Nick Piacente/Sipa USA via AP Images
A sign advertising a $3 billion investment from the Inflation Reduction Act is seen in Baltimore, October 29, 2024.
By every economic metric, three signature achievements of the Biden presidency were a resounding success. Its infrastructure bill has led to long-overdue repairs and new construction of the nation’s roads, bridges, and digital interconnectors as well. Its CHIPS Act kick-started semiconductor production, a critically important field for the nation’s technological performance and security, which had been ceded to other countries. And the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act yielded a boom in new factory construction, in which America had lagged for decades as Wall Street and major corporations had preferred to offshore production to anyplace where labor was cheaper.
By every political metric, however, American voters appeared largely indifferent to these achievements when they went to the polls. A survey by Aurelia Glass and David Madland for the Center for American Progress, released this morning, shows that voters in the 2024 election who lived in counties where these projects were located did reward Kamala Harris for these investments, but by margins that were all but microscopic. For every new infrastructure, semiconductor, or factory project that had been announced to be going up in their county, Kamala Harris’s vote share rose by three ten-thousandths of a percent (0.028 percentage points) over Joe Biden’s vote share in 2020, while Donald Trump’s vote share declined by a corresponding three ten-thousandths of a percent (0.026 percentage points) from his 2020 vote share. If a country received multiples of these projects, Harris’s increase in vote share over Biden increased accordingly. Four such projects in a county boosted her margin to 0.1 percent over Biden’s in 2020.
These figures shouldn’t come as a surprise. To begin, they concern all such projects that had been announced, and many of them were not yet actually under way. That said, many of them were indeed under way, and had not moved the needle all that much higher, either. Factories in particular take a naggingly long time to be built, and even more to get up and running to their full productive capacity. Many of us who were writing about the various Biden industrial policies during his presidency frequently noted that the time lag between the announcement of new manufacturing and the actual job creation it would bring was considerable.
There were other Biden proposals that would have effectively put money a lot more swiftly into people’s pockets: the expanded Child Tax Credit (which Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia refused to extend beyond one year) and key components of Biden’s Build Back Better program (affordable child care, free community college) that never made it through the Senate at all. Biden himself understood the speed differentials between direct social provision and industrial revitalization; that’s why he initially refused to sign his infrastructure bill unless Congress also enacted his child care and other such programs. As these bills could have passed through the filibuster-free reconciliation process, it wasn’t Republicans but right-wing Democrats in the House (like New Jersey’s Josh Gottheimer) and the Senate (like Manchin, who’ll be remembered as the man who single-handedly almost doubled child poverty) who killed them.
When your news source is Sean Hannity or Joe Rogan, you’ll miss the news about the elimination of potholes from your local streets or interstate.
The study’s authors note that previous research on federal spending in localities generally showed somewhat greater impacts, though a good deal of that previous research dealt with projects that were already in progress or actually completed, not just announced. Still, there are other reasons, outside the scope of this CAP study, that doubtless led to the low level of political impact of these projects.
If ever there was a president who initiated such projects on a wholesale basis and reaped wholesale political gains from them, it was Franklin Roosevelt. But Roosevelt’s success wasn’t simply a function of the size of his projects, which included providing federally funded jobs (chiefly in infrastructure) to more than 10 percent of the workforce in the depths of the Depression. It was also a function of his ability to sell such programs to the public. Roosevelt was a charismatic figure and a supremely effective communicator, to which the huge audiences for his radio fireside chats clearly attest. Biden, by contrast, had none of Roosevelt’s charisma even before the effects of aging limited his capacity to deliver impactful messages.
The CAP study, I hasten to make clear, doesn’t deal at all with any individual’s strengths or weaknesses as a messenger of federal policy. It does note, however, that “the strength of messaging about federal policies in particular plays a crucial role” in the public’s awareness and appreciation of those policies. It cites a study of previous elections that showed the frequency of messaging had a greater effect on voters than the actual size of the projects, and a previous CAP study that showed even when voters were aware of the presence and considerable positive impact of a particular federally funded project, they didn’t know that it was federally funded.
I suspect that the dearth of messaging due to Biden’s inability to implant the coming of such projects on public consciousness was further compounded by the disappearance of local news media over the past couple of decades as well. When your news source is Sean Hannity or Joe Rogan, you’ll miss the news about the elimination of potholes from your local streets or interstate, and most certainly the news that it was federal dollars that paid for it.
Moreover, even if enlightened industrial policy were to generate a manufacturing renaissance in the future, the ongoing automation not only in those factories but in the construction of those factories will mean that fewer workers will be required, which could also limit the political impact of such projects. Fifteen years ago, the then-CEO of U.S. Steel told me that it took two workers to produce the same volume of steel that had required ten workers when he’d started in the industry. Anyone looking at the floor of a steel mill today, who’s also seen photos of the floors of mid-20th-century mills, won’t dispute that assertion.
As to the “multiplier effect” that manufacturing has on local economies—with factory workers spending a portion of their pay to boost local businesses—the studies that have shown such effects to be significant were largely conducted at a time when factories were substantially unionized, and the pay differential between production and service-sector workers was therefore considerable. As the share of factories paying a union wage has plummeted, that pay differential has plummeted with it.
None of this is to gainsay the considerable merits of the kind of public-investment policies that the Biden presidency revived or inaugurated (particularly if they produce the kind of union jobs for which Biden also advocated). They do bolster our economy and, by reducing our dependence on other countries for necessary products, our national security as well. In and of themselves, as the CAP study shows, they don’t appear to cost the elected officials who enacted those policies any votes; they may actually increase them. But not, unless whole galaxies of the stars are aligned, by very much.
