Biden's Economy Is a Risky Bet for 2024 Election

President Joe Biden feels good about his performance on the economy—so good, in fact, he is willing to bet the fate of his presidency on it. Voters, however, might need more convincing.

Nearly one year after the August 2022 passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, a cornerstone part of Biden's ambitious "Build Back Better" agenda, June polling by the Associated Press and NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found just 34 percent of U.S. adults approved of his economic leadership.

An additional 64 percent of Americans in a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll say the economy is worse off today than it was compared to what it was in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, while more than half of all Americans—56 percent—say they believe President Biden and his administration are not doing enough when it comes to investing in the economy.

"There seems to be this perception and messaging problem for the administration right now," Mallory Newall, vice president of U.S. public affairs at Ipsos, told Newsweek in an interview.

And that hurts him. While polling by Ipsos and by Newsweek earlier this summer shows a high degree of popularity around some of the specific positions his administration has taken toward managing the economy—including higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy—few Americans are actually aware of what Biden's policies actually do, Newall said. Nor do they appear aware of the healthy, macroeconomic indicators showing the state of the U.S. economy not only improving but improving faster than the rest of the world.

Put simply: if things are better, most Americans don't believe it.

"When you take the sense that most Americans feel the economy is worse compared to five years ago and marry that with the fact that Americans are largely unfamiliar with the policies of the IRA, that signals to me an uphill climb for the president between now and 2024," Newall said.

Still, the 2024 election is more than a year away, and Biden is playing the long game.

Over the weekend, Politico reported the lion's share of green energy investments tied to the Inflation Reduction Act were being made in Republican-leaning Congressional districts, with a conspicuously high concentration of those projects located in battleground states like Ohio, Arizona, Michigan and Georgia.

Biden has also shown a greater willingness to criticize Republicans like Colorado Representative Lauren Boebert and other Congressional Republicans for voting against job-creating programs in the IRA in their own backyards while using federal resources to ensure the source of funding for federal projects are not just conspicuous, but that his name is attached to them.

And on Monday, Building Back Better—a Democratic super PAC backing Biden's re-election effort—announced the rollout of a six-figure, bilingual ad buy in blue, battleground state cities like Atlanta, Las Vegas, Milwaukee, Philadelphia and Phoenix as part of a larger $75 million promotional blitz to tout the benefits of Biden's economic programs in their home states in popular policy areas like climate change and healthcare.

The aim is simple: to galvanize early support for the president's re-election bid ahead of next year's elections among constituencies critical to his campaign's success. Particularly among the Black and Hispanic males recent demographics have shown are increasingly beginning to gravitate toward the GOP in recent campaign cycles.

"One of the biggest problems still is that folks just simply don't know that a lot of these bills happened," a source familiar with the Biden campaign's strategy told Newsweek in an interview. "You'll see in poll after poll that these are genuinely extremely popular policies, particularly within these constituencies."

While not an explicit part of Biden's strategy, the campaign has also leaned heavily on Democratic governors and candidates like Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer to help evangelize the successes of Biden's economic agenda at the state level. Signs alongside Michigan highway projects tout Biden's role in securing the funding for New York Governor Kathy Hochul's promotion of the Biden administration's help securing a $50 million microchip facility in a relatively red-leaning region of upstate New York.

"Democratic governors truly are where the rubber meets the road in terms of implementing a lot of these huge bipartisan accomplishments of the Biden Harris agenda," Sam Newton, communications director at the Democratic Governor's Association, told Newsweek in an interview. "And we're able to run on a lot of those accomplishments and talk about how they're using those resources to deliver jobs, invest in infrastructure, invest in clean energy, lower costs, and just make life better for working people and working families."

Biden's ability to convince voters his plans are working will likely be critical to his re-election. Per Ipsos polling, some 49 percent of Americans say that inflation or increasing costs are the most important issues facing the country. Nine percent cite unemployment as another top issue, while an additional 10 percent cite economic inequality.

Even with good things happening around them, Newall said, most voters right now are primarily focused on how things are going for them personally.

"There's still a disconnect between some of these broader economic indicators and how people are feeling about their pocketbooks, how they're feeling squeezed when they go to the grocery store, when they go to the gas pump and they're paying more," Newall said. "And that's really true across the board. And I think that's what the President has to contend with right now."

Correction, 08/15/2023, 12:05 p.m. ET: A previous version of this story incorrectly attributed a recent ad buy to the Biden campaign. It was actually purchased by Building Back Better, a Democratic super PAC.