President Joe Biden goes into next year’s election with a vexing challenge: Just as the U.S. economy is getting stronger, people are still feeling horrible about it.

Pollsters and economists say there has never been as wide a gap between the underlying health of the economy and public perception. The divergence could be a decisive factor in whether the Democrat secures a second term next year. Republicans are seizing on the dissatisfaction to skewer Biden, while the White House is finding less success as it tries to highlight economic progress.

“Things are getting better and people think things are going to get worse — and that’s the most dangerous piece of this," said Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, who has worked with Biden. Lake said voters no longer want to just see inflation rates fall — rather, they want an outright decline in prices, something that last happened on a large scale during the Great Depression.

“Honestly, I’m kind of mystified by it,” she said.

  • Heresy_generator@kbin.social
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    11 months ago

    The oligarch-owned media shouts that everything is terrible when the only thing they care about, the interest rates that impacts their cost to borrow capital, is going up because that limits their ability to run their VC Ponzi schemes. The far-left media and far-right media shout that everything is terrible all the time because they both start from wanting a revolution that tears everything down and won’t ever let reality get in the way of that being the proper solution; things must always be bad and getting worse to justify their revolution. And that’s basically of all of our media.