As elections near, economic growth exceeds expectations (again)

If all you know about the U.S. economy were based on Donald Trump’s campaign ads, you’d make some rather ugly assumptions about the status quo. Those assumptions would be wildly at odds with reality.

In fact, a Washington Post fact-check report scrutinized the former president’s newest ad — which claims, among other things, that there’s “a recession now headed our way” — and concluded: “This ad is stuck in the time warp. The Trump campaign may wish it was still running in 2022 and 2023, when the economic numbers were grimmer for Democrats. But that’s no excuse for pretending the situation has not improved significantly in the past year.”

Quite right. In fact, for those interested in the reality of the nation’s economic conditions, one of the most important things to remember is that it’s 2024, not 2022 — and this year, there’s plenty of good economic news to consider. The Hill reported:

White House National Economic Advisor Lael Brainard also took stock of the bigger picture and the revised data, concluding in a written statement: “We learned this morning that the economy has grown by 3.2% per year during Biden-Harris Administration — even stronger than previously estimated — and better than the first three years of the previous administration.”

That’s true, too. The standard Republican line about Trump’s economic performance is that 2020, when there was a recession as a direct result of a pandemic, shouldn’t count. But even if we exclude 2020, economic growth in the United States has been stronger under Biden/Harris than under Trump/Pence.

With fewer than 40 days remaining before Election Day, this probably isn’t the news Republicans wanted to see.

Indeed, circling back to our recent coverage, as last month got underway, there was a sharp and unexpected downturn on Wall Street. As a New York Times report summarized, it was easy to explain: Investigators grew skittish due to a combination of a disappointing jobs report, trouble in Japanese markets, and concerns that the Federal Reserve had waited too long to lower interest rates.

For Trump and his GOP, however, the truth was clearly inadequate, so they rewrote it. In the Republicans’ version of reality, the brief Wall Street slide was obviously Vice President Kamala Harris’ fault. From the Times’ article:

The rhetorical push was, of course, utterly ridiculous. The idea that a sitting vice president was directly responsible for brief and entirely predictable stock market losses was absurd, but Trump and his allies expected voters to believe it anyway.

At least that was the Republicans’ message in early August. As September comes to an end, Americans are no longer hearing much about the “Kamala Crash,” in large part because there’s been no crash. All of the Wall Street losses from earlier in the month have been regained, and economic growth in the United States continues to quite good.

The results also pose a challenge for the former president and his allies, which they haven’t even tried to address: If voters are supposed to believe that Harris is directly responsible for the world’s largest economy, how much credit are Trump and the GOP prepared to give the incumbent vice president for 3% GDP growth?

As for the Republicans’ crystal ball, four years ago, Trump told supporters that Democratic policies would “unleash an economic disaster of epic proportions” and force the country “into depression.” He’s begun making nearly identical predictions ahead of Election Day 2024.

Everything Trump said was wrong — and he hasn’t even tried to explain why his predictions were so hilariously misplaced, or why anyone should believe his new predictions in light of his awful track record.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.