Andres Leighton/AP Photo
Miranda Padilla holds her 11-month-old son Grayson Sanchez while marking her ballot at a polling center in the South Valley area of Albuquerque, New Mexico, November 8, 2022.
One obvious takeaway from last week’s midterm elections is that despite high levels of inflation, the issue didn’t drag Democrats down to defeat. In more cases than virtually anyone predicted, both the outrage over the Court’s Roe revocation and the rejection of Republicans who’d gone full Trump eclipsed voters’ discontent over inflation when they cast their ballots.
But there’s another reason—an economic one—why Republicans fell short, and it’s received virtually no attention. It becomes clear when we examine two questions buried deep in the AP VoteCast exit poll. In the first, voters were asked how confident they were that they could find a good job if they needed to. In response, 65 percent answered they were very or somewhat confident, while just 35 percent said they were not too or not at all confident.
Voters were also asked “how confident are you that you can keep up with your expenses?” To this, 67 percent said they were very or somewhat confident, while just 33 percent said not very or not at all confident.
Inflation was clearly a problem, then, but for most voters, a manageable one. Even more important, these questions don’t reveal a level of economic anxiety that can turn an election when there are other pressing issues in play.
But how is it that voters felt so confident about getting a good job and keeping up with their expenses? The answer, I suggest, is that the very same economic policies for which Biden has been raked over the coals for causing inflation also created a robust economic recovery in which jobs are plentiful and incomes are rising. The very same $1.9 trillion bill to offset the pandemic downturns—the bill on which every Republican on the Hill voted no; the bill that Larry Summers et al. predicted would have inflationary impacts—also created an economy in which jobs and incomes were, and still are, growing. And they still may, unless the Fed slams on the brakes so hard that growth turns negative.
This isn’t to say that the bill wasn’t inflationary. It is to say that it also gave a boost to the economy—and to middle- and working-class Americans who were the intended beneficiaries of that boost—on a scale large enough to enable those Americans to feel confident about getting a good job and weathering the rising prices.
Dare we say that the much-maligned Bidenomics actually worked? I think we dare.
