As I and many others noted after Trump won, real median household income didn’t grow nearly as much under Biden as it did during Trump’s first presidency. But there is more to the story of why 45% of voters said they had become worse off under Biden. Paul Krugman, in his new subtrack that is obviousy essential reading, points to the Michigan Consumer Survey that asks consumers about their personal financial situation compared to five years ago. In October 2024, before the election, 45% said they were worse off, while 39% said they were better off. When the same question was asked one month later, after the election, the numbers were 41% and 45% respectively.
Nothing happened in that month to make 6% of the respondents better off. There are two possibilities. One is that a significant proportion of respondents were answering the question in a politically strategic way. The other is that the election result changed their perception of their personal financial position. But how could an election today change perceptions about the past?
Paul presents two pieces of useful survey evidence that may help answer that question. The first is that people generally thought that the economy in their own state (the ‘local’ economy) was doing better than the economy in the national as a whole. Obviously this might be true in some states, but for all states to be doing better than the US economy as a whole doesn’t make sense. Second, people had a more favourable view of their own financial well-being than the economy at local or national level.
Now if people were answering in a politically strategic way, we shouldn’t observe those differences. Instead it suggests that, when people are asked about how they think the economy is doing, they don’t just reference their own financial situation. Most people have a conception of how the economy as a whole is doing which doesn’t come from their own or even their friends and neighbours financial positions, but something else. For a tiny minority of people, like myself, that perception comes from looking at macroeconomic data. For everyone else, their perception comes from what they read or see in the media.
People know that ‘the economy’ is important. When the economy is in crisis, that will affect most people. In addition most people think that politicians are at least partly responsible for how the economy is doing. They probably grossly overestimate this responsibility, in part because economic and political news is so often linked in the media, and in part because politicians make false claims about what they can achieve and the failures of opponents. In short, what the media says about the economy influences how people vote, even if what they are saying is different from the individual knowledge people have about their own and local economic conditions.
A clear example of this in the UK was during the 2015 election. Voters generally agreed that pretty well everything was worse in 2015 than in 2010, with one exception: “the economy”. Media pundits agreed that the economy was the Conservative party’s strong card. Yet real wages had been falling every year from 2010 until 2014, and had only begun to grow during 2015. This was a period that should have seen a strong recovery from a very deep recession. So why did people think the economy was the Conservative party’s strong card? Because they believed reducing the deficit was the absolute priority, and the government had succeeded in doing this. Why did they think reducing the deficit was more important than an economic recovery or their own wages? Because that is what the media said or implied day after day.
The part of the media that is used by its owners as a vehicle for propaganda in favour of right wing parties will obviously push a view of the economy that is favourable to their side, be it the Conservative led government in 2015 or the Republicans and Trump in 2024. I wrote about this immediately after Trump’s victory, but this part of the media is not my concern in this post. Instead I’m interested in how the part of the media that thinks it’s being objective in its reporting (the ‘mainstream media’ for short) treats the economy and other subjects.
For this part of the media, it is wrong to see their negative reporting of the economy under Biden, or their positive reporting of the UK economy in 2015, as some kind of conspiracy. Large government deficits do sound bad if you constantly make analogies between governments and households, and the Eurozone crisis appeared to show how high deficits could create financial crises. Equally inflation was higher under Biden, and living standards didn’t grow as fast as they had under Trump as a result. The mistake the media made in both cases was to ignore economic expertise. The majority of expertise told them in 2015 that their household analogies were awful and why the Eurozone crisis wouldn’t happen in the UK. Any unbiased expertise told them over the last few years that US economic performance was the envy of the world, and many would have said this was in part because of Biden’s policies.
There is nothing particularly special about the economy that allows the media to sometimes present a view (a 'vibe') that departs from expert opinion. All you need is any issue that most of the public believe is important to their wellbeing and/or which touches on common fears, but where direct experience or knowledge is limited and most do not have the time and knowledge to directly access data and expertise. In an ideal world expertise and the media would cooperate, but all too often that doesn’t happen, particularly when debate involves senior politicians and so is handled by political reporters rather than reporters who are subject specialists.
Another example which I wrote about at the time was how the pandemic was treated by the UK media, especially in the early months of 2020. The UK has a large amount of expertise on pandemics, how they spread and how policy should react, but we hardly saw any of that expertise used by the mainstream broadcast media. Instead the UK media mainly acted as a mouthpiece for the government. As a result, it largely failed to inform the public about basic concepts and alternative policy options. It was left to broadcasters on Irish TV to point out the absurdity of the UK’s ‘herd immunity’ strategy, and when that strategy was abandoned the mainstream media parroted the politicians in saying the ‘science had changed’.
In this case the media took the reasonable idea that in emergencies it was bad to scare people and translated that into the dangerous vibe that it should just act as a mouthpiece for politicians because politicians would ‘follow the science’. That made no sense in scientific terms (there is too much uncertainty to believe there is a uniquely optimal way of handling pandemics known ex ante), but most political journalists have little scientific background. It also made no sense in political terms, but too often political journalists assume that if something is not contested among the two main political parties then it must be right. Maybe at the time they thought it was the responsible thing to do to become the government's mouthpiece, but instead the vibe that the government was 'following the science' was extremely irresponsible and the media became complicit in the unnecessary deaths of thousands of people.
I have written a lot about why the mainstream media often ignores expertise, and instead creates vibes that at best reflect only part of reality, and at worst gets things very wrong. There are clear similarities, interactions and overlaps with the knowledge transmission mechanism between academics and policy. The fault may sometimes lie as much with expertise as with hard pressed journalists with very little time. One thing political journalists seem to do, however, is read or watch what other political journalists say, which makes the persistence of vibes easier. It also means it is easier to create vibes that benefit the political right, but not so easy that it happens all the time. Why and when the mainstream media collectively create and push stories about reality that conflict with a majority of expert opinion without being told to do so is an interesting area of study, made that much harder by a belief in much of the media that it never happens.
