Half of Americans think the economy is in trouble and they blame Biden

The 2024 United States Presidential Election will be one of the most consequential that voters will face in decades. Which candidate will win could largely be determined by the economy but that isn’t good for Joe Biden. 

On May 20th, Nerdwallet's Anna Helhoski wrote that the U.S. economy was doing well despite inflation. “The economy is expanding at a crisp pace, unemployment is low, inflation is slowing from its peak,” she wrote. 

According to Helhoski, economic indicators have shown that the economy in the United States has shown steady growth since the global pandemic and an annual growth rate the country hasn’t seen since at least the 1950s. 

However, even though the economy is doing well, it appears as if Americans don’t know or understand that fact based on the recent polling data from a Harris poll that was done exclusively for the British news outlet The Guardian. 

Poll results showed that three in five Americans wrongly believe that the U.S. economy is in a recession according to The Guardian, and even more concerning for Joe Biden is the finding that the majority who think this blame him. 

“The survey found persistent pessimism about the economy as election day draws closer,” wrote The Guardians’ Lauren Aratani who reported on the polling data and went into depth about the misconceptions Biden is facing. 

More than half of those surveyed (55%) believe that the U.S. economy is shrinking while a similar amount (56%) thought the United States was experiencing a recession despite the fact the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has been growing. 

Things also weren’t looking good when it came to perceptions about the stock market. 49% of those polled said the S&P 500 was down for the year. Aratani noted that at the time the poll was conducted, the S&P 500 was 24% from 2023 and up 12% for the year. 

Unemployment was another concern for those surveyed and 49% believed that it had reached a 50-year high, though in reality, the unemployment rate was actually sitting at 4% at the time of the survey, which was a 50-year low. 

The reason why these numbers should concern Biden and his campaign team is because many of the Americans who held these misconceptions also believed that Biden was the one to blame for the problems. 

Polling revealed a lot of Americans blame Biden for the state of the economy with 58% saying things were getting worse in the economy because of mismanagement from the president’s administration—though this isn’t true based on the data. 

“The poll underscored people’s complicated emotions around inflation. The vast majority of respondents, 72%, indicated they think inflation is increasing,” Aratani reported about the poll’s findings before explaining inflation has gone down considerably. 

“In April, the inflation rate went down from 3.5% to 3.4% – far from inflation’s 40-year peak of 9.1% in June 2022 – triggering a stock market rally that pushed the Dow Jones index to a record high,” Aratani explained. 

Unfortunately for Biden’s reelection campaign, people don’t see the leaps the economy has taken since he took over the Oval Office but not all of the news from the new polling was bad for the president, some think the impacts of his economic policy will last. 

Four in ten Republicans and 81% of Democrats polled said they thought the president’s ‘Bidenomics’ economic policy would have positive lasting impacts while three-quarters of those surveyed noted they supported at least one of the key pillars of Bidenomics.

“Yet even with these small strands of approval, pessimism about the overall economy is pervasive. It will be an uphill battle for Biden to convince voters to be more hopeful,” Aratani concluded, which is a sentiment his team must be feeling.

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