As the 2012 general election was blossoming into full flower, Gallup asked voters who was most to blame for the sorry state of the U.S. economy: Incumbent President Barack Obama or his predecessor, George W. Bush.
It was, in a way, the essential question about Obama's reelection hopes. The economy was gaining ground, but only barely. The postrecession rebound that had seemed to be well underway at the end of 2009 had fizzled and then vanished. In the reelection year, the recovery had resumed, but only in anemic fashion, and would eventually end with actual economic contraction by the final quarter of 2012.
That's a recipe for a one-term presidency right there. Unless he was being graded on a curve…
It might seem odd now that Gallup pollsters were still asking about the former president nearly four years after he left office, but not in context. The incumbent's argument was that Republicans deserved the blame for the financial panic of 2008 and what was then being called the Great Recession that followed. Obama, he said, was just cleaning up their mess.
Remember the car in the ditch? That was Obama's well-tortured metaphor for how he said Republicans had wrecked the economy and were actively impeding his efforts to get the engine of American prosperity back on the road. So when Gallup asked in mid-June 2012 whether Obama or Bush deserved the blame, it was a good test of the Democrat's chances in the fall.
Six months after Obama took office, Americans still overwhelmingly blamed Bush, with 80 percent of respondents saying the 43rd president deserved "a great deal or a moderate amount of blame," compared with 32 percent for Obama. That may be understandable for a honeymoon period. But what happened next is more interesting.
As the years rolled on, the share of people blaming Obama climbed up to about 50 percent, but stayed there. The share blaming Bush slackened a bit but was still a very robust 68 percent as Republican Mitt Romney, a businessman promising to engineer an economic turnaround, started his attack on Obama's record.
Team Obama had not been able to deliver the strong, stable growth they had promised, but performed a political miracle. They took credit for saving the country and the world from a crippling global depression but avoided the blame for a recovery that continued to disappoint. Those were the days when jobs could either be "saved or created," a metric that constantly asked voters to imagine how much worse things might have been.
And it mostly worked. Despite widespread dissatisfaction with both the economy and with Obama's signature health insurance program, he won a decisive victory over Romney. The campaign's tagline spoke to its backward glance: "Osama bin Laden is dead, and General Motors is alive."
So can Joe Biden be to inflation for Donald Trump and the GOP as Bush was to recession for Obama?
The news this week on inflation has been grim. Real grim. While the economy continues to grow at a pretty stout rate and unemployment remains at rock-bottom levels, the prices for almost everything continue to climb. Some level of inflation is a byproduct of economic growth, but when it exceeds the benefits of that growth, voters revolt.
And when Americans expect prices to rise, as they very much do right now, it tends to cause sellers to charge more and workers to seek more in payment for their services. Fear of inflation can cause inflation itself. What makes this New Year's surge in prices so concerning is that the pace of price increases had been slackening for months, until September of 2024, when it ticked back up. January was the fourth straight month to see the rate of price increases climb. At 3 percent, we're now getting outside of what's considered tolerable in a growing economy.
Ulp.
The White House is going straight to the Obama playbook (and not just on dealing with unfriendly reporters). "The Biden administration left us with a mess," said press secretary Karoline Leavitt, which is hardly a stretch when talking about an inflation report that only included 11 days under the new administration.
But the degree of difficulty goes up from here. Eight years ago, Trump took office after a long period of low, stable inflation rates. Obama had, understandably, feared how a robust recovery might cause inflation to rise and put the economy in a flat spin. That undid Lyndon Johnson's presidency and hung a cloud over his immediate successors. As Biden can attest, once it sets in, inflation is very hard to get back out.
In 2017, Trump and Republicans in Congress were able to keep spending levels high and deliver a massive tax cut without an inflationary spike. Sloshing that much money into the economy might push prices up, but things stayed within the normal range. When the pandemic spending glut came, though — first under Trump and then under Biden — the dam broke and Americans experienced inflation rates unseen since the 1970s.
The fear throughout most of Biden's term was that inflation, and the only tool available to combat it in the short term — the Federal Reserve jacking up interest rates and restricting the flow of capital — could kill off the postpandemic recovery. But the economy kept growing and the job market stayed strong as the rate of price increases crept down, down, down after the summer of 2022.
The Fed, which was last year ready to call inflation whipped, is now preparing to keep up the fight. Yes, because of the unhappy trend of the past four months, but also because of what's coming. Trump and Republicans are looking to do what they did eight years ago and deliver a blast of deficit-financed tax cuts that will juice the economy. Add to that new tariffs coming down on imported steel and aluminum as well as a flurry of other levies, and you have a formula for sending prices skyward.
If the Fed responds as history suggests and prudence would demand, not only would it make borrowing for homes and cars harder for consumers, it would push up the cost of financing America's voluminous debt. Another double whammy.
As much as Trump and the GOP imagine this moment as an opportunity to get right what they failed to achieve before, America 2025 is a very different place than America 2017.
The VoteCast data on the 2024 electorate from The Associated Press and the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center gives pretty clear form to the Trump mandate.
The top four issues to voters were:
• The economy and jobs [39%]: Harris 37% – Trump 61%
• Immigration [21%]: Harris 10% – Trump 88%
• Abortion [11%]: Harris 85% – Trump 15%
• Health care [8%]: Harris 78% – Trump 19%
And it seems clear that when voters were talking about the economy, prices were the principal concern.
Thinking about voting in this election, how important to you was each of the following? High prices for gas, groceries and other goods:
• Single most important factor [40%]: Harris 33% – Trump 65%
• Important factor, but not the most important [47%]: Harris 53% – Trump 46%
• A minor factor [9%]: Harris 82% – Trump 17%
• Not a factor [3%]: Harris 84% – Trump 14%
For 87 percent of voters, inflation was a big deal, and very clearly they laid the problem at the feet of Biden and his administration, personified by then-Vice President Kamala Harris. In 2016, inflation wasn't even on the radar screen.
It turned out that 2024 was not a "vibes" election, but a fundamentals election. And there is no problem more fundamental to persuadable voters, especially higher-propensity, older voters, than high prices.
Trump is beyond the reach of voters now, but the members of his party are not. And as Republicans in Congress hammer out a deal on taxes and spending, they are doing so in a very different climate from that of eight years ago. As GOPers consider how to get a deal done that can satisfy both swing-district moderates and fiscal hawks from deep-red districts, they do so with the knowledge that if they get the blame for pushing prices up, it will make what is already expected to be a rough midterm cycle into a bloodbath.
Which brings us back to where we began. Will the strong association of inflation with Biden be strong and durable enough to buy Republicans time to govern the way they want to?
Obama got away with it with Bush, but it still didn't save Democrats in 2010 from the worst midterm shellacking in more than 70 years. Lawmakers fearing a similar fate this go-around may prove less willing to go along for the ride.
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