WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden’s top advisers are repackaging his economic message to the American public as his approval ratings sink and his legislative agenda stalls in Congress, just months before crucial midterm elections.
Within the last week, Biden has taken pains to put more emphasis on growth in wages, union jobs and domestic manufacturing, according to a senior administration official. At the same time, he’s given less weight to areas that remain sore points with voters, like inflation and the legislative machinations of his stalled "Build Back Better" plan, as well as the partisan strife over COVID-19 vaccinations, masks and testing.
In the wake of surging consumer prices, continuing supply-chain bottlenecks and a renewed jump in COVID-19 cases, Biden’s economic advisers decided over the U.S. winter holidays his approach could use a reset, according to a senior administration official.
At stake: the president’s standing with voters who will decide in November whether Democrats retain their slender House and Senate majorities.
In his new message, Biden so far hasn’t used Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s formulation of “modern supply-side economics” — the idea that the government should intervene in corners of the economy not sufficiently addressed by the private sector. But he has talked up the principle of expanding the productive capacity of the economy.
“There is a lot we can do to give families a little extra breathing room,” Biden said in a speech celebrating a surprisingly strong jobs report on Friday. “For example, child care,” he said, referring to an element of the Build Back Better plan aimed at helping “millions of parents, and especially women,” return to work.
But Biden didn’t specifically refer to Build Back Better in his speech Friday — a tacit acknowledgment that the broader package has become a political football.
Republicans’ advantages heading into the 2022 midterms underscore the urgency behind the Biden team’s hunt for a new script. GOP control of one or both chambers of Congress would doom White House policy initiatives and give Republicans even greater momentum in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election.
Biden’s more celebratory tone got a boost Friday with the jobs report, which far exceeded expectations by economists, including those within the White House. Biden said that in his first year “our economy created 6.6 million jobs. If you can’t remember another year when so many people went to work in this country, there’s a reason: It never happened.”
The 467,000 gain in nonfarm payrolls was a pleasant surprise for an administration more accustomed to the unpleasant variety. In recent months, Biden and his White House have repeatedly been caught flat-footed by unexpected aspects of the economic recovery as well as political developments.
U.S. consumer prices have risen faster, for longer, than the administration anticipated. COVID-19 continues to disrupt global supply chains, slowing the delivery of goods and materials. Build Back Better can’t get past moderate Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin.
Biden’s approval rating has suffered as a consequence, sinking from better than 50% before the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in August to about 42% now, according to an analysis of polls by FiveThirtyEight.
In the White House’s vision, boosting domestic manufacturing, expanding preschool and ensuring there are enough workers to take care of seniors will help increase the productivity of the economy.
“There is a bit of reclaiming the mantle of pro-growth,” Brian Deese, the director of the White House’s National Economic Council, said in an interview. “It is a Democrat, after all, who shepherded the strongest economic growth since 1984. Hopefully, if we’ve done our jobs effectively, you see that.”
But Republicans are dubious that voters will respond to a message built around a concept as abstract as “modern supply-side economics.”
“I don’t know who this framing is going to appeal to, outside of Ph.D. students and think tanks. Right now people want a return to normal and a lower cost of living,” said Brendan Buck, who served as a top aide to former Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan. “If your messaging is built on economic philosophy instead of those concrete things, you’re going to continue to look out of touch.”
Some of the change in message is aimed at rebranding Build Back Better, which stalled in Congress after acquiring a shorthand description as “social spending” — a term Biden himself has lamented.
But it’s also intended to draw a sharp contrast with Republicans ahead of the 2022 midterms, aides say. Biden has accused his opponents of having no agenda beyond trying to stop his policies, and wants voters to associate Democrats with efforts to boost economic growth. Those include investments in areas Biden and his team consider “modern” — supply chains, climate resiliency, child care and home health workers among them.
Such measures could in turn help rein in living costs, in tandem with monetary policy moves by the Federal Reserve.
“The White House does not have a lot of inflation tools, so they are about increasing supply,” said Jason Furman, an economics professor at Harvard University and a former top economic aide to President Barack Obama. “Demand management is happening but it is happening at the Fed. Their job is the parts of the economy that the Fed cannot get to.”
Biden has also tried selling his agenda by emphasizing the element of international competition — warning often that China is seeking to overtake the U.S. economically, and will succeed without a comprehensive set of policies from Washington.
“We’re not operating in an unrestricted global free market. We no longer have the luxury of just ignoring the fact that, not just China, but many other countries are operating in it with a strategy where they explicitly engage to protect and build and foster their own productive capacity,” Deese said. “And if we don’t have a strategy to do that, we end up exposed.”
Republicans, meanwhile, have stuck to the message they’ve espoused since President Ronald Reagan: slashing taxes and regulations to promote growth. Biden administration officials argue those policies haven’t worked in the past, especially the 2017 tax overhaul that disproportionately cut rates for corporations and wealthy people.
Biden has just eight months to convince voters his approach is best before they go to the polls to decide whether Democrats will keep control of Congress.
He has his work cut out for him: an Economist/You Gov poll from late January showed only 39% of Americans approved of his economic stewardship. The majority of White working class men and women surveyed called the economy just “fair” or “poor.”
