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For those rooting for the American economy, Friday morning offered another round of great news: The economy added 303,000 jobs in March, extending an incredible hot streak, as the unemployment rate inched lower to 3.8. The jobless rate has now been below 4% for 26 consecutive months — a streak unseen in the United States since the 1960s.
What’s more, wage growth continued to outpace inflation, and all of this comes on the heels of 2023, which was arguably the best year for job creation in the United States since 1999.
And what, pray tell, did Republican leaders have to say about these developments? In keeping with the recent trend, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Mike Johnson responded to the job numbers by saying literally nothing about the good news. No press releases, no tweets, and no public comments.
It appears that the American job market is so good, Republicans have literally found themselves speechless — again.
Circling back to our earlier coverage, this wasn’t at all new: The GOP leadership in both chambers has spent nearly all of the Biden era pretending not to notice extraordinarily good job growth.
(For its part, the Republican National Committee issued a statement that claimed Americans are “worse off” under President Joe Biden. For the record, in March 2024, the economy added 303,000 jobs. In March 2020, the economy lost 1.4 million jobs — a month before the economy lost an additional 20 million jobs.)
The importance of the political implications should be obvious. Economic growth is healthy; economic confidence is growing; the stock market is up; wages are up; the job market looks great; and the United States is experiencing the world’s best post-pandemic recovery. If Republicans were to talk about this, voters might hear about it — and if voters heard about it, Democrats might reap electoral rewards.
GOP silence is intended to keep the public conversation away from good news that might interfere with Republicans’ election-year strategies.
But part of the party’s plan included attacking Democrats on the economy, which as Politico reported in February, is suddenly more difficult than GOP officials had hoped.
The U.S. economy just keeps getting better. And it’s forcing Donald Trump and his allies to contort the talking points they thought would guide them back to the White House. A remarkable run of good economic news has tripped up the Trump campaign’s initial plans to paint President Joe Biden as a disaster on the economy. Now, the GOP frontrunner is grasping for new ways to attack the administration’s increasingly robust record.
The Heritage Foundation’s Stephen Moore, who is closely aligned with the Trump campaign, told Politico, “I think that is the question of the day. You can’t blame the president when policies go wrong, and then say he’s not responsible if things are going right.”
If recent history is any guide, Republicans will simply pretend things aren’t going right, ask voters to believe their version of reality, and hope for the best, all while turning the other way as good news rolls in.
So far, that’s working: Despite the fact that Biden’s economic record far exceeds his predecessor’s, the latest NBC News poll found Trump with a 20-point advantage over the Democratic incumbent on handling the economy.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.