In what will be a generous gift to his successor, President Joe Biden beat inflation, brought down gas prices, created millions of jobs, spurred strong growth, boosted retirement savings and revived American manufacturing — just in time for Donald Trump to take credit for all of it.
Any objective assessment of Biden’s tenure would show him to have been a highly successful president.
Any objective assessment of Biden’s tenure would show him to have been a highly successful president, especially on economics (even if no president can actually bring down the price of gas all by himself). The fact that he is widely viewed as a failure shows just how warped our political and informational systems are.
In a perfect world, we’d all have a good understanding of the challenges presidents face, including what it would take to meet those challenges. We’d know what actions the president took and what the results were. We’d have at least some concept of how things could have gone differently — for better or worse.
Because we don’t live in that world, economics is where Biden has received the most criticism, and the overall judgment has been brutal. Most Americans have disapproved of his performance for the last three years (after a brief early honeymoon), and his approval ratings now hover in the high 30s.
Among the things for which Biden gets little acknowledgment is his legislative success. He signed a series of highly consequential bills, including the bipartisan infrastructure bill, the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, which was by far the most important bill addressing climate change in the nation’s history.
Biden’s critics would say his approval ratings are low primarily because we went through a period of inflation, which people hate. Fair enough. But inflation happened all over the world as supply chains struggled to restart after the worst of the Covid pandemic. The decision we made in the U.S. to minimize the shock of the Covid recession by pumping money into the economy — a strategy that began while Trump was president — was clearly the correct one, saving the country from an explosion in unemployment.
America has recovered more quickly and more completely than almost any comparable country. As The Economist put it, “The American economy has left other rich countries in the dust.” Real wages have risen fastest for those at the bottom of the income scale. Today, inflation is at 2.4%, compared with the 9.1% peak in June 2022. The fight against rising prices has essentially been won.
But few in the electorate seem aware. Voters punish incumbent parties for inflation, whether or not it was their fault — and even after it’s over. That’s a phenomenon we’ve seen around the world this year. But the fact that voters in other countries are also blaming their governments for inflation doesn’t mean that Biden deserves blame for it, especially given how successful his economic policies have been more generally.
If your answer to that is “But there are still a lot of people struggling!” that’s true — but it is no more true than it has been for decades, and in many ways, it is less so. For instance, the proportion of Americans without health insurance is at an all-time low, thanks to Democrats (and Republicans are still hoping to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which would be catastrophic). You can argue that it would be better if Biden had solved the problem of inequality, but you certainly can’t say he did worse on that score than previous presidents.
In the inevitable circular firing squad Democrats and progressives are now assembling, one of the most prominent criticisms is that the party plays too much to its highly educated base, and if it wants to succeed then it must reconnect with working-class voters. As Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said Wednesday, “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working-class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.”
Far from “abandoning” working-class people, Biden’s has been the most economically populist presidency in decades, probably since FDR’s.
Yet, far from “abandoning” working-class people, Biden’s has been the most economically populist presidency in decades, probably since FDR’s. He was the first president to walk a picket line, with striking autoworkers. His labor record has been exemplary: He banned noncompete agreements for most workers, expanded overtime pay and saved the pensions of hundreds of thousands of workers. The Federal Trade Commission is finally attacking monopoly power. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which all but lay fallow under Trump, is protecting consumers again. The bills he signed have begun a manufacturing boom, focused purposefully on jobs that don’t require college degrees.
Vice President Kamala Harris promised to continue and expand on that progress. Did it convince voters that Democrats are the party of the working class? No, it did not. Yet, Trump, whose primary economic priorities are extending tax cuts for the wealthy and imposing huge tariffs that will be brutal for people of modest incomes, is supposed to be the “populist.” There are many other things we could mention: student debt relief, Medicare’s finally being allowed to negotiate drug prices, Biden’s extraordinarily progressive record on judicial appointments and the fact that despite Republicans’ best efforts to find one, there has been no serious Biden administration scandal. A cynic might say that we can’t expect the average voter to appreciate all this, and while we certainly don’t expect them to, that doesn’t mean not appreciating it isn’t a problem. If we want government to be responsive, we would hope that good governance would be rewarded and bad governance would be punished. But for that to occur, the public has to understand what’s actually happening. And for the most part, it doesn’t. It’s partly a problem of inattention, compounded by the fact that policy gets more complicated all the time. It’s also about salesmanship; unlike recent presidents who got re-elected (Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan), Biden isn’t a particularly skilled communicator. To make things worse, voters are swimming in a social media environment that is built to pull our attention to outrage and triviality. And the right is particularly adept at using those platforms to distract and deceive; just look at how Elon Musk turned what was Twitter into the engine of misinformation and far-right extremism that is X. Biden’s unpopularity was an albatross that Harris couldn’t shake; the fact that it was largely unwarranted is no comfort. But Democrats need to realize that they have less a policy problem than a propaganda problem, one that is evident in both the messages the parties send and the systems through which information is delivered. If Democrats can figure out how to do something about that, they’ll be less likely to find themselves in the position they are now. Trump will no doubt claim that he is responsible for everything good that Biden did. Worst of all, many people will believe him.
Paul Waldman is a journalist and author focused on politics and culture. 
