“The economy is the worst in history” doesn’t pass the smell test either when unemployment is under 4 percent, but Republicans believe it! The economy wasn’t up to your standards in 1984, either, but people believed it was.
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What difference does it make what Republicans think? They’re never voting for Biden anyway. But a majority of middle income and lower income and younger Dems don’t think the economy is good. Those are voters that can be turned out, and they have legit gripes with the economy - it’s not working for them!
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This is not true, and it doesn’t take flipping more than a percent or two to make a big difference.
Also, these people are steeped in Republican propaganda about the economy, even if not to the same degree as actual Republicans. Maybe there should be some alternative messaging! Propaganda doesn’t only work on Republicans.
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Feels like propaganda is more likely to work when you’re not telling people things are good when they’re experiencing shitty things. The inverse seems a lot easier to pull off, or scaring them about some far away imaginary threat.
Also not so sure propagandizing the base is as likely to work when you’ve got the smarter voters.
Never mind that it’s pretty dirty.
Maybe, but given people thought the economy was better 5 years ago when things were objectively worse suggests that positive messaging can still work.
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As per my earlier plot, ~60% of Republicans thought the economy was good in 2020. Was Trump out on the campaign trail equivocating about the economy? Of course not. Everything was the best it ever has been and ever could be.
Of course they did. Those numbers were driven by…
…because the converse of this is true as well…
I don’t see how this supports your point.
Show me the numbers for young Democratic leaners in 2020. If they are better than the numbers now, I’ll reconsider some of my positions.
Six years ago, Dems had better confidence in the economy than they do now:
If they key deciding factor about whether or not polling showing the economy is good is whether or not a republican is in the white house (which it is), then we shouldn’t base our evaluation of the economy on polling. Dems should also message a lot better.
The answer to this is likely that social media is rotting their brains at unprecedented levels. Because they have no idea at that age what a good economy even means. So that 100% is a messaging battle.
The young generation is incredibly smart, but they’re being force fed garbage by “influencers” at an absurd rate through social media algorithms.
Nah man it’s not propaganda. The propaganda is people telling young people (this behavior is actually exactly what the term gaslighting was invented to describe) that everything is fine. Any time you isolate them and get economic stats on just their group it’s fucking grim.
Grim compared to what? By what objective measure?
I’m not doing this again. It’s all of them. They make lousy money relative to the cost of living and nobody has ever paid more for college/training than they did. I don’t even get what you’re arguing here. Every time anyone breaks out economic stats for people under the age of 30, or just the bottom 60% of wage earners the picture gets bleak fast.
Measure their earnings against productivity over time, the price of a home over time (even in their own zip codes), the price of education, the price of food, or just CPI even deliberately neutered the results suck. They have no money and outside the type of person heavily overrepresented on this forum they have no prospects for making meaningfully more of it.
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This has been true for, like, every single year since 1980, and a whole lot of those years had 7% unemployment or more. Yes, it’s bad to be young and poor, but that doesn’t mean the economy of today is bad compared to other economies of other days.
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I don’t think it’s true for every year since 1980, and I think it’s trending worse - especially when you factor in prospects to climb the ladder.
It absolutely is worse and that’s been the trend since the mid 70’s. It’s also regional in nature.
One of the big problems with our current econometrics is that they are so big picture that you can have 60% of the population having an awful time and every light can be green because things are going great for people at the other side of the spectrum.
Like what exactly do you think ‘growing wealth inequality’ means? Where did you think the money was coming from? When the S&P 500 returns 10% a year in an economy that only has 3% growth where do you think the extra money comes from?
It comes from a variety of people who didn’t have enough leverage to hold onto it. The people at the bottom are first in line to get their helping of ‘efficiency’ too. If they can’t physically make them take less money because they would be homeless if the job paid a cent less they make the working conditions tougher. Productivity has gone up a lot since the 70’s. Some of that was technology but some of that was management figuring out how to get more work done with fewer people and the ways they did that were often pretty unpleasant for the people doing the work.
Not sure if true but saw a stat on Reddit or something that in 2004 60% of total stock was owned by people 55+ and now it’s 80%. I’m sure lots of factors play into that but interesting if true
I’ve posted this graph before, too:
Yes, of course the rich are getting richer of the backs of workers, for whom wages have been much more stagnant. But also, it this time of roughly stagnant wages, things have also been considerably worse than they are now. They’ve been much worse for the vast majority of both of our entire lifetimes.
Was the economy better than now in 2004, when W sailed to reelection, running in no small part on how his tax cuts led to a good economy? I don’t think so, but that didn’t stop W from using that messaging to win. Was the economy good in 1984 when Reagan ran on a great economy despite Black unemployment being north of 15%, and total over 7% (both are less than half that now)?
From where I’m sitting, Republican presidents have touted mediocre economies to big election wins. It’s silly to think Biden shouldn’t use this potent tool when his economy is better than 2004, even if, sure things could and should be better for more people. Things could have and should have been better for poor people in 2004, but Bush still touted the economy.
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They for sure weren’t worse when I was poor. I could still rent a 1br apartment for 10-12 days of labor, and that was crushing. Now it’s more like 15-18 and I have no goddamn idea how that maths.
You do realize that it’s gotten worse since we were young right? We aren’t old enough to be doing this man we aren’t that old. I used to make 12 bucks an hour working at a call center. The double cheeseburger was one dollar. Today that same call center pays 20 bucks an hour but the downgraded one less slice of cheese version of that sandwhich costs just shy of 3 bucks. It’s like that for just about everything you need to sustain life. The apartment that cost me 500 costs 12-1300. Groceries are up similarly. These kids have to paddle faster than I did to keep my head above water, and when I did it it was fucking brutal. They were already monitoring how often we went to the bathroom by the time I got there, now they’re monitoring everything you do the entire time you’re in the building.
Let’s not kid ourselves the job I did was probably outsourced 10+ years ago lol. It probably pays less than 12 bucks an hour in 2024.
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It’s gotten worse, and not only that, a lot of the people stuck in that situation have realized it’s going to keep getting worse unless something is done about it. So there isn’t much hope to go around.