Election Countdown: 305 Days to Go.
C'mon, reporters and editors. You can do better—as ‘The Daily Sun’ of Florida has just shown us. And as the AP has shown us what not to do.
The front page of today’s Sun newspaper in Florida. As mentioned before, news organizations convey much of their message through presentation and ‘framing’: story placement, captions, headlines, sub-heads. The people who laid out this Sun front page knew what they were doing and have my respect.
For family reasons I am at the moment in Englewood, Florida, on the west coast of the state near Venice. The photo at the top of this post is what I saw in the Sun newspaper this morning, after I bought it at the local Kwik-E-Mart. I offer it as a time-capsule image of America during the ‘AR15-ocene,’1 the epoch of gun massacres.
Whether and how that epoch might end I do not know. One thing I’m sure of is that the answer won’t be legislation to help teenagers buy more guns, as Rep. Bobby Payne, a Republican legislator in Florida, has just proposed.
Now, on to benchmarking and time-capsuling as America counts down to its next presidential election. This post has three main purposes:
-To start a benchmark for some of the economic and other indicators that have historically loomed large in election outcomes.
-To note parts of the “narrative” about this election—a term I try to use only in air-quotes—and signs that they could be changing.
-To record some warning signs about a media establishment that has not absorbed the hard experience of the past dozen years.
I’ll talk about Joe Biden’s speech today in an upcoming dispatch.
1. The times we’re living in.
Most presidential elections are determined by “fundamentals.” Is the economy getting better or getting worse? Is the United States '“winning” wars, losing them, or momentarily not at war?
Yes, there are exceptions that go against the fundamentals. That’s how campaign strategists make a living.2
But the fundamentals have mattered. And what do they show now? Let’s review them, as a baseline for the 10+ months ahead:
Economics: The combination of factors that together equal “the economy” are doing better than for any other modern president in a re-election run. Job creation is very high. Inflation is rapidly coming down. Back when Jimmy Carter (my former employer) ran for re-election, his opponents coined the term “misery index” for the combination of the rates of unemployment and inflation. [UPDATE: Thanks to my friends Walter Shapiro and Mark Feeney for pointing out that the “Misery Index” came into parlance before the 1976 campaign, during which Carter used it against Gerald Ford. My apologies. I probably used it in some speeches we cranked out in those days!] In those days the misery index was well above 20. In Biden’s time it keeps coming down:
‘Misery Index,’ from YCharts. Of course this does not make the economy “good,” since for any economy, at any time there are people left out, left behind, cruelly neglected, and so on. Housing prices are a problem everywhere. Homelessness and drug-abuse are crises in nearly every city. Inequality staggers the mind.
But compared to any other period in my lifetime, the combined economic indicators are the best they have ever been. Here is a big-picture comparison from Abha Bhattarai in the WaPo, with many useful charts like this one:
Again, the economy may not be “good” now. But it is better than it has been, for more people in more ways, than in more than 50 years.
Crime: It is going down. Of course, with regional and particular exceptions. Most Americans think, or have been told, that it is going up. That’s a problem, but is different from the law-enforcement realities.
Debt and deficit: also in the believe-it-or-not category, the federal deficit is lower than in the past few years. This tracker chart, from the Bipartisan Policy Center, gives the idea:
The red line, at top, is the deficit for fiscal year 2020, under Trump. The yellow line is fiscal year 2021, also under Trump’s budgets The blue and greenish lines are under Biden. Paul Krugman gives many more details here.
I could do similar metrics about public health, about foreign trade statistics, about border crossings and related immigration data, about educational data, and so on. I will do these soon.
Hate rhetoric: As far as I can tell, other Republicans (except for the kamikaze-mission Chris Christie) are swallowing, averting their eyes from, and in other ways legitimizing Trump’s Nazi-level rhetoric about outsiders “poisoning our blood” and becoming “vermin.”
Just for now, just for this moment, the point is that ten months before a national election, the economic fundamentals are overall as strong as they have been for any first-term administration in my memory. And the leading challenger to them is speaking the way Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini did, with only the most sniveling resistance from his party. And most of the press is treating this as a “both sides have strong points to make” situation.
We’ll follow this week by week in the time to come.
2) A shift in ‘narrative’?
For most of the past year, the prevailing press narrative has been:
—Joe Biden is old and unpopular. And while Trump is almost as old, and highly divisive, we’ll treat him as ‘colorful’ and ‘authentic.’ Plus: RFK Jr, and Jill Stein, and Cornell West, and Joe Lieberman, are themselves well into Medicare eligibility. (RFK Jr is 69, Stein is 73, West is 70, and Lieberman, like Biden, is 81.) But hey, they are fresh and interesting voices!
—Biden’s unpopularity is a drag on his party and heading it to doom. (Even though nearly every election since 2016 has broken in the Democrats’ favor, and Biden has repeatedly done better than expert analysts foresaw.)
—The Democrats are in despair about lining up behind a candidate who is no one’s first choice. As you read and hear every day.
Two iron laws of the press come into conflict here. One is: When everyone believes something, it becomes ‘true.’ (See: Hillary Clinton and her emails.) The other is: The story always has to change!
And if the story for the upcoming election were to change, if Biden and his coalition were to prove “surprisingly resilient” rather than tragically doomed, what would be some of the signs?
Here are a few possible early tells:
A broadcast yesterday on the NYT’s ‘The Daily,’ about how Biden might be slyly turning ‘the narrative’ into a story of success.
An analysis in the NYT about how the beleaguered Joe Biden might compare himself to the beleaguered Harry Truman, who was ‘unpopular’ and dismissed by all pundits but prevailed.3
A number of posts and reports elaborating on the point Ben Wittes and Quinta Juercic made four years ago: Trump’s “oh, poor me!” act has become old, tiresome, predictable, and pathetic. The path Rudy Giuliani has blazed awaits Donald Trump. His act still attracts a “Greatest Hits!” crowd, as the remnants of the Beach Boys or the Four Seasons do even now. It still has manifestly scared most of the GOP away from criticizing it. But it’s passé. All of the Republicans will say “Oh, we always were against him,” the second he is gone.
Someone, among the 2024 campaign chroniclers, will claim the crown of have declared Trump “yesterday’s news” before everyone else. As I write, that crown is still up for grabs.