Voters Like What They Don't Hear

Two new polls reveal reality for Biden, Bidenomics, and the re-election of the biggest oil-producing administration in American history

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“The only poll that counts is on election day” goes the refrain of politicians facing bad news. 

Tuesday’s election results were mixed for the parties - but great for pollsters. After being “historically accurate in 2022”, polls again predicted last week’s results. 

And polls made as much news as elections last week: Nate Cohn and the New York Times lit up a million group chats with six state level polls suggesting that Biden trails behind Trump in all but one swing state. Days later, the  “Blueprint” polling initiative launched with a sober look on where Biden could shift focus to win re-election. 

The NYT poll has a strong track record, and we should be taken seriously. The solution is “strategic panic”: remembering that 2024 will likely be a very close election. The Blueprint poll illuminates two reason why Biden may be trailing: a focus on jobs instead of prices, and just how much voters like his accomplishments they don’t hear about.

Voters: Prices > Jobs

According to Blueprint polling, voters overwhelmingly believe that politicians should be focused on the prices of goods, services and gas. When given a choice between focusing on lowering prices, and three other economic priorities (raising wages, lowering interest rates, and adding jobs), nearly two-thirds of voters choose “lower prices on goods, services, and gas”.

Unfortunately, fewer than a quarter of voters believe Biden shares this focus. Nearly half of voters think Trump does.

Good news for the White House communications team is that the stated goal of Bidenomics - “Creating Good Jobs and Empowering Workers” - is getting through to voters: 68% of voters believe Biden is focused on more jobs and higher wages. 

The problem is just 27% of voters are focused on those two, compared to the 64% focused on lowering prices. 

Potential solutions cross policy and communications. Matt Yglesias has noted that the administration doesn’t seem to put prices first when making decisions: pushing forward with inflationary student debt cancellation plans, limiting oil drilling and abetting labor policies that drive up prices.

The Blueprint polling shows that voters have picked up on the lack of prioritization: Even among Democrats, voters think the administration is more focused on jobs (45%) than inflation (29%) and while 87% of Democrats say Bidenomics is good for more jobs, only 73% say it is good at creating lower prices on goods and services. 

More pressing than what but could do, is what he’s already done that voters do not know about.

Biden has also done the #1 thing on the #1 driver of the #1 issue. Inflation is the biggest issue, gas prices drive costs more than anything else, and oil production drives gas prices. And America is producing more than ever before. 

But voters are not hearing that, largely because the blowback from progressive activists may be perceived to be larger than the benefit with voters. 

Josh Barro hit it succinctly 17 months ago:

Of course, these moves would make Joe Manchin happy and anger a lot of progressives. Good. The best thing Biden can do to convince people he wants more oil production and lower gasoline prices is to get environmentalists publicly mad at him for trying to increase oil production and lower gasoline prices. Democrats tend to act like nothing is more important than never pissing off anyone inside the coalition, but this is a situation where that’s exactly what you need to do.

The NYT and Blueprint polls were released days before Joe Manchin announced his decision not to run for re-election. Manchin’s focus - epitomized by the prayer card of popular bipartisan achievements he carried - offered a vivid contrast to deference to the intra-party dilemma described by Barro.

Voters like what they are not hearing

 In the Blueprint polling, only 32 percent of Independents have heard that Biden approved more permits for domestic oil and gas drilling than any previous president (but 71 percent support such a move). Only 44 percent have heard that Biden has increased domestic oil and gas drilling (but 75 percent support).

The good news is that President Biden has been here before, on the economy and on blocking out the online left. 

It was Biden’s job to tout the Obama Administration’s work clawing us out of the Great Recession; he did it well, and Obama-Biden got a second act in 2012. 

It was Biden’s job during the 2020 Democratic primary to block out the progressive activist noise. His campaign literally said “We turned off Twitter. We stayed away from it. We knew that the country was in a different headspace”. Biden did it well, and got a third act in 2020.

Time to do it again.