Yui Mok/Press Association via AP Images
By now, those of us on the left and center-left have seen any number of polls that alarm or depress us, or both. But a new Harris Poll published this week in The Guardian sets a new OMG standard. To be sure, Harris is run by Mark Penn of No Labels, who is notorious for releasing push polls that make Biden look bad, and any poll of his should be taken with a large grain of salt. That said, the results are not that far off other polls asking similar questions.
At any rate, this isn’t a Biden vs. Trump poll per se, but it sure doesn’t augur well for Biden’s prospects. Rather, it records public opinion on the state of the economy, and even if its margin of error were 20 percentage points, its findings should come as a shock.
It shows that 56 percent of Americans believe the nation is currently in a recession, that 49 percent believe the stock market is down (actually, it’s up), and 49 percent also believe unemployment is at a 50-year high, even though it’s actually near the lowest point in the past half-century.
What’s really striking about the poll is that 49 percent of Democrats say we’re in a recession (as do 53 percent of independents and 67 percent of Republicans). The number also shows even higher percentages of Americans believe inflation is increasing, but public reactions to high prices (by which most Americans gauge inflation) are old news by now.
How are we to interpret these findings, which at first glance suggest our compatriots, across the political spectrum, have confused day for night? To begin, we know that millions of Americans are having trouble paying for such necessities as rent and food and that financial insecurity is a widespread condition of life in these United States—which has led massive numbers of Americans to extrapolate that the economy is terrible.
But how has that extrapolation gone so viral? Whence the vibe in vibe-cession? How have Americans come to judge the current economy so harshly when they once rendered far more positive judgments on economies that were far worse, when unemployment was much higher and rising? Let’s acknowledge the issue of affordability for many basics is real enough to impact a sizable part of the Democratic base, particularly minorities, single women, and the young. But more adverse economic conditions throughout our history have not previously led to dire economic assessments so utterly at odds with the economy’s actual state.
To explain the vibe in vice-cession, I have a couple of provisional and not all that novel explanations. The first is the substitution of social media for traditional media. Social media has a built-in bias for the negative, the apocalyptic, the unedited and uncurated. It’s a magnet for the expression of discontents, both real and imagined. And as the presence of traditional media in Americans’ lives has dwindled, social media has become the place for news, also both real and imagined. It’s no friend to good news and no friend to Joe Biden.
But Biden’s own shortcomings as a communicator, which are partly a function of his age, have also played a role in the vibe-cession, enabling his critics to create a public perception of him that he’s been manifestly unable to overcome. As a number of polls, including the recent Times/Siena poll, make clear, his polling numbers lag those of down-ticket Democrats and the level of support for Democratic economic policies. That means that the Harris Poll’s numbers on the economy are linked, in a reciprocal relation, to Biden’s own lagging numbers: For now, at least, he’s dragging down people’s assessment of the economy, even as people’s assessment of the economy is dragging him down, too. If there’s a more depressing chicken-and-egg conundrum, I don’t know what it is.
Nor is it clear which is the easier to reverse: people’s assessment of the economy or people’s assessment of Biden. Perhaps his June 27th debate with Trump will compel a public rethink on the Biden question, at least in comparison with Trump. If it does, I suspect fewer people will tell pollsters that we’re in a recession. If it doesn’t, I suspect a nontrivial number of delegates coming to the Democratic National Convention in August will be wishing for and thinking about an alternative presidential nominee.
