Polling suggests that as we go into Election Day, the Republicans’ advantage on the economy is substantially smaller than it was a few months ago. But if you look at the numbers, what’s astonishing is that the advantage doesn’t go the other way.
Wednesday’s data release on gross domestic product for the third quarter, the last one before the election, paints a portrait of remarkable economic success. One way to see how amazing that success has been — The Economist calls it “glorious” — is to compare where we are now with Congressional Budget Office projections released in January 2020, before Covid struck. There were widespread warnings that the pandemic would cause “scarring” — that is, do lasting damage; instead we have substantially outperformed those projections:
At the same time, inflation looks beaten: The Federal Reserve’s preferred measure of underlying inflation is close to its 2 percent target. What looked like a bump in inflation early this year was probably just a statistical blip:
Today’s political scene being what it is, Republicans will continue to denounce Biden-Harris economic policies as a failure. But if this is failure, what would success look like? Claims that we have a bad economy are about as credible as claims that armed migrants have taken over Times Square.
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