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Hi, I'm Tara Palmieri. I'm Puck's senior political correspondent, and this is Somebody's Gotta Win. Depending on what news you consume or your political persuasion, you probably have a very different feeling about the economy. If you're a Republican, you watch Fox News, Newsmax, or listen to Donald Trump,
you think that the American economy is shit and it's getting worse and we are losing to China. If you are watching MSNBC and you're listening to White House surrogates, you're hearing cheerleaders about the economy. You're hearing the GDP is up by 3%, that you're seeing unemployment go down, wages are going up, inflation is going down. So
You're hearing a very different message. And it turns out that Democrats and Republicans feel very differently about the state of the U.S. economy. And this will impact the election because pocketbook issues obviously have a very big impact on how voters vote. But how they feel often is reflected by, you know, how much money they're spending for eggs.
what they're paying at the pump and how much they're making. What's for sure is that the middle class has been squeezed since the 1960s and 1970s, and the cost of living has gone up since the last recession in 2008. But how is this really going to affect the 2024 election? We'll see. We've already seen the economy sort of start to go down in terms of top of priority for voters. Right now, immigration is starting to supersede the economy among Democrats and Republicans.
But it's still going to be a top issue in 2024. And White House officials say...
By Election Day, you will see the fruits of Bidenomics, even if they don't want to call it Bidenomics anymore, because it has become a bit of a taboo word. It turns out when you tell people they are feeling something and they're not, it can cause backlash. And this time it did. Now the word Bidenomics has been banned and White House surrogates have been told to acknowledge the economic pain that voters are feeling and then to tout Biden's stimulus to the economy.
But maybe Bidenomics isn't such a dirty word. Okay, before I get to that, I just want to talk about some news from over the weekend.
It's looking like it's the end of days for Nikki Haley. In fact, it may only be eight more days until Super Tuesday, which is on March 5th. Nikki Haley has made it known she probably won't continue past Super Tuesday. But since she lost her home state of South Carolina on Saturday by 20 points to Donald Trump, which was actually better than expected, there were some polls that predicted she would lose by 30 points. The influential Koch network has pulled funding and
And at the same time, she was able to raise a million dollars in grassroots support. But that's really just not enough money to keep going. Tuesday night is the Michigan primary. Still hard to see her winning because the base of the Republican Party is with Donald Trump. Staying in the race, though, is obviously driving Donald Trump absolutely crazy. He wants to take over the Republican National Committee. He wants to be the presumptive nominee and be able to raise money in a joint victory fund, probably to pay for a lot of his legal fees.
Another thing I'm paying attention to is the impact of artificial intelligence on the election. Ahead of the New Hampshire primary, there was a robocall of Joe Biden's voice telling voters not to go out on primary night and vote for Joe Biden.
It was AI. It wasn't him. And it was created by a man who just so happened to be paid by a consultant connected to his opponent, Dean Phillips. Dean Phillips is running a long shot campaign to be the Democratic nominee. But it's obviously very concerning. If this is going to happen in New Hampshire, it could happen in any other state, general election. AI definitely will have an impact on this election. And we should all be careful of disinformation.
Now let's dig into the real state of the economy and how it will impact the 2024 election. Ron, thanks for being on the show. Absolutely. You know, this conversation started a while back in, I think, around December ahead of New Year's because we were both on set on the Stephanie Rule show. It was a special and you were trying to make the point over and over again that the economy is not as bad as everyone is saying, right? You know, you hear it.
from the right wing media, right? You're listening to Fox News, you're thinking, oh my god, this country is going to shit, right? You hear from Donald Trump. But at the same time, you are hearing it from from voters from middle class voters, independents as well. And those concerns are real, and they cannot be pushed aside. You're very bullish, though, you think the economy is doing really great. And
For me, what I've seen is that the cost of living has exploded and I don't think that the wages have caught up to it. So...
I'm hoping you might be able to explain how people are going to start to feel a little better about their situation. Well, they're already starting to feel a little better. Most of the sentiment surveys that we've seen have illustrated a pronounced upturn in consumer sentiment. They are feeling better and wages are rising faster than current inflation. But the problem that you allude to, Tara, is the fact that in a post-pandemic world, prices are
generally speaking, are about 19% above where they were before the pandemic. And so whether it's houses, whether it's cars, whether it's the cost of money, all of that is elevated, relatively speaking. And so people have felt this post-pandemic sticker shock. The rate of inflation has slowed dramatically. We're getting close to the Fed's 2% target by most measures.
And the prices of a lot of different things have come back down, whether grocery bills have slowly started to ease. The price of gasoline, for instance, is back where it was before the pandemic. But this unease is understandable, given that one fact that the overall price level is elevated. The reality, though, when you look at the numbers, and the numbers are the numbers, and people can argue that
that every administration cooks the books. But we're living with the agreed upon line. No matter what we do, every administration calculates the unemployment rate, the inflation rate, and all these different metrics in the same way. And it's done by career bureaucrats in Washington that aren't particularly partisan. So,
We have better than 2% growth going into 2024. The unemployment rate has been below 4% for over two years. That's not happened since the 1960s. Minority unemployment is at a historic low. You have women's unemployment at a near historic low, and you have business formation at a record high. So when you look at all of that, the economy...
is pretty much humming on all cylinders by every metric. Now, people's views of it are also colored by their political affiliation. You see Democrats, generally speaking, liking the economy much, much better than Republicans do. And that's something that really has been true ever since the end of the Clinton era, that the view of the economy has been colored by whether or not your party is in the White House. The one thing that hasn't really taken effect is that the process
prices of things. They're starting to go down, but they haven't really quite gone down. And I'm wondering, you know, how much control does the president have over this? Because I'm sure the companies are thinking, okay, we had to increase our prices because of inflation, right? And now that inflation is going down, our margins are bigger. So why would we ever lower the price of our
Our eggs, for example. Eggs are down 50%, by the way, but nobody seems to pay attention to that. But you're right. Profit margins are being held where they were when inflation was higher. And so this notion of greedflation, and I hate to use that word, but corporations are holding their profit margins where they were. So something like 53%.
of the price increases that people experienced in the third and fourth quarters of last year were the result of companies holding the line on prices even though their input costs have come down so if those margins came back down people would invariably feel that inflation was less of a problem
right now than it appears to be. We're a liberal economy, so there's really nothing a president can do. They can't call up, I don't know, name some company that is probably holding their prices. Yeah. I think automakers are holding their prices up a lot higher still. Well, they also have another problem, which is more having to do with the Federal Reserve than it has to do anything to do with the president. So the cost of money has gone from zero during the depths of the pandemic. And also, we had zero inflation
zero interest rate policy for quite a long period after the great financial crisis, cost of money was incredibly low. So if you were trying to buy or lease a car anywhere from 2009 to 2020 or 21 even, your interest rate was slightly above zero or you were getting big incentives to purchase or lease a car. Now that money factor is 7% or 8%. So the cost of leasing a car
or buying a car is considerably higher. So there's big sticker shock there. Same is true with residential real estate because mortgage rates are above 7%. So it's, yeah, it's interest rates that are hurting people more so than the sticker, you think? And that has nothing to do with President Biden. Right. Or any president for that matter. It's the Fed is presumably an independent institution that sets the price of money based on the economic environment, which we find ourselves. You know, Trump would often tweet at the Fed and be like...
do this, lower the interest rates or like... When they were at historic lows, by the way. You know, he would tweet, oh, the stock market is rising. It's doing amazing. Here's the question though. How much does the stock market actually impact middle-class voters? Well, not nearly as much as one would think. I mean, I think, you know, by the same token, you know, home prices have gone up 40% since the pandemic. And so middle-class voters have seen a real increase in the home equity value that they have. They're not moving because they don't have...
They can't get loans. They're not moving, so they're not tapping that equity, right? There's a housing shortage, really, because of it, right? About 5 million units short of demand, yeah. And that's, again, when the Fed took rates from zero to now 5.25%, and it's likely they'll start cutting rates a little later in the year and push mortgages to between 7% and 8%.
90% of mortgages are below 6%, 80% plus are below 5%, 60% are below 4%, and over 20% are below 3%. So we have this post-pandemic lockdown, if you will, in residential real estate. Nobody's going to move. Nobody's going to take a 2.5% or 3% mortgage and go buy another house, smaller house at 7% or 8%, get less for their money, pay more for it.
And downsize. If you're retiring or if you're a first-time homebuyer, you're kind of priced out of the market. So until the Fed really dramatically lowers rates, which are going to happen over the course of the next couple of years, we have this problem too. So it's cars and autos, and people feel that a lot. So that also tends to color their view. But again, the president doesn't set it.
interest rate policy the federal reserve does but politically no one really cares and it seems like the president anyway yeah blame him he's a buck stops there no matter what but politically i would think this is a disadvantage to younger people and these are the people that biden needs when to come out and vote for him if they feel like we can't even borrow you know we can't get a mortgage to buy our first house or we can't afford a mortgage that's not a great you know
you know, that's not helpful for him. No, it's not helpful for him. And he's got other problems with young people, as you well know. And we talked about this when we were on Stephanie's show around Christmas time is one, the messaging to young people has until recently been entirely absent. They're not just now taking the tick tock to talk about various issues that affect kids. So, OK,
You think that wages are going to go up, though? They are going up. I mean, they're running at about a four, four and a half percent annualized rate. We've seen in certain states. They didn't match inflation originally. And that was a problem. Yeah. But now they're surpassing inflation. So by the time of the election, do you think that people will feel even better when they go out to the polls? Yeah. I mean, barring, you know, some unforeseen catastrophe where energy prices spike up and gasoline goes, you know, crazy. Yeah.
or food prices turn around, or China attacks Taiwan and creates a global recession or worse. The economy should continue to chug along at this two, two and a half percent rate. The unemployment rate is likely to stay at or below 4%. Again, borrowing anything untoward. If the Federal Reserve raised rates again, it might throw us into a recession. That's unlikely. So the economy will be better. People will feel better. And I think
To the extent that that redounds to President Biden's benefit, there'll be some incremental improvement there. I'm not sure how much it'll boost his approval ratings, but it'll be better three, four, five months from now on the public side than it is now. And so do you think that's why people on both sides of the aisle, while Republicans and Democrats have lifted
the issue of migration above the economy in terms of their priorities, because they are starting to feel better. Yeah. And we see, you know, there's obvious intransigence on this as dictated by former President Trump not to do a deal on the border. Now, one of the crazy things about this is that and our friend Catherine Rampell from The Washington Post, who I think is maybe one of the most brilliant writers on the economy, addressed a CBO study that came out recently that just throws cold water on
immigration, broadly speaking, being a net negative for the economy. It's actually a net positive. If we saw an influx of immigrants going forward at the same pace that we do now, the CBO projects that the GDP of this country would be $7 trillion larger.
And that the revenues of the federal government would be $1 trillion larger as well. And these are immigrants that would have a pathway to citizenship and would be paying taxes and all of that, right? Yeah, and it assumes that there's, you know, remediation at the border that you get the, you know, you get more border control agents, you get more legal ports of entry, that you get more judges who could adjudicate asylum claims and things like that. It would assume a rational, comprehensive immigration reform policy would be put into a place. Now, having said that,
the majority of the increase in employment that we've seen has come from foreign born workers, which again is boosting the economy and holding down the unemployment rate and filling all those vacant jobs that we have for which there are fewer and fewer Americans over time. Yeah, because the Chinese right now in Asia,
They are having an economic boom that's better than ours. No, no, no. But they're about to have a bust, right? Because of- They're in the middle of a bust. China's been busted. It's already happening. It's already happening. They're like a population, right? Well, they have a population time bomb. In fact, the latest estimate that I saw suggests that China's population is going to go from 1.4 billion today to just over 500 million by 2100. Wow.
That's an even bigger drop than everybody thought. And they've got a property sector which accounts for 30 percent of their GDP, which is imploding. They're not. We're actually growing faster with and in better ways, if you will, than China is. They have some strength in their high tech sector. But broadly speaking, their economy is already imploding, whether they're willing to recognize that publicly or not.
Their stock market peaked in 2007. A lot of people don't recognize that fact that their market peaked in 2007. They had another rally in the 2015. They're still down 40% from their all time high. And we're hitting highs every day in our stock market.
So our GDP grew by 3%, and then in Europe, it grew by 0.8%. And so we're actually, our country is actually doing better than any other country in the world right now. Yeah, 100%. So we're growing faster with less inflation than Europe and other major economies. China's actually suffering through deflation, which is a separate problem for them. And we're probably growing faster than they are because they fudged their numbers. So-
Yeah, right now. And it's funny, a couple months ago, I had an interview with Tony Blair last summer.
And he said, you know, Americans should take stock of the fact that this is the best economy and the strongest military in the world. And we probably should feel better about our situation when you look at places like Europe and the UK, China, than we actually do. But there's a feeling that during COVID, Europe did not do what we did. They did not write basically checks to everyone, blank checks. Trump did it, and so did Biden. They did the same thing. And that created a lot of this inflation right now, correct? Yeah.
Some. I mean, the supply chain disruptions that we saw were profound. I mean, the inability to get computer chips that would go into automobiles and that limited the available supply of cars or computers or other consumer goods. And that pushed up prices quite a bit. Yes, fiscal stimulus and inflation.
interest rate reductions down to zero, you know, created inflation. But we've seen now that on the supply chain side, all of that's been completely reversed. And the price of manufactured goods is actually falling. It's actually deflating right now. Services are sticky because there's still some revenge travel going on, shockingly, after a couple of years. And so there are some sticky prices in hospitality. We're also seeing some weird
things in inflation that are not necessarily going to be around forever. Things like auto insurance going up, which accounted for the largest component of consumer prices advancing last month. And so health insurance, which we know is already kind of sticky, tuition, things like that, beyond the control of the Fed or the federal government, have been going up at a faster than normal pace. And so that's something that
is hard to control and overstates maybe some of the inflation that we've seen recently. But yeah, look, at the margin, and it may be a little more than at the margin, fiscal stimulus played a big role. But the reason that we're growing faster than the rest of the world were those fiscal stimulus packages that came and offset some of the rate increases that the Federal Reserve engaged in over the last 18 to 20 months.
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Okay. I want to talk about the middle class. So I really want to get into it because, you know, the middle class is the background of the American society. It's been shrinking since the 1960s and the 1970s. And, you know, they see the rich getting richer and they're not, they don't seem to be really enjoying the impacts of the economy or at least the boom that we're experiencing right now. And I just wonder, you know, why is that? When are they going to feel it? Why don't they feel it right now? Are they going to feel it?
Are they feeling it and they don't even know it? That's an interesting way to ask the question. They feel it and not know it. Have they been economically lobotomized? Seriously, no. The reason I ask that is because in August,
the Biden campaign went out there and they were like, Bidenomics, Bidenomics, you should be feeling great. Bidenomics, Bidenomics. They had all of their cabinet secretaries out on the road, even Biden in August. Oh, come on. Everyone's on vacation. Why are we talking about that? Regardless, they're out there and they're saying Biden saved us from a recession. It was coming and he stopped it and you should be very excited. And the reaction was actually pretty
pretty negative to the point where they no longer use the word biodynamics. It's almost become like associated with Obamacare and how the Republicans were able to sort of... Yeah, four times, except that in this last year, 21 million people signed up for the Affordable Care Act. Exactly. It's hugely popular, but they were able to brand it in a way that made it seem like a negative thing, probably also because the system broke when it first launched and it had a few glitches. And it was a big political mess, but it got there. And now it is very popular.
Yeah. They couldn't gut it. They couldn't get rid of it, the Republicans. But regardless, politics is a very big part of this feeling. People are going to the poll. They're thinking like, oh, the elites, screw them. You know, this Bidenomics is garbage. I'm not feeling it. Why are they feeling this way? I'm not entirely sure, because when you look at when you break down the various income groups. Right. So in the last couple of years.
aside from the mega mega billionaires the the richest of the rich the elon musks the jeff bezos and those folks whose whose stock prices are appreciated so much that they're now worth 200 billion dollars a piece or thereabouts the bottom 10 percent of all wage earners have actually seen faster growth in their income than the top 10 percent or any other cohort uh in the economy and so that that's actually happened for a wide variety of reasons and we've also seen
Job creation pick up in areas that are really interesting, like the construction of manufacturing facilities for computer chips. The Chips and Science Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, however poorly named, was an infrastructure and green energy transition program that's created a fair number of jobs. And they're generally high paying jobs. So we've seen.
So some improvement in the lower decile. We had seen a lot more people come out of poverty when the child credit tax credit was was given out during the pandemic, but then it was pulled back and it's disappeared. Now we've seen more kids fall back into poverty, which is which is, in my mind, somewhat tragic because that.
program actually worked quite well and improved a lot of quite a number of people and i think one could argue that wasn't the democrats or this administration that killed that program republicans did um but but broadly speaking with respect to by gnomics
There have been consequential pieces of legislation, like I said, Ships and Science Act, which is helping us to onshore our high-tech manufacturing capacity. The Inflation Reduction Act, which is if you live in and around New York, you've noticed, and other parts of the country, you've noticed some infrastructure repair going on. It hasn't happened in quite a long time. But it's also kind of annoying at the same time. Well, yeah, look, but it beats the potholes that we had in my neighborhood. Right.
about a year ago, there was, we had a pothole that was so large, you could break a tire in it. And then in the infinite wisdom of the state of New Jersey, city of Englewood Cliffs, they filled half of it. Now, more recently, when the infrastructure bill got passed and this money started going back to road reconstruction and so on and so forth, they're also, by the way, replacing water pipes and things like that, that have aged and that are no longer, you know, of any quality whatsoever. This is happening all around the country. And so I think it takes people
people some time to feel the benefits of these large programs that have put a fair number of people to work. So I don't dispute that middle class Americans still feel the pain, particularly in areas that have been abandoned and have been abandoned now for 40 or 50 years. They're just not coming back. Although Intel's building a chip facility in Ohio and you do see
A lot of companies starting to build up manufacturing capacity. They're typically doing it more, though, in Sunbelt states, right to work states and places like that, where those people who are disenfranchised by the hollowing out of the middle class and our old manufacturing sector aren't necessarily benefiting from these new programs. Got it. OK, so wages haven't really gone up. People got checks. They spent them.
They wanted to continue living that way, obviously. Have I missed anything on the middle class part of it? The one thing I would say, if you want to talk a little bit more about wages, they actually have gone up. And in select states, they've gone up a lot. I mean, California just boosted minimum wage to $25 an hour. That's problematic, I think, for some fast food companies. But...
And wages, by and large, are growing at the fastest clip that we've seen in quite a number of years. And so and faster than inflation, at least for the last several months, if not the last year. And that's actually that should be good news for individuals. And like you see it in the data. I mean, you see it in people, you know, going out and traveling and spending on airfares where you don't.
it's more expensive to eat out than it is to eat at home. So there's been a slight slow down there, but that's, I think also something that's going to wear off over time. So Biden ended up keeping a lot of Trump's tariffs and his restructure trade deal with NAFTA and Europe. And he kept the China tariffs. Why? Well,
Well, because China strategically is becoming increasingly adversarial, both in economic terms and in military terms. And so I was I never disagreed with the Trump administration strategically that China was going to be an economic and military problem. I didn't think
The bludgeon that they used in addition to the tariffs that they put on, but identifying certain industries and grappling with the steel industry and a couple other industries, I didn't think necessarily tactically they were doing the right thing. At the end of the day, the US has a very big strategic geopolitical challenge with China centered around Taiwan. Taiwan's semiconductor provides 90% of all the advanced microchips in the world.
And so if they were to take over Taiwan, there would be an enormous economic issue there, not to mention the fact that, you know, when it comes to freedom of navigation in the South China Sea, we have big military problems with potentially with China as well. So I think I don't think anyone necessarily disagreed.
that China needed to be dealt with more aggressively, that they flout international trade rules and they were doing things and cutting deals with countries that were effectively bribing them to come to China's side, that President Biden should have done anything differently, like rolling back the tariffs.
I think going forward, there's going to have to be a much more nuanced and strategic view on the economic side, even as we tighten our relationships with East Asian countries, South Asian countries from a geopolitical perspective and military perspective to ensure that China kind of stays, you know, not boxed in necessarily. We don't want to cage them, but we also want to constrain their influence.
assertiveness in certain parts of the world in order to keep something bad from happening down the road. Okay, so Trump's pitch to the voters is Biden's ruined the economy. Come back, vote for me. Go back to the good old days, right?
That's what his pitch is. It's empirically untrue, by the way. And if you go back to the final three years of the Obama administration, and I'm not pitching democratic policies by any stretch of the imagination. I'm just and I wish people and I hope people understand that I do policy analysis. I don't engage in personal preference when I'm talking about these things. The last three years of the Obama administration and the first three years of the Trump administration, economic growth and job growth were roughly the same.
And the fact that the unemployment rate fell below 4% under Trump was it went from 4.7 to about 3.5 after having gone from 8% during the great financial crisis down to 4.7 over the course of the Obama administration. Now, we've
We've got unemployment under 4% for over two years. That hasn't happened since the 1960s. Job creation under President Biden is considerably larger than under President Trump. Wages growing faster than inflation. And our post-pandemic world, again, the US is growing faster with less inflation than the rest of the world. That's the data.
How people feel about it, how people interpret it is something entirely different. When President Trump says that it was better then, it's just empirically untrue. It was fine up until the pandemic, but it wasn't greater than any other period that we've had. Certainly wasn't better than the 90s, certainly wasn't better than the 80s. And in many ways, this last couple of years that we've had are better than even some of those. Do you think we're really heading towards a recession like Larry Summers said we were?
Oh, God. I wish Larry would just stop speaking for a couple of years because he's been dead wrong on almost everything having to do with the economy since the pandemic when he said when we're coming out that we were going to have inflation. He was the Secretary of Treasury under President Obama. He was.
He was. And he was also Secretary of Treasury under President Clinton following Bob Rubin for a period of time as well. So Larry came out saying that because of all the stimulus that we had, because interest rates were at zero, as the economy rebounded, we faced a 1970s style scenario in which inflation was simply going to run out of control as it did leading up to 1980, where inflation was 13%, unemployment was 11%, interest rates went to 20%, what we called stagflation at the time.
And instead, what happened was inflation, because supply chains normalized, began to fall faster than anyone anticipated. Fed took rates to 5%. That largely did the trick. We're on our way back to 2% inflation. And he's been wrong. Yes, can we have a recession? Sure. At the Federal Reserve, we're going to raise interest rates again, or we had some sort of external shock, or the commercial real estate sector in the US becomes so deeply
hurt by rising interest rates. Or credit card crisis, frankly, if people continue to spend at the level that they were spending when they were receiving stimulus checks. And look, credit card and auto loan defaults are at levels that are consistent with a recession.
They're both in the mid to high single digits. And that's not great. And credit card interest rates, irrespective of what the Federal Reserve has done, are extraordinarily and unfairly high. They average about 30%. That really shouldn't happen. I don't know how we can legislate that away, but somebody ought to do something about that.
But a recession, recession, like something that's going to be really bad, the ingredients just aren't there unless the Fed, we're going to raise rates some more or again, unless commercial real estate implodes and affects the financial sector to such an extent that it weakens the economy. Right now, it looks like we're going to grow 2% and change this year.
And again, unless something untoward happens, we're not necessarily headed for a recession. And even if we have one, it would be pretty mild by historic standards, at least so far. So just to end this conversation, I've learned a lot. I hope everyone else has as well. And I hope they're feeling a little bit more upbeat, you know, no gloom and doom. Democratic strategists, the White House are constantly saying,
Don't worry. All the indicators say everything's going great. People are not feeling it right now, but they will around the time of the election because there's a bit of a lag. Why is there a lag? And do you agree with them that this will happen?
Yeah, I mean, there's always been a lag between things getting really good. Most people feel most optimistic at the top of a cycle, right? Then they think that it's never going to end. In my experience over now, the last 40 years- Do you mean a presidential cycle or just a cycle? No, economic cycle.
So if you want to talk about a presidential cycle, a four-year cycle, what happens typically is the third year is the best year for the stock market, fourth year is the second best. And generally speaking, towards the end of a presidential cycle, whether coincidence or not, the Federal Reserve is usually cutting rather than raising interest rates, although George H.W. Bush would argue quite the opposite for his period in office.
Look, it takes time for people to feel good. And given everything that we went through, the profound impact, and I think people underestimate just how bad they still feel because of the pandemic. Look, we lost 1.2 million people. We went through an inflation shock. Interest rates went up. Houses became unaffordable. People changed the way in which they worked and lived. That was a profound event, almost as profound as a war experience.
And so I think psychologically, there was a lot of scarring. And we see that with mental health crises. We see this with suicides. We see it with the opioid epidemic that, you know, kind of all these things coalesce at the same time. So I think it takes time for people to psychologically recover from these things and feel better.
I mean, it's hard to feel as comfortable today as you did pre-pandemic, right? Just the scars that are left behind. And it's happened in post-war environments too, where it takes people a long time to feel okay. And so I think that's still part and parcel of why people feel the way they do, given that the economy is doing, you know, by every metric that we look at, very,
very well. And so yes, by election time, should they be feeling better? You would think so, unless something comes between, you know, comes comes the next couple of months and changes that calculus. But my perspective, and again, you know, I've been, I've not only been doing this for 40 years, I'm almost 63 years old, I've lived through a lot of cycles. And I know which ones felt worse. And I know which ones felt better. This one feels
pretty good. And, and I think probably ultimately will feel pretty good again, depending on one's political persuasion. Do you think that's why messaging is so important? Absolutely. If you look at the, you look at the polls leadership, I think that's what I'm sensing from people is that they don't sense they feel a lack of leadership from the democratic side. I,
at least from Biden explaining. And maybe the state of the union will change that when he's actually, well, yeah, we'll, we'll know soon. Right. I mean, he's got a lot to talk about there, but yeah, messaging has been horrible. I mean, there's no doubt about it that they have not framed it in such a way that it's advantageous to them. Well, they were facing a lot of resentment from people when they would go out there and say, everything's great. And people were like, what?
I don't feel that way. So they realized they had to acknowledge and you hear it from the messaging. We know it doesn't feel great, but we promise it will get better.
And they need to validate. I know you look at all these political polls as well. There's two things that are really interesting. Number one, when you ask people about the economy, they think it's not great. When you ask them about their own personal situation, they tell you it's fine. Right. So this is true in the University of Michigan, Michigan consumer sentiment numbers. This is true in a lot of different sentiment readings that we get about consumers. When you look at charts and polls of how people feel based on their political affiliation,
Republicans feel horrible about the economy. Democrats feel relatively good. The last time we saw people of both parties feel good about the economy was during the Clinton years. And then it began to over whoever was in the White House. So if your party was in power, you felt fine. If your party was out of power, you felt horrible. And that's been true now for almost 30 years. And how do independents feel?
It's hard to tell. I mean, I think we'll find out. And it may not be the economy that turns independence anyway, right? It might be a whole rapid migration issue, immigration, abortion, LGBTQ issues, voting rights. You know, I'm not a cheerleader for the economy. It's just I try to go by the numbers. You know, the numbers were fine during the Trump years. They weren't
astounding, as the former president liked to say. They were on average, they were on par with what Obama did. The Reagan and Clinton years were very, very strong. And this cycle, if you look at the metrics that we look at, which is unemployment, inflation coming down to normal levels, business formation, all these different things that measure economic vigor, the US at the moment is the envy of the world. It's just been a very tough sell. Ron, thank you.
This was illuminating. I feel like I've gotten smarter. I hope listeners have too. If you want Ron on again, send me an email at Tara at puck.news and we'll get him back in a few months telling us how we should be feeling. Yes. Resident economic psychiatrist. It's just the whole thing. It's like, how are you supposed to feel versus what is the reality for each person is different, right? Yeah. And look, you know, there was all this talk about a vibe session.
That doesn't exist, by the way. For those of us who apply the economic trade, you don't have psychological recessions. You have real recessions and you have real recoveries and people feel the way they feel for a wide variety of reasons. But you don't get a recession because people feel bad and then still spend money.
Those are just wildly incongruent ideas. It's called retail therapy. Yes, exactly. All right. Thanks so much, Ron. I appreciate it.
That was another episode of Somebody's Gotta Win. I'm your host, Tara Palmieri. I want to thank my producers, Christopher Sutton and Connor Nevins. If you like this podcast, please subscribe, rate it, and share it with your friends. If you like my reporting, go to puck.news.tara.palmeri and sign up for my newsletter, The Best and the Brightest. You can use the discount code Tara20. If you have questions and comments, you can email me at tara.puck.news. I'll be back on Thursday.
