Trying to make sense of Biden’s unpopularity

Eric Levitz takes a look at a number of theories, none of which are entirely convincing:

Since Biden took office in January 2021, the economy has been steadily replacing the jobs it lost during the pandemic. This recovery has necessarily brought more lower-wage workers back into the labor force. It is hard to say exactly what percentage of the apparent decline in real wages this composition effect accounts for. But if we use the month before the pandemic started as a baseline — since, in February 2020, the unemployment rate (and thus composition of the labor force) was similar to today — then the real wage picture looks very different: Even after accounting for inflation, the real hourly wage in the U.S. is now nearly 2 percent higher than it was before the pandemic.

A less than 2 percent advance in real wages over more than two years isn’t fabulous. But it nevertheless means that, using one plausible measure, American workers actually have higher living standards now than they did before the pandemic, when their assessments of the economy were historically positive. Shortly before COVID, a CNN poll found voters viewing the economy more favorably than they had in nearly 20 years. Today, Americans are earning higher real wages than they did then. And consumer sentiment is, nevertheless, lower than it has been during 92 percent of the months since 1978.

So, the unpopularity of both Biden and his economy are stranger than I’d previously allowed…

So, if most Americans have objectively seen an increase in living standards since the pandemic and subjectively feel satisfied with both their economic and nonmaterial circumstances, why are they so dissatisfied with their president and his economic record?

One possibility is that, after enjoying largely stable prices for decades, Americans simply have little tolerance for inflation. Sure, their wages may have grown faster than prices since February 2020. But voters might be inclined to attribute their income gains to their own efforts, while blaming rising prices on the government’s mismanagement. They still have not adjusted psychologically to the jump in their grocery bills, and are irked each time they see the receipt and remember what things used to cost when Donald Trump was still president.

Another, related possibility, is that the American middle class resents many aspects of a tight labor market. For households earning the median wage or above, falling income inequality might be experienced as a loss in relative social status. More concretely, as wages have risen at the bottom of the labor market and competition for low-wage workers among employers has intensified, it may be harder to get “good help” these days, whether in the form of affordable housecleaners, child-care workers, or timely restaurant service.

That said, neither of these explanations do a great job of accounting for the fact that a supermajority of Americans express satisfaction with their personal economic circumstances. By contrast, a disconnect between perceptions of one’s own material wellbeing, and perceptions of the economy writ large, could be explained by media dynamics.

Certainly, right-wing media in the United States has vast reach and influence. The mainstream media, meanwhile, has a well-documented negativity bias, which has generated years of stories about a hypothetical recession, whose start date is forever being postponed.

Another theory is that voters are simply put off by Biden’s extraordinarily advanced age and are inclined to believe that an 80-year-old president is probably mismanaging the economy in some way…

This is far from an exhaustive list of potential explanations. I’m personally inclined to think that the answer is some combination of the public’s (perhaps, irrationally intense) antipathy for inflation and media dynamics. Regardless, widespread disapproval of both Biden and the economy is much weirder than a cursory look at real-wage data would lead one to believe.

Put me in the “media dynamics” category.  Margaret Sullivan on the issue:

Meanwhile, Biden’s approval ratings remain low — around 43 percent. And one media narrative that is extremely easy to find is that many Democrats and independents believe he shouldn’t run again.

Why does this happen? I see three reasons:

1. The press has a well-known negativity bias. Journalists prefer stories filled with conflict, finding them more compelling and more likely to generate clicks. Biden’s strong economic record doesn’t fit the bill. Isn’t it much more fun to deal with the red meat of culture wars, or whether Biden has a fiery temper?

2. Journalists, in general, may not always have the economic knowledge or patience to delve into the policy details of “Bidenomics.” In the American Prospect, Harold Meyerson slammed the “piss-poor job that most of the media have done in reporting — or even understanding — his economic programs.” These include Biden’s $1.9 trillion pandemic aid package which, he writes, “stands as the most effective anti-recessionary policy in American history.”

3. My own theory, which I floated in the Washington Post at the beginning of the Biden administration: The mainstream press is freaked out by the fact that many journalists share Biden’s basic values of decency, respect for the rule of law and a predilection for human rights. But they don’t want to be seen as “in the tank” for this administration, so they twist themselves into knots to find the negative.

I think the other part of this, which I recall writing about back at 2022 midterm time, is that there’s a lot of “soft” Biden disapproval out there from (young) lefty Democrats who are frustrated by Biden’s relative moderation and not really inclined to give him credit for much. 

Regardless, it really is a bit of a political puzzle why Biden’s approval should be stuck in the low 40’s in a time clearly characterized by peace and prosperity.  

The changing relationship of religion to American politics

I had a great conversation yesterday with a longtime NC political reporter and she remarked that it was interesting that while Republicans were pushing all these “values” issues, the longstanding conservative Christian opposition to gambling had completely eroded in North Carolina.  This led to an interesting conversation on the nature of what it means to be a “conservative Christian” or “Evangelical Christian” these days, where I have been very influenced by Ryan Burge.  I got off the phone and literally the first tweet I saw was Burge’s latest post on the issue and it’s really good stuff (emphases in original)

For a lot of people who try and portray themselves as military veterans the goal is gain all the benefits and accolades of having served without any of the real sacrifices that go along with that service.

I think the same thing that is happening with religion, too. I am seeing this more and more in the data. People like the *idea* of religion, without the actual trappings of said religion. They are the kind of folks that talk about concepts like biblical values without every stepping foot inside a church. They want (primarily) Christian values to be protected, but they don’t actually want to spend much time understanding the theology around the values.

For them, religion has become a social and cultural marker – not a spiritual one. It’s basically become another cudgel in the culture war. So, when the debate heats up over issues of sexuality, gender, or abortion these are the kind of folks who will post memes on Facebook that include references to scripture verses, despite the fact that they themselves never read the Bible…

But notice what’s happened to the overall religious attendance of evangelicals in the last decade or so? They don’t attend nearly as much as they used to. Now, 27% of self-identified evangelicals attend services less than once year. That’s double the rate of 2008. At the same time, the share who attend weekly services has how dropped below 50%. Note also that those who attend more than once per week has declined 11 percentage points since 2008.

It’s evangelicalism without the religion part…

For Democrats, religious importance dropped at twice the rate as religious attendance.

For Republicans, religious attendance dropped faster than religious importance.

See what’s happening here? Democrats are moving away from the *idea* of religion faster than they are moving away from actual religion. For Republicans, it’s the opposite. They are moving away from religious attendance faster than they are moving away from the *idea* of religion.

Again, it’s about religion as a cultural marker. Not necessarily a theological pursuit that someone engages in…

What American religion has become is primarily all the harmful aspects of religion and very little of the democracy building activities that we very desperately need. It’s been reduced to a weapon that is wielded in the culture war debates without any training in it’s proper use.

That’s why religion has become so polarized – because the type of religion that most Americans see now has been stripped bare of all the best parts. And all we are left with is the division, the hate, and the vitriol. The pews are emptying because they aren’t full.

Quasi-relatedly, Drum with a post about how people inflate their church attendance:

Here’s an interesting little tidbit about religion in America. Devin Pope of the University of Chicago has been tracking church attendance using cell phone data that tells us whether you’re really in church, and his results are remarkably consistent:

Week in and week out, there are roughly 25 million Americans at church each Sunday. Note that this is not the number who attend church every single week. It may be different people each week who make up the 25 million. So how does this compare to the number who say they attend church?

People lie a lot about church attendance! A quarter of Americans say they attend church weekly, but in reality fewer than 3% of them do. That’s about 8 million regular weekly churchgoers.

I imagine lying about actual church attendance is especially prominent among those for whom “Christian” is a cultural totem, rather than a meaningful value system.