Morning Woe

Take Morning Joe, the favorite political show of the president and Washington insiders more broadly. This message about a “disconnect” between voters’ feelings and the supposed objective economic reality was ubiquitous on the influential cable news program over the last two years, led by the titular host himself. Reportedly doubling as Biden’s occasional off-air informal advisor, Joe Scarborough’s rave reviews of the economy were, as the election neared, often paired with a slavish defense of the president, his record, and his place at the top of the ticket.

The numbers were “lining up fairly well for Joe Biden, if he decides to run for reelection,” Scarborough said in December 2022, painting a scenario where cost-of-living pressures would simply resolve themselves just in time for Biden to win by November 2024. “You could go down one indicator after another, and America is doing pretty damn great,” he said three months later. It was only because of “hyperpartisanship” and because of Donald Trump, Fox News, and Republicans, he said that summer, that Americans weren’t recognizing that “the economy is, by most objective measures, doing very well.” The solution was to try “hammering the message home” about his economic numbers (which is exactly what Biden did wind up doing, to no avail).

Ironically, the more precarious Biden’s standing became, the more intense Scarborough’s glorification of the economy. After special counsel Robert Hur’s report suddenly made Biden’s questionable mental fitness a national issue in February 2024, Scarborough spent an episode angrily talking up how the US “economy is the strongest in the world,” that it was “crushing China’s economy right now” (which was a highly debatable claim), touting how “a lot of billionaires and millionaires” were “making millions of dollars every single day because the stock market is soaring,” and telling “rich country club types” to “look at your stock app and see how much money you’re making every hour.” US allies were “jealous” of the US economy, he said, where “every trend” was tremendous, even if groceries were too pricey.

This continued in the months that followed, with the only solution presented to the president being to explain to people what he had accomplished. When regular panelist Mike Barnicle charged in March this year that Trump and Republicans had “roiled the pot in this country” and created “unearned ager” among voters, Scarborough followed it with a lengthy rant that saw him say three separate times that the country’s economy was stronger relative to the rest of the world than it had ever been.

If the last few years of Biden administration policy was anything to go by, the president was listening. He only belatedly pivoted to criticizing firms for price gouging, after more than a year of talking up his economic record to a public in no mood to hear it and blaming the media for their unhappiness. And once he did turn his attention to inflation, it was a rhetorical pressure campaign on corporations, with his price-gouging “strike force” meeting only once, in August, where they mostly listed actions they had taken over the preceding three years.

Bigger Than Joe

This kind of talk on the show didn’t just come from Scarborough but was a unified message relentlessly hammered into the heads of viewers (meaning, the president and his team) by cohosts and guests over the past two years:

• Cohost Willie Geist saying, “You have number after number showing how strong the economy is,” and that economic unhappiness was a matter of “perception versus reality.”
• Panelist Jonathan Lemire asking how Democrats can “change this particular narrative” about economic unhappiness, and being told the problem was Democrats didn’t have their own “echo chamber.”
• Former Barack Obama official and campaign manager Jim Messina, when asked by Lemire why Americans didn’t think the economy was good “despite the numbers saying it might be,” responding that “they need to be reminded.”
• Frequent panelist Donny Deutsch telling viewers at various times that “people are trained to say the economy sucks,” that Biden had “overseen the best economy in my lifetime” and had “done everything right,” that “every metric is positive” and that “you’ll start to see a lot more discussion about that,” and that Deutsch’s wealthy friends should look at the performance of their stock portfolios and thank the president.
• Guest Fareed Zakaria insisting that unhappiness with an economy supposedly stronger than ever was purely due to “cultural backlash” and that “we have been sold this doom and decline by Trump and . . . that whole movement.”
• New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin telling the panel that “this is a very good economy,” that it’s even “very hard to say this is not a great economy,” and that “people are rooting for it to be a worse economy so they can get the interest rates down lower.”
• Former Hillary Clinton aide Jennifer Palmieri explaining that the reason people didn’t feel what Geist said was a series of fantastic pieces of economic news was that “people kept hearing reports for the last year and a half that we were headed into a recession.”

An August 2023 appearance by former MSNBC host Chris Matthews was one of the rare times the show acknowledged the economic pain in the country, with Matthews reminding the panel that “this still remains for the vast majority of people a paycheck-to-paycheck economy” and that talking about the price of bananas coming down didn’t change that. But for the panel, the solution to this was either “out of the president’s hands” or to just acknowledge people’s economic pain in speeches.

This wasn’t limited to Morning Joe. The entirety of MSNBC — similarly oriented around flattering the president and his party — was filled, on air and online, with pro-Democratic pundits scratching their heads over why Biden was getting no credit for an economy benefiting the working class, talking up the same selection of positive “normal metrics” while ignoring the negative signs, determining that voters were wrong or delusional, and insisting they had to be told how good things were.

Even the typically insightful Chris Hayes spent segments extolling how “astoundingly well” the economy was doing, calling Biden’s presidency “the most successful macroeconomic stewardship of any president in my lifetime,” and concluding that partisan blinders had left voters unable “to assess the facts.”

One of the serial offenders was anchor Stephanie Ruhle, a former Wall Street banker. Over the past two years, Ruhle has insisted “we have the best economy in the world” with “an extraordinary stock market run,” blamed the media for having “instilled this fear and unhappiness in people, and said that “we need an economic explainer” because “people are confused” and “doing quite well.”

“When you ask [Americans] about the economy, they start looking at it through these partisan lenses and they start telling themselves stories that are completely at odds with the reality,” economist Justin Wolfers told Ruhle last year. Wolfers, incidentally, has made the rounds through some of Democrats’ other preferred news outlets spreading the gospel that people are simply addled by partisanship, they shouldn’t mind higher prices in the first place, and that “the economy is good. Full stop.”

Dispatches From Punditocracy

Zoom out from cable news, and there is an entire universe of news outlets and commentators listened to by the White House and Democratic officials who told them this comforting narrative.

Take Matthew Yglesias, one of Bidenworld’s most–followed pundits. “Biden’s economy is great everywhere except in the polls,” Yglesias wrote for Bloomberg last October, in a column that now reads like a best-of compilation of terrible political advice: voters weren’t angry at Biden for anything specific but because of “a global trend of bitterness and anger toward almost all incumbents,” his messaging telling people that things were better than they knew “is probably working better than most people realize,” and “it’s at least conceivable that voters will eventually forgive and forget the inflation of the past.” So he should just wait it out, because his “best shot at winning” would be Republicans nominating the polarizing Trump. (“His much-discussed age may be overblown as an issue,” Yglesias added for good measure.)

Yglesias has spread these and pretty much every other talking point we’ve heard so far on his Twitter/X account and on his Substack. There, he blamed the president’s polling woes on progressives for not “doing positive messaging on the Biden economy” as the Right would have uniformly done for Trump, and for not wanting “Democrats to say popular things like ‘the economy is good.’”

Another culprit was economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. Though Krugman was careful to note he didn’t “want to say that Americans are stupid” or only imagining “economic hardship,” it’s hard to know what else to take away from his many columns arguing negative sentiment was just a matter of “extreme partisanship, fed by right-wing media” and “everyday people’s perceptions” (which were, he claimed, actually moving closer and closer toward Biden), and that in reality, the economy had “been doing extremely well.” Like others, Krugman’s other message to Democratic elites was that they were right to do nothing to respond to people’s unjustified unhappiness.

“Could Biden have pursued alternative policies that would have left him in a better political position?” he asked. “The lessons of history suggest no.”

Special mention should go to one particular voice: Will Stancil, a Minneapolis-based legal researcher who became bizarrely influential among Democratic elites this election cycle, probably because his Twitter/X presence consisted of relentlessly telling Democrats this reassuring fantasy.

By New York magazine’s count, Stancil tweeted about the US economy roughly 150 times in December 2023 alone, his analysis usually some variation on the talking points that this was “the strongest large economy in human history” and that people were “completely misinformed about” it thanks to a “media and social media doom loop” — “a hallucinatory media bubble” that, he charged, was also leading Americans to hold the equally absurd belief that “Biden is senile.” Pointing Stancil to the many statistics that said otherwise — as, full disclosure, I once did — only led him to further ignore countervailing evidence and double down, and he is still spamming this narrative post-election.

In the end, Stancil’s tweeting didn’t succeed in convincing a majority of American voters that they were wrong about their economic struggles. But it probably did help convince the White House and Harris campaign that they should run as if he had.

This sampling gives you a sense of how ubiquitous this message was. You could find it on CNN, in influential magazines like the Atlantic and Economist, on the New York Times’ Daily podcast, even on fact-checking websites like Politifact or from a host of other inexplicably widely read commentators.

Flattery Will Get You Nowhere

The problem for the Democrats has three prongs: their favorite pundits are often very well-compensated, coastal, and increasingly come from elite backgrounds and so don’t feel the past few years of cost-of-living increases the same way as the majority of the public. They mostly talk to each other instead of the ordinary working Americans most likely to struggle with paying rent or to fear the arrival of medical bills, leaving them debating with themselves the “mystery” of why people feel the way they feel. And they exist in a media ecosystem and political culture where they’re incentivized to flatter the people in power they know are reading or listening to their advice.

All of this drastically lowers the chances they’re actually going to hear something that challenges their worldview or even gives them an accurate picture of reality.

For all the talk of Democrats not having the kind of echo chamber that exists on the Right, their problem is precisely that they do. It’s impossible to know now if the campaign and election result might have gone different had the party not been in thrall to a media diet of court flattery put out by, sometimes, literal millionaires. But it sure didn’t help that they were.