 10,000 phrases; in 2022, MSNBC was using 5.5 of those phrases per 10,000.

The Economist’s research aligns with other recent research on the topic showing that America’s news media has become increasingly partisan, with much of it aligning itself with the Democratic Party.

One report from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications highlighted a 2022 survey that found 36% of journalists self-identified as Democrats while around 3% identified as Republicans. That’s the lowest number ever recorded for self-identified Republicans among the profession; in 1971, about a quarter of journalists were Republicans.

Why all of this matters is that it helps create a culture within the news media of defensiveness towards the incumbent administration, which is led by Democrats.

As Bill Clinton’s strategist James Carville once said about the election in 1992, “It’s the economy, stupid.” The fate of a president is considered tied up with how the economy is doing under their tenure. Acknowledging the economic stress that Americans have faced over the past few years could endanger President Biden’s re-election – meaning that journalists who identify strongly with the Democratic Party are much less likely to do it.

And when journalists are so partisan, they shouldn’t be surprised that there is now a massive partisan gap in trust in media. The latest Gallup survey shows only 11% of Republicans say they have either a great deal or fair amount of trust in “mass media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly.” While 58% of Democrats say the same, just 29% of Independents share that view, demonstrating the damage that partisanship is doing to media outlets.

Besides sheer partisanship, there’s also an elitist tendency among some in media to downplay the realities of people’s lives using a flurry of selectively curated data and statistics – to show the average person that they don’t really understand the situation, only the pundits like them do.

This extends beyond the economy to issues like crime. The Washington Posts’s Philip Bump, for instance, wrote a piece in October 2022 titled “Crime is surging (in Fox News coverage),” warning that in New York City “murder and shooting incidents are down relative to last year, though violent crime in general is up” – so the real problem is that “last year, and so far this year, Fox News has mentioned crime twice as often as its competitors on average.”

Bump concluded that “most Americans say there is a ‘crime crisis,” but that the real problem was the “endless loop of criminal activity shown on television.”

Even if there have been declines in violent crime in many places in America across the past year, the average American still lived through one of the worst homicide spikes in recent history following the summer of 2020. The fear and insecurity related to that increase will persist even if you can massage the numbers and see that crime is flat or declining in some places. People aren’t simply automatons that can turn on or off their emotions the second that a line flips on a graph.

The Spin Isn’t Working

Trying to tell Americans that their feelings about the economy the past few years are either irrational or irrelevant because of recent positive trends misunderstands how human psychology works.

“I have had some people push back and say well look the graph is positive now so everyone should be good to go…in my mind I’m thinking, have you never had a bad experience in your own life? You don’t know what human beings are like? They don’t just snap right out of it,” Bruenig said.

Imagine a man who lived the following life the past three years: he went through a painful divorce, he was laid off for months at a time, and he was diagnosed with a chronic illness. But in the past few months, he was able to get a new job with decent pay and recently started dating someone again.

If you asked him how his life is, he’s probably not going to say that things are wonderful. He does have some reason for optimism, yes, but he is also emotionally drained from his negative experiences the past few years. He doesn’t know whether he might lose his job again or whether his relationship may once again fall apart.

Addressing the economy seriously would mean recognizing that downplaying the inflation situation as “temporary” or “transitory” as the President and his allies did for months, served to downplay very real economic pain among Americans.

Let’s remember that this pain included new and shocking elements that most Americans had never experienced before. Last year, there was even a shortage in baby formula, parents had to turn to the good will of others simply to find formula that was available for their infants.

And while there are some positive trends now – including, as Bruenig’s chart shows, a positive uptick in wage growth – many Americans still continue to deal with the stress of high interest rates that are making cornerstones of the American Dream – like owning a home – difficult, particularly for young Americans.

If the Democrats and allies in the news media want to speak seriously to Americans about the economy, they should acknowledge the pain they have felt and continue to feel, rather than hoping to convince Americans that everything has been going swimmingly. Sometimes, honestly reasoning with people is a better political strategy, even if it means acknowledging your own flaws.

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