Joe Biden struggling to win over voters amid lingering inflation

Joe Biden ordering sandwiches at a Wawa store in Philadelphia on April 18 – ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP

Standing in line waiting for President Joe Biden to appear at a rally in Philadelphia on Thursday, Lawrence Otter’s frustration with the president’s poor performance in the polls is clear.

In the minds of Democrats, the president has done everything right. Economic growth is up, unemployment is down, and inflation has pulled back from its peak in June last year.

“I don’t understand why it isn’t resonating,” said Mr Otter, a Pennsylvania resident and lifelong Democrat who worked on Bobby Kennedy’s 1968 campaign.

Mr Biden is fond of telling audiences that he is “growing the economy from the middle out and the bottom up,” and that joblessness is at a 50-year low.

This week, Mr Biden launched his “Pennsylvania push” – a three-day blitz of one of the most important battleground states in the nation that included a trip to Scranton, his home town.

“When I look at the economy, I don’t see it through the eyes of Mar-a-Lago,” said Mr Biden on Tuesday, comparing his own background to Mr Trump’s. “I see it through the eyes of Scranton.”

Surveys show that the economy is consistently the biggest issue for US voters, so the president should be streets ahead of Donald Trump, his Republican rival.

The polls, however, tell a different story.

Pictures of the two men on a screen during a campaign rally for Donald Trump in Green Bay, Wisconsin – Brian Snyder/Reuters

A Telegraph tracker survey by Redfield and Wilton Strategies shows a consistent scepticism for “Bidenomics” – the president’s flagship economic policy.

Last month, the latest poll showed that in six key swing states including Pennsylvania, Mr Trump was trusted more on the economy. In five of the states, the largest group of voters said they disapproved of Mr Biden’s economic record.

Economists say the answer to Mr Biden’s predicament lies in historic inflation, which peaked at more than nine per cent in 2022 and has eroded the purchasing power of Americans’ wages.

The president has been accused of hectoring Americans with macroeconomic statistics, in the face of polls that show the majority of voters think their financial situation has become worse under his tenure in the White House.

“We’ve seen the administration attempt to address that, with a pretty ineffective and kind of odd effort to try to convince people that what they think is their experience of the economy is not actually their experience of the economy,” said Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank.

“When people think about the economy, they’re thinking a lot less about the low unemployment rate, and they’re thinking a lot more about how expensive everything is compared to 2019.”

Front yard signs supporting the Biden-Harris campaign in front of a home on April 19 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania – Joe Lamberti

Despite Mr Trump’s legal woes, polls suggest his performance on the economy could be enough to maintain his national lead over Mr Biden, which has narrowed to around one point.

Restoring his credibility on the economy could make or break the Biden campaign – but arresting inflation is no easy task.

This week, Jerome Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, said it would take “longer than expected” for the central bank to cut interest rates, citing persistent inflation of around 3.5 per cent that has been driven partly by the cost of housing.

Most voters, of course, will not be following Mr Powell’s speeches closely. In a sea of economic data, Mr Biden’s performance might be better explained as something as simple as the price of a burger.

“If you go to McDonald’s to get a Happy Meal, it’s almost $10 here,” said Mr Otter. “In California, it’s even more expensive. How the hell do you control that?”

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