A Spot where like 2/3s of the people are doing better and will tell you so, but a lot of those same people who are doing better will tell you the country isn't though.
And then there's another group of people who will swear up and down they're doing worse when you can point to how they're actually doing better individdually. I have a friend like this I saw last week, he can't stop complaining about food prices and specificaully resturant prices. He's a good friend and I know for a fact he's gotten a big promotion and several large yearly raises. So I say, "Dude, you're making like $50K a year more than before Coivd, you really care about the price of a McDouble?"
And people are struggling, there will always be people struggling. Not everyone has a good job, not everyone takes these price increases in stride and hasn't been hurt by them. And increasing rent and interest rates create hardships too. And you can't tell people struggling with rent that rent prices are actually decreasing right now and have been for over a year, they still pay more now than 5 years ago. And you can't tell people interest rates right now aren't really unusually high, this is closer to historicalk normal than the 3% rates were. Those people are still struggling to buy their first homes and seeing crazy bidding wars price them out.
It's a really hard problem for Dems who are by default the voice of people who need help and who aren't the powerful. The data says we are doing better as a country in almost every way under Biden, but that's still not going to undue 40 years of Trickle Down overnight. So you have to recognize that people are still suffering at the same time as show them the gains we are making.
And it's pre Covid as a comparsion, the public is willing to give Trump an economic pass for Covid (even though they shouldn't.) The economy is better now than 2019. Poverty is falling. Real icomes are higher. Growth is better, Wage growth is much better. Job growth is way way better.More people have heatlh care. Less people are going bankrupt, by a lot, in 2019 there were 480,000 personal bankruptcies, in 2023 there were 260,000. Crime is down, lowest it;s been since the 1960s for both violent and property crime. So you've got to communicate these many successes, but at the same time acknowledge not everyone is doing great and we must do better for them.
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