July 15, 2024
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Recent polls show that the economy is still chosen by more voters than any other issue as the most important in this election. A recent Washington Post/Schar School survey shows this to be true also for the swing voters in the swing states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — the people who are the most likely to decide the presidential election by their voting choices, or choice to stay home.
If we look at the data as economists do, it is clear that this presidency has been quite successful compared with the prior presidential terms in more than half a century. Exhibit A: unemployment has been below 4 percent for 28 consecutive months, the longest in more than 70 years.
This by itself is a very important achievement. As economist Dean Baker has pointed out for this and previous episodes of low unemployment, real wages not only grow faster but inequality is also reduced. In this recovery, he notes, “The real wage (inflation-adjusted) for workers in the bottom decile of the wage distribution rose by 12.1 percent from 2019 to 2023—and this was following decades of stagnation.” And record lows have been hit for the wage gap between Black and white workers, as well as unemployment rates for Black and Hispanic Americans.
Yet Democrats have not gotten credit for these and other gains — which were achieved under difficult circumstances. Polling data shows Trump pulling ahead of them on the economy, and apparently succeeding, at least to some degree, in blaming them for the whole inflationary episode since the second quarter of 2021. Here again, economists would disagree, as the inflation is understood as overwhelmingly a result of supply disruptions from the pandemic and recovery that followed. Inflation has declined from its peak of 9 percent annually two years ago to 3.3 percent in May, and it is expected to continue to decline further. This surge in inflation was not brought about by macroeconomic policy choices, and it is pretty much over; it’s possible that by the time the election arrives in 120 days, this will be more widely understood by the public.
The Washington Post/Schar survey finds that the swing voters in swing states put “Threats to Democracy” in second place in terms of most important issues. Here we must recognize an increasing partisan divide that seems to have reached a new, more structurally based phase. American democracy, even after the Second Reconstruction of the Civil Rights movement and legislation, has always been limited by various constitutional and legal impediments. These include the electoral college, the Senate (where a 50-50 split in 2022 had Democrats representing 43 million more people than Republicans), and the filibuster on top of that; the ease with which voter suppression and gerrymandering of congressional districts can disenfranchise voters.
Add to this the capture (and corruption) of the Supreme Court, and increasing right-wing appointments in other parts of the judiciary, which accelerated under Trump.
As Ari Berman describes the process in his book Minority Rule, after Samuel Alito was appointed to the Supreme Court by George W. Bush, “GOP-appointed judges reliably supported Republican efforts to tilt the rules and institutions of democracy in their favor … which in turn helped Republicans win more elections and appoint more judges, with one undemocratic feature of the system augmenting the other.”
Thus a new stage of political polarization has been created. It goes beyond the polarization on a set of political, economic, and social issues on which there is disagreement between the two major parties. It is an antagonism based on conflicting interests in which one of our two major political parties has an enormous stake in the continued destruction of democracy through consolidation and even expansion of minority rule. Whereas the other has the opposite need — political democratization — in order to pursue most of its goals, and perhaps for its own political survival.
