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Election Day 2024 is still 469 days away, and no one can say with confidence what the political landscape will look like by the time voters cast their ballots. The Republican National Convention is itself 51 weeks away, and while we can probably guess who the party’s nominee will be, a lot can happen between now and then.
As for the Democratic incumbent, we also have a pretty good idea as to what President Joe Biden’s GOP opponents will tell the electorate about his first term: Thanks to the White House, they’ll say, the United States has descended into an unrecognizable, Mad Max-style dystopian hellscape, with high crime, high inflation, porous borders, and a weak economy.
There is, however, a quantifiable problem with the Republicans’ case. Axios reported over the weekend:
Republicans are hammering “Joe Biden’s America” as a land of rising violent crime, surging immigration and out of control inflation, but there’s just one problem: the numbers are starting to move in the opposite direction. ... With 2024 around the corner, the U.S. is making measurable progress in the areas where Biden has been most vulnerable to GOP attacks.
Just to reiterate, I’m not in a position to know whether the recent trends will continue, but the Axios report nevertheless highlighted trends that the White House is eager to talk about:
- Violent crime rates are generally “down across the board.”
- Illegal border crossings have plummeted.
- Inflation rates have improved significantly since Democrats approved the Inflation Reduction Act. (Whether the law deserves the bulk of the credit is a separate conversation.)
And though the article didn’t emphasize the broader economy, the news on that front looks good, too, thanks to a combination of low unemployment, steady growth, and improved inflation data. A CNBC report from late last week added that Morgan Stanley, one of the nation’s largest investment banks, “is crediting President Joe Biden’s economic policies with driving an unexpected surge in the U.S. economy that is so significant that the bank was forced to make a ‘sizable upward revision’ to its estimates for U.S. gross domestic product.”
Is this good news for Americans? Yes. Is it equally great for the folks responsible for creating anti-Biden attack ads? No.
To be sure, it’s a safe bet that the electorate will hear plenty of messages that aren’t exactly fact-based. The airwaves will likely be filled with claims about conditions that bear no resemblance to the actual data. (I’d refer readers to a 2016 story about Newt Gingrich, which is one of my favorite anecdotes from my book.)
But it also helps contextualize the Republicans’ recent fixation on presidential “scandals” that don’t stand up well to scrutiny, but which start to have more appeal to GOP officials as the crime, immigration, and economic data turns rosier.