No. of Recommendations: 2
Biden may well have gotten dinged by voters for high inflation even if their real wages continued to grow steadily. The tendency of humans to blame others for anything bad and praise themselves for anything good (including being so smart as to elect and retain the right people to run government) may be insurmountable.
Yep.
Plus, I think Democrats are going to have to reckon with the changing reality of how government spending on physical projects now works. Back during the New Deal, when Congress authorized funding for public works projects, those projects started getting built right then. The TVA was enacted in May of 1933 - by October of 1933 they had already broken ground on their first hydroelectric project. That doesn't happen any more. I don't know if Democrats expected voters to make an association between their big bills and the economic recovery, but I think they shouldn't any more - it just takes too long from the funding vote to shovels in the ground for that connection to fly.
So voters saw their own wages rise, and didn't attribute any of that to federal government action - because they didn't see any federal government action in their lives or community. But they saw inflation rise, and attributed that to federal mismanagement of the economy: because fighting inflation is one of the jobs of the federal government.
It makes for a hard predicament.
