Bidenomics

By Finbarr Curtis

"We are very proud of Bidenomics."

Swing state voters saw Kamala Harris's endorsement of Joe Biden's economic policies many, many times in Trump's campaign ads. The clip was not only cringeworthy in retrospect. Harris seemed to be cringe laughing at the time, as if to say: "Okay, we know there is no systematic economic philosophy called Bidenomics but we are having some goofy fun with this."

In the wake of the 2024 election, one rare point of universal agreement among political analysts was that voters were not proud of Bidenomics. Hearing that inflation motivated Trump support, political analysts once again discovered that: "It's the economy, stupid." Post-election commentators asserted that pre-election commentators had overstated Trump's existential threat to democracy. Some took Trump's electoral gains across demographic groups as proof that his appeal lay in promises to fix the economy rather than in nativist rhetoric or authoritarian ambitions.

This was not Trump's interpretation. On the campaign trail, he was irritated with advice that he should focus on economic policy. His Madison Square Garden rally was awash in racial, religious, and nationalist grievance. His proposed cabinet appointments are a motley crew of characters whose primary job qualification is to own the libs. 

The reality is that while post-election analysis often fixes on an issue, there is no one thing that motivates voters. Some were drawn to Trump's offensive style while others were repulsed. While Trump made inroads among African American voters, most rejected him. The gender gap suggests that abortion along with Trump's misogynist rhetoric influenced many women. 

People voted for Trump for different, and even contradictory, reasons. His coalition was made up of at least three groups. The first was his base, the loyal Trump supporters variously described as illiberal, or populist, or nationalist, or fascist, or MAGA, or just plain patriotic. The second are Republicans who are no fans of Trump but would not vote Democrat. The third are swing voters who were unhappy with Bidenomics.

Despite their votes, members of the second and third groups often share the view that Trump is a terrible human being. Even many in Trump's base distinguish between their political support and their disapproval of his personal immorality and offensive speech. As I have argued previously, Trump's profane style and willingness to flout democratic norms dramatizes the moral impoverishment of politics to people convinced that liberalism has destroyed the government and that emergency measures are required to protect faith, family, and nation.

Harris's warning against fascism backfired by reinforcing Trump's brand as a profane and immoral strongman who defied ordinary democratic politics to fix the economy and broken government. This could have been especially true for late deciding voters who had not yet decided who to vote for, but had decided that Trump was a bad person.

After a political career that began in 2015 with Trump's calling Mexicans rapists and murderers, and then followed by his ridiculing a prisoner of war, labeling veterans losers and suckers, mocking the disabled, stating that "Islam hates us," funneling tax money into his own properties, funneling campaign contributions to porn stars, bragging about sexual assault, being accused of sexual assault, being found liable for sexual assault, defending white supremacists, recommending that people drink bleach, refusing to concede a lost election, fomenting a riot on the capitol, keeping classified documents in his bathroom, lamenting that Haitian immigrants were eating cats, having multiple high-ranking members of his administration denounce him as dangerous and incompetent, and refusing to apologize for any of this, voters who were still undecided in October 2024 were unlikely to be swayed by a crude campaign performances or reminders that Trump broke lots of rules. 

It is possible that hammering home Trump's threat to democracy was less an attempt to persuade undecided voters than a strategy to turn out the base. But what is the Democratic base exactly? Answering this question is complicated by exit poll data that suggests that Harris did outperform Biden with at least one demographic group: people making over 100 thousand dollars a year.

For those making six-figure salaries, Bidenomics was good indeed. While prices went up by 20 percent, your salary went up by 30 percent. Your house doubled in value. Your 401K is looking great. And while eggs are more expensive, you buy pasture-raised organic eggs for three times the price anyway. 

American politics is profoundly shaped by the reality that the senior political advisors of both parties are drawn almost entirely from this class.

But while Republican operatives might be affluent, they harbor no illusion that their policies will benefit anyone other than themselves. The support they draw from union members will have no impact on their efforts to crush organized labor while in office. JD Vance's Hillbilly Elegy suggests that poor people are responsible for their own lot anyway, and their best bet is to make better choices instead of looking to the government to solve their problems. He does, however, stay true to his working class roots by rejecting the social liberalism of overeducated elites. 

Democrats are more earnest. They sincerely believe that they help working people. When Biden was still running for reelection, the campaign's initial response to economic grievances was to tell people that the economy is good actually and they just didn't know enough about economics to tell. As it is tactically unwise to tell people they are dumb, they abandoned this strategy. Rather than develop new policies or an alternative narrative, however, the Biden campaign appears to have concluded that working class voters lacked economic rationality. How could they persuade people that Bidenomics would improve the economy when it was already good? Therefore, they would direct the campaign away from economic issues and toward the existential threat to Democracy.

What finally got through were concerns about the president's age and his debate performance. Harris provided the solution. She was younger and a more energetic, engaging speaker. She proved to be arguably the best debater in modern presidential history. The debate stage showcased her particular talent for shredding mediocre men with high opinions of themselves. 

But the quick transition meant that Harris inherited a campaign with no plan to improve or even defend Bidenomics. The underlying issue went beyond political strategy. Neoliberal metrics of economic growth have been so ingrained in the common sense of Democratic strategists that they no longer know how to argue for their value. If the numbers say the economy is good, then it is good.

This common sense led to a failure to imagine that not everyone experienced "the economy" in the same way. While GDP is a statistical abstraction for most people, inflation poses a unique existential threat to anyone making under a hundred thousand dollars a year. There is a straightforward rationality to someone whose sees the high cost of living as their greatest grievance, blames the administration in charge, and is willing to give a shot to the guy who promises to bring prices back to what it was when he was in office. 

Harris increasingly acknowledged the high price of groceries, and her campaign was improvising economic reforms up until the last minute. These policies might have been more systematically thought through if Biden had not run for reelection. In open primaries, potential Democratic nominees would have to run against each other instead of Trump. They would have had to confront voters' economic concerns earlier, and this in turn might have invited more profound responses to inequality. 

Maybe. Maybe not. Whatever might have been, what is surprising is that the advocates of Bidenomics did not come up with a message to defend what they believed to be a good economy. It would not have been hard to imagine that in response to a town hall question about whether Biden caused inflation, Harris said something like this: 

"When we came to office in January 2021, we found a country in chaos. Factories were shut down and houses weren't being built. As we kickstarted economic growth and created millions of jobs, demand came back for things faster than they could be made. This sent prices through the roof. Recognizing how bad this was, we passed an Inflation Reduction Act that tried to help with high prices. Since 2022, inflation has come down from 9% to 2.8%. While this is still too high, we have at least made progress and look forward to getting prices even lower. And the factories built in the last couple of years will provide higher-paying manufacturing jobs to help people catch up."

I do not know if this would have been persuasive or if it is correct (Harris cited the Inflation Reduction Act in her town hall, but the causes of declining inflation are more complex). But my point is to reconstruct what would have to be the defense of Bidenomics for someone who believed in it. 

One irony of laments about the visceral decisions of low information Trump voters is that the Harris campaign's oscillating emphasis on either good vibes or existential fear accepted the premise that economic arguments would doom the Democrats. 

So what vibes was Harris running on? The campaign's media imagery emphasized seriousness over unseriousness, competence over incompetence, decency over obscenity, empathy over cruelty, democracy over authoritarianism, legality over corruption, and truth over lies. These are good qualities and the vibes campaign could be why Harris remained more personally popular than Trump up through election day. 

But this imagery did not necessarily undo the GOP's efforts to brand Democrats as affluent, elitist social liberals. While Trump spoke to people's grievances, the Harris campaign doubled down on a narrative of professionalism and success adorned with A-list celebrities. Trump's D-List celebrity lineup and clownish campaign spectacles baited Democratic commentators into exactly the kind of dismissive condescension that played into the GOP's branding strategy. 

While media branding is by no means a reflection of the reality of class alignment or actual economic policy, the contrasting party brands might say something about a visceral sense among Democratic insiders that maybe they were speaking for affluent professionals. The Democratic Party has become the conservative party in the literal sense that it seeks to conserve the existing order. Trump's burn-it-all-down approach to government is not meaningfully conservative, and this is why the Liz Cheneys of the world have found a more amenable candidate in Harris.

Conservative is not necessarily bad. A charitable interpretation of the shift of affluent voters to Harris would be that college educated professionals live and work in places that are more diverse than they used to be, and they see this progress as a reason to reject Trump's politics of racial, sexual, religious, and national grievance. It's also possible that college is not just a class marker, and that it cultivates habits of critical thinking, information literacy, and civic engagement that make it less likely for graduates to vote for a candidate who says things that are false. But this still means that liberals will need to think about what exactly liberalism stands for, and whether they see their job to challenge the status quo or preserve it.

In the end, the biggest beneficiary of Bidenomics might be Trump himself. On January 20th, he could inherit an economy with strong conventional metrics like rising GDP, low inflation, and low unemployment with increasing numbers of manufacturing jobs for workers without college degrees, all while enjoying further cuts to interest rates. On January 21st, his supporters will congratulate him for a miraculous economic turnaround. 

But while Trump feels he has an overwhelming mandate, many who voted for him have mixed feelings. He is likely to have the lowest approval rating of any incoming president in modern American history. Voters in five battlegrounds states split the ticket to elect Democratic senators and a Democratic governor. While warnings about the precarious state of American democracy were not electorally successful, they are not descriptively wrong. Ironically, members of the Trump administration who served as guardrails contributed to his eventual reelection as they kept the president from making unpopular decisions. Trump's biggest debt of gratitude is owed to John McCain, whose vote to preserve the Affordable Care Act protected the president from what would have permanently alienated millions of working class voters by taking away their health insurance.

While his base will remain loyal, voters who just wanted someone to fix inflation might sour on Trump when they learn he has no plan for a fair economy because he believes that no such thing exists. In economic as in all matters, Trump sees only winners and losers. This message can feel refreshing to voters who feel that they have been screwed, and want someone to fight back. Rather than offer solutions to economic inequality, Trump promises the will to win. And in 2024 he came back and won, big league.