It’s not quite morning in America. Joe Biden’s economy is undeniably strong almost every way you look at it, such that he’s begun campaigning on the media portmanteau “Bidenomics,” pitching a Reaganesque story with an FDR twist—that his combination of industrial policy and pro-union support is rebuilding the economy “from the middle out, and the bottom up.” There’s just one big problem, though: Most of America's influential voters are upper middle-class professionals who are a bit worse off than before he took office, and they comprise the Democratic base.
With the offyear elections in the rearview mirror, the two major political parties increasingly appear locked in for the 2024 presidential contest, with the economy taking a starring role in voters’ minds. And that’s a worry for the president, as a flurry of polls released this month show Biden struggling to defend his economic policies against pessimistic consumers and workers.
“‘Voters Aren’t Believing in Bidenomics,” the New York Times declared last week, showcasing a joint poll with Siena that showed the president struggling in battleground state polls against his likely GOP opponent (and predecessor), Donald Trump. “Americans are unusually down on a solid economy,” NBC wrote Thursday.
Indeed, most Americans are dour. Half of respondents to a Bankrate survey released Wednesday said that their personal finances had gotten worse since 2020, and nearly seven in 10 cited a surge in living expenses. A survey by Morning Consult, a decision intelligence company, shows consumer sentiment has been dropping for two months, particularly among middle-income households.
“There seems to be this massive disconnect between what people are feeling and what the data are saying,” Aaron Terrazas, chief economist at job site Glassdoor, told Fortune.
Blue-collar workers win big
The economic recovery since the pandemic has been unusual in many ways — but especially in how well less-educated and lower-paid workers have done.
In a reversal of every economic expansion for the last three decades, wages since the pandemic have grown fastest for workers in the lowest-paid rungs. It’s the “revenge of the blue collar worker,” one anonymous Amazon worker wrote in February — a month that saw employers hire half a million people but tech companies lay off 10,000.
“It’s totally, totally atypical,” said Julia Pollak, chief economist for job site ZipRecruiter. “The pandemic and the labor shortages and increase in worker leverage has been a huge boost for lower-income workers.” In a similar vein, pay growth for workers with less than a high school degree has outpaced growth of college-educated workers—the first time since at least the late 1990s that this has occurred.
View this interactive chart on Fortune.com
That’s a problem because those well-educated white-collar workers now make up the Democratic party’s base. College graduates (of all races) support Democrats over Republicans by a 24-point margin; those without degrees favor the GOP by 12 points. It’s the culmination of a great shift that began with the Clinton-era “New Democrats” of the late 1990s, which emphasized social progressivism while pushing through neoliberal reforms that did lasting damage to America’s working class. The declining popularity among working-class voters is even threatening Democrats’ earlier gains among Hispanics and Asian-Americans, as working-class voters of all ethnicities break toward the GOP.
It’s that decades-long shift away from economic populism that Biden’s economic agenda is attempting to reverse, albeit in a limited way.
Not only is pay for the top tiers of white-collar workers growing more slowly than for the people who serve them coffee and look after their kids, but many of the office elite are facing an entirely different job market—one with fewer prospects and more requirements. It’s the most dire in the tech and media sector, where payrolls have shrunk 3% since last fall, but also visible in finance, where bankers are expecting their bonuses to shrink substantially from last year, according to Reuters.
(Compare that to employment in construction, which is up nearly 3% from last year, or health care and education, up 4%, or oil and gas extraction, up nearly 5%).
Those who are still employed are less than thrilled at being told to return to the office—or find another job. “The rapid shift around employee flexibility, compensation, and benefits, has generated a lot of resentment among white collar workers who are used to being treated exceptionally well,” said Terrazas.
It’s the inflation, stupid
Besides the job market, there's another major factor getting Americans annoyed—the cost of living. While the annual rate of inflation has slowed substantially from its scorching-hot levels of last year, the official inflation figure leaves out the impact of high interest rates, which make big-ticket purchases like a home, a car, or even carrying a credit-card balance prohibitively expensive.
“Inflation’s coming down, but prices aren’t,” Mark Hamrick, Washington bureau chief at Bankrate, told Fortune. “If you want a typical new car right now, you’re talking $50,000, and you’re looking at a payment of $1,000 a month. People rightly feel like the pricing environment isn’t in their favor.”
That’s bad news because plenty of research has shown that voters feel rising inflation much more than they do raising wages—even when their own net worth is growing faster than prices. Some research even suggests that the purchases people make most often—such as groceries and gasoline—shape their attitudes more than the items that make up the bulk of their budget.
“What people are paying in the grocery story—that’s such a visible price, and when you pay 30% or 60% more on your grocery bill than you did two years ago, that’s really noticeable,” said Jesse Wheeler, senior economist at the decision intelligence company Morning Consult.
“Inflation impacts everyone, and those income gains, while they affect a lot of people, maybe isn’t everyone,” he added. “A raise or a promotion, it’s something that you worked for, you earned it — And then you go to the store and you have to pay more for the same stuff. One feels like a personal, earned item; the other one feels like it was done to you.”
