Phelan M. Ebenhack via AP
A Now Hiring sign is displayed outside a restaurant, April 1, 2024, in Augusta, Georgia.
Just in case you were feeling unaccountably perky yesterday, the release of The Wall Street Journal’s poll of seven swing states should have brought you suitably down. In the seven states the Journal polled, Biden trailed in six (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania) by between six and one percentage points, while coming in tied in Wisconsin. That these results resemble The New York Times swing-state poll of last November shows that these grim tidings are beginning to settle into concrete.
The concrete isn’t fully hardened, of course, and the increasing focus that the Biden campaign and the media are giving to the abortion issue and (in the case of the media, one hopes) what Trump is actually saying still could concentrate enough minds to enable Biden to squeak through. But the Journal poll’s findings on Americans’ economic perceptions provide further cause for concern. By a 20-point margin (54 percent to 34 percent), the swing-staters preferred Trump to Biden on the question of handling the economy. Where this really becomes interesting, though, is in their responses to their own states’ economies.
Asked to assess the condition of the economy in their own state and then in the nation as a whole, respondents in each of the seven states replied that their own state’s economy was in far better shape than the nation’s. Those who rated their own state’s economy as “not so good” or “poor” did so at rates that ranged from 11 points to 33 points lower than their assessments of the nation’s overall economy. At one level, this shouldn’t come as a surprise: It somewhat echoes other recent polls in which Americans have rated their own families’ economic condition to be notably better than the nation’s.
Neither the swing states’ actual economic conditions nor the partisan makeup of state government seems to have had much effect on the respondents’ answers. All but one of the states (Nevada) have rates of unemployment that differ by less than 1 percent from the national unemployment rate. And Democratic Party policy per se doesn’t seem to be a cause of discontent: Four of the states have Democratic governors, and in another (Nevada again), Democrats control both legislative houses, though not the governor’s office.
That, too, shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. The particulars of Biden’s economic policies—higher taxes on the rich, re-industrialization, paid sick leave, affordable child care and college—all poll very well. It’s only when the name Biden is attached to people’s assessments of economic conditions that those assessments turn decidedly gloomy.
I don’t mean to discount the widespread discontent over high prices generally, particularly of food, and the systemic unaffordability of housing, health care, child care, and higher ed. I don’t mean to discount the fact that the president, any president, is held more accountable for such matters than any state-level official.
But when all that discounting is done, it’s still apparent that the association of Biden with economic conditions brings down the assessment of those conditions. Biden may yet be able to mitigate this by stressing his support for popular progressive economic policies, and the continuation of the recovery (in which his actual record is nothing short of stellar) may help some, too. But looking at this polling suggests that if he’s to defeat Trump, abortion and Trump himself are the themes he most needs to sound.
