Why did voters EVER think Republicans were better for the economy?

Let's try to solve the mystery.

Depending on which poll you look at, Kamala Harris has caught up to Donald Trump on the question of which candidate voters think would be better for the economy, after a long period in which first Joe Biden and then Harris trailed Trump badly on that issue. Which raises this question:

Why do voters always seem to default to the belief that Republicans will do a better job on the economy than Democrats will? Or to put it another way, why did they ever believe that, when it’s so plainly wrong?

This is something of a mystery, which I’ll attempt to solve. But there’s little question that it’s true, and it’s not just a matter of ordinary people failing to grasp complex macroeconomic concepts and arcane data. The numbers go up and down, but every Republican seems to start with the presumption that they’d do a good job managing the economy, and every Democrat has to work twice as hard to convince voters that they’d be just as effective at it.  

It’s as though your town has two plumbers; Plumber Anderson can be relied on to make competent and timely repairs, while Plumber Jones floods and nearly destroys the home of everyone who hires him, inevitably leading them to call in Plumber Anderson to fix the damage Plumber Jones created. But people keep giving Plumber Jones their business. How can we account for this? 

Reality has a liberal bias

To those who pay a great deal of attention to politics, the facts are amply clear: The economy has historically performed better under Democratic presidents, by almost any measure you can name (see here or here or here or here). But people can’t be expected to be aware of historical data on GDP, job growth, stock market gains, inflation-adjusted income, or any of that. So what would they use to arrive at a default judgment about which party does a better job, apart from bias toward their own tribe?

The most obvious answer would be recent experience, which shouldn’t be hard to call to mind. If things were bad under one party and good under the other in your lifetime, you’d remember, right?

Apparently not. Because in our recent history, we’ve repeated the same pattern again and again: A recession happens under a Republican president, then a Democrat comes into office and the economy recovers, then everything collapses under the next Republican, then another Democrat has to fix everything again. So: recession under George H.W. Bush, recovery under Bill Clinton, recession under George W. Bush, recovery under Barack Obama, recession under Donald Trump, recovery under Joe Biden. 

This has nothing to do with the deep economic problems we have, like persistent poverty, lack of health coverage, or the decline of manufacturing jobs. That’s all true, but it doesn’t say anything about the relative performance of the parties. Why hasn’t the nation’s experience over the years penetrated people’s consciousness?

Fantasy has a conservative bias

Part of the answer can be found in the fact that for many decades, Republicans were the party of big business (which they still are) and Democrats were the party of working people (which they still are in policy, but not in image; we’ll get to that part in a moment). Though there has always been plenty of anti-corporate sentiment, American culture lionizes the wealthy. The American Dream — that anyone can succeed and become rich if they’re willing to work hard — is a myth in both senses of the word: It’s false, but it’s also a story that instructs us in what our society’s values are. And it’s pounded into the heads of every American pretty much from birth. 

So wealthy businesspeople, the people the Republican Party represents, supposedly understand this big unwieldy thing called “the economy.” No one questions whether the fact that you got rich selling soap flakes or used cars actually means you have better ideas about macroeconomic policy, and rich business guys (and the occasional gal) regularly win office by telling voters “I’m a businessman, not a politician,” as though that were a reason to vote for and not against them. (I’ve been complaining about the “businessman, not a politician” scam for far too long, with little apparent effect.)

The image persists: Business guys are smart, knowledgeable, pragmatic, unsentimental and hard-working. They’re not bound by ideology; they just want to “get things done.” And they “know how the economy works.” A disturbing number of people even say this about Donald Trump, a con artist who inherited hundreds of millions of dollars and maintains his fortune with every two-bit scam he can get his grubby little paws on, from commemorative bibles to commemorative sneakers to commemorative trading cards to, naturally, crypto. 

But wait, your leftist friend might say, Democrats are just as much in the pocket of corporate America as Republicans! Even if that were true, the erosion of the Democratic image as the party of the working class apparently did nothing to make them seem like wiser economic managers, all the success they had at economic management notwithstanding. That image first began to change in the 1960s; as political scientists Christopher Ellis and James Stimson argue, “With the coming of the Great Society there was a new clientele of liberalism, the poor — and the non-white.” Over time new clients were added to the Democratic list, including women and LGBTQ people. 

Nevertheless, Democrats are the ones who generally value more technocratic approaches to governing. But it’s very much in Republicans’ interest to portray the economy as an arena where values are largely irrelevant, the squishy Democrats are too bound by their affiliations and obligations to make good decisions, and we all benefit when the pragmatic approach of the businessman is brought to bear. And what would a bunch of latte-sipping cultural elites debating postmodern literary theory in their Upper West Side apartments know about how the economy works?

A final reason why Republicans retain their image for economic competence despite their copious failures: propaganda. Their messaging on the economy is consistent and relentless, in a way Democrats never match. Tax cuts create wealth for all, regulations strangle innovation, wealth is a sign of virtue, the deficit will bury us (but only when there’s a Democrat in the White House), repeatedly endlessly and passionately. You don’t have to agree with all of it to get the message that Republicans are sober-minded people who care deeply about responsible economic policy-making. 

And the elite news media, in their eternal quest to prove they aren’t liberal, do their part by treating preposterous economic proposals by Republicans as though they are serious and sensible, while simultaneously not bothering to examine those claims too closely, precisely because they know how idiotic they are. Yet Democratic ideas are picked apart with a skepticism bordering on contempt. 

Democrats are constantly asked “How will you pay for this?” and “You can’t seriously think this is going to pass a divided Congress?” while Republicans rarely get those kinds of questions; reporters don’t take the Republican ideas seriously, which means they’re just presented to their audiences on their own terms. The result is dueling headlines like “In Appeal to Inflation-Pressed Voters, Trump Says China Will Give Every American $50,000” contrasted with “Harris Dodges Questions On Deficit Effect of Housing Plan.” 

What’s happening now

So yes, Harris has now pulled essentially even with Trump on the economic question. Why? It’s likely the combination of a few factors. The first is a whole bunch of genuinely good news on the economy, which does manage to penetrate at least a millimeter or two into the brains of voters: The post-pandemic inflation is basically over, job growth is still strong, interest rates are coming down, and gas is relatively cheap. Second, just by virtue of being young and vigorous, Harris seems like someone who can be a reasonably good manager of the government, more so than Joe Biden, who has in fact been an excellent manager of the government and economic policy-maker, but gets no credit for it because he’s old. In other words, vibes.

Finally, Harris is just talking a lot about economic stuff: the cost of living, bringing down housing prices, tackling long-term care for seniors, and so on. People see her campaigning and grok that she is addressing economic questions and putting out proposals, and even if they couldn’t tell you almost anything about what those proposals are or whether they’ll work, they have a vague sense that she’s on it. 

That’s not all that much to celebrate, if you want decisions to made by an informed and deliberative electorate. But if it works, it works. Yet even if Harris wins and presides over a terrific economy for the next four or eight years, it’s unlikely to reset people’s perceptions of which party actually knows what it’s doing when it comes to the economy. If they didn’t get the message of the last few decades, the next presidency, however it goes, isn’t going to change their minds.