Everything is still adjusting to the post pandemic economy. Inflation, unemployment, wages, none of it makes sense relative to a baseline. There is no real baseline.
I won’t argue that Biden is amazing because unemployment is at 3.5% which is a (near) record low. 3m people left the workforce during covid for various reasons. So now what?
I think we can all mostly agree on the economic impacts of covid. How should democrats spin something like nicks chart? Three posts on a forum is already beyond the attention span on most voters.
Do you like this one better? Are you trying to deny it’s not the economy that is going to cause Dems to get swept out of office? When people don’t feel good about their money they want change. It doesn’t matter the cause and ultimately these folks mostly aren’t doing anything about it anyway. It’s all cyclical and we just have a bunch of abnormal cycles going on in many industries that started with lockdowns and giving people money to buy stuff while no one was producing stuff. And then a war that disrupted energy markets. It’s going to take the end of the Ukraine War and several years to get back to more normal cyclical behavior if the Fed doesn’t agree everything up and there is a decent chance they have already done that IMO. Not sure who to blame for Jerome Powell but if I was Biden I might fire him.
I agree, that it is people’s lack of understanding and the Republican’s lies and deceptions about the cause of the current state of the economy (see above) that will cost the democrats voters that can’t see past their own wallet.
No, I am not denying the Dems could have a bad election, but this will be primarily due to inflation over the past year that can at best be loosely tied to the democrats policy and is likely more just a settling of the fallout from global pandemic disruptions (and war in Ukraine) and related stimulus passed on a mostly bipartisan basis. People vote on feels rather than reals and I am not really seeing anything proposed by Republicans that actually addresses the issue for the average voter. It is just “inflation high, dems are bad”.
Complex issues are where politics in this country completely break down. You will say it is an issue with democrats messaging, but there is not a one liner that can address what is happening with these economic readings, and people generally don’t have the time or the attention span to understand these things.
Painful it was. OTOH Oz made his abortion position very clear, and it is IMO very bad and bad for him. He rejects a federal role is setting abortion rules because that decision should be left to the worman, her doctor, and local legislatures. He said that multiple times.
So a serial abortionist with mental health history who threatened his wife and had to be taken to court for child support for his absentee father children is the the anti-abortion family values candidate. I wish this was satire.
I did not watch the Oz Fetterman debate, but it seems like the Fetterman team should have known better than to let him debate given his current progress on recovering from his stroke.
If he had ducked the debate it wouldn’t have been great either, but probably a preferable result
So, now with GDP growth are the people that claim “it is the economy, so we must vote Republicans!!!11!11!!” going to ignore these facts (just like they ignore any inconvenient facts) and keep claiming we are in a recession?
Because, voting for Republicans to save “our economy” is lookong dumber and dumber every day.
I detest the practice of attributing the economy to the sitting POTUS / Congress, but I would not be arguing that the economy is doing great right now.
Investments have lost a ton of value in 2022, eating into retirement accounts. Inflation is higher than it’s been in a while, eating into fixed incomes. And I believe that prices are increasing faster than wages. About the only plus is low unemployment. And that’s meaningful, certainly. But I don’t think most people care about GDP growth if the amount left in their checking account after paying the mortgage / rent and buying groceries & other necessities is going down.
Mobility is down as mortgage interest rates are going up. The guy with a 2.5% mortgage in Florida is not going to want to pack up his family and move to Colorado for a job that pays 10% more when he’s going to have to buy a new home with a 7% mortgage.
I think most people are feeling some sort of pinch.
I wouldn’t characterize what will happen in this election as voting for Republicans to save our economy. I would characterize it as voting for the other party because we don’t like how things are going with the current party. It’s as simple as that and it has worked for Democrats in the past too. It’s really not particular to either party, it’s just voting for the party that doesn’t have power when things aren’t going good. I mean the Dems ran this same platform in 2018 and things were going really well except no one liked Trump’s attitude.
I got my ballot in the mail.
My 6 year old asked me whom I was voting for.
“oh, I don’t know, I have to read about all these people.”
“well, what about this one-- he has the same (first) name as the kid who picks on me in class. Do you think he’s nice? Is he mean? Is he thoughtful? Is he wise?”
Hm, Republican Congressman…Checks facebook… Spits on Biden. Claims Trump won. Fuck. “Well you’ll be pleased to hear I’ll be voting against him because he’s also bad guy.”
“Well, my kid isn’t a bad guy yet. He’s just a bad kid.”
