Authored by Connor O'Keefe via The Mises Institute,
Around two and a half years ago, as the Biden administration was entering what we now know was its final year, the then-president’s re-election campaign was growing frustrated.
According to nearly all the big economic indicators and aggregates, the economy was doing quite well, especially considering the historic shutdown governments had forced on the global economy a few years before.
However, at the same time, the American public as a whole felt very negatively about that same economy. And that negativity was persistent.
That diversion appeared to genuinely baffle some media figures and political strategists who seemed to believe everything you could ever need to know about the health of the economy could be gleaned entirely from GDP and the unemployment rate. But, more urgently, it forced the president’s team to make a decision.
On one hand, they could find some politically useful scapegoat for the public’s economic discomfort and run a campaign on addressing it. That would allow them to meet voters where they were, but it would force them to tone down their aggressive celebrations of all the nominally strong economic data drops.
On the other hand, they could continue to celebrate the “strong” economy and give themselves credit for rescuing the country from the dark days of covid with “daring” legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Acts.
Clearly, the team of presumably seasoned political strategists on Biden and later Harris’ campaign chose to pursue the latter. It went te
