US president’s approval was dragged down by inflation long before poor debate performance focused attention on fitness.
Even before pressure mounted on United States President Joe Biden to withdraw from November’s election due to concerns about his age and fitness, he was losing the support of Americans over his handling of the economy.
Despite presiding over solid economic growth and low unemployment, Biden, who bowed out of the race on Sunday after weeks of turmoil around his candidacy, struggled to convince voters that they were better off on his watch.
In May, weeks before a disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump cemented perceptions of Biden’s decline, just 23 percent of Americans surveyed by the Pew Research Center viewed the economy as “excellent or good”.
Much bigger shares of Americans – 41 percent and 36 percent, respectively – rated the economy as “only fair” or “poor”.
Much of the dissatisfaction came from Biden’s own voter base, with the proportion of Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters who viewed the economy positively falling from 44 percent in January to 37 percent in May.
Worse for Biden, US voters consistently viewed his Republican rival Donald Trump as more trustworthy on the economy – a perception that persisted after the June 27 debate.
In a Pew poll released earlier this month, 34 percent of respondents said they were very confident Trump would make good decisions about economic policy, compared to 17 percent who said the same about Biden.
Biden’s overall approval rating closely tracked his dismal ranking on the economy.
For almost the entirety of this year, the president’s approval hovered below 40 percent, according to an average of polls compiled by the FiveThirtyEight website.
For nearly all of this period, Biden also trailed Trump as the preferred pick for the 47th US president.
While Biden could point to a strong economic record by many measures – including the fastest growth of any major advanced economy and the creation of 15.7 million jobs – his administration also got saddled with the blame for the highest inflation since the early 1980s.
Inflation topped the list of concerns for Americans in 2022 and 2023, according to Pew, and as recently as May, nearly 62 percent of respondents said it was still a “very big problem”.
While inflation has declined sharply from its peak of 9.1 percent in June 2022, it is still hovering at about 3 percent – above the US Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target.
And while the pace of price growth has slowed, consumers are still paying much more today than they were just a few years ago.
Since Biden took office in 2021, prices have risen by more than 19 percent.
This helps explain why 65 percent of adults surveyed by the Federal Reserve last year said changes in prices had negatively impacted their financial situation, even as 72 percent said they were “doing at least okay financially”.
At a similar point in Trump’s presidency, prices had only risen about 5 percent – a major factor why more Americans recall feeling better off under his presidency.
In a CBS News poll released in February, 65 percent of respondents said the economy was good under Trump, compared to 38 percent who said the same about conditions under Biden.
While COVID-related supply chain disruptions that drove much of the inflation spike were largely out of Biden’s control, most Americans blame inflation on government policies, according to a study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in May.
The public also views higher inflation as an “unambiguously negative” phenomenon, even when it can signal greater economic growth, while there is a “widespread belief that managing inflation can be achieved without significant trade-offs, such as reducing economic activity or increasing unemployment”, according to the study.
While wages are again growing faster than inflation after falling behind price growth during the pandemic, they have yet to catch up with where they were at the start of Biden’s tenure in real terms.
On Friday, Heather Long, a columnist for The Washington Post who covers the economy, summed up the difficulty Biden faced trying to sell a positive economic message.
“Overall, Biden deserves more credit for this strong economic rebound. But he and his team failed to really acknowledge the pain of higher prices (or show they were doing much about it in 2022 and 2023),” Long said in a post on X.
“This is a key economic lesson going forward: Americans really hate inflation.”
