BY ZEKE MILLER AND SEUNG MIN KIM
HOUSTON (AP) — “Are you better off today than you were four
years ago?” Rarely have voters’ answers to that question been so complicated.
Former President Donald Trump asked the time-tested question
of his supporters in all-caps Monday on his Truth Social platform. President
Joe Biden did the same three times over this week during a trio of
Each candidate is hoping the answer skews in his favor — but
the verdict may well hinge on whether people are reflecting back on the
COVID-19 pandemic, the state of their pocketbooks or some broader sense of
well-being.
Four years ago, the country was in the throes of a
nationwide shutdown due to the coronavirus, with surging joblessness and a
cratering stock market. Now the presumptive Democratic and Republican nominees
are hurtling toward a rematch in which the virus for most Americans is but a
traumatic memory, markets are up and unemployment is at or near record lows.
DONALD TRUMP
Trump’s invite to major donors prioritizes the committee
paying his legal bills over the RNC
Pro-Trump attorney in
Pro-Trump lawyer Stefanie Lambert turns herself in on
outstanding
Trump’s latest 2024 campaign fundraising report shows him
lagging behind Biden in cash
If the handling of the once-in-a-century outbreak defined
the 2020 presidential race, it appears that voters have other things on their
minds as they consider their choices in 2024.
“Speaking of Donald Trump, just a few days ago, he asked the
famous question at one of his rallies: Are you better off today than you were
four years ago?” Biden told donors this week. “Well Donald, I’m glad you asked
that question, man, because I hope everyone in the country takes a moment to
think back when it was like in March of 2020.”
From there, Biden plunged into a recitation of dark moments
from the early days of the pandemic, when hospital emergency rooms were
overcrowded, first responders were risking their lives to care for the sick and
some nurses resorted to wearing trash bags due to the scarcity of personal
protective equipment.
Trump, for his part, tosses out a wider net in reflecting on
the American psyche.
“Under the Trump administration, you were better off, your
family was better off, your neighbors were better off, your communities were
better off, and our country was far, far, far better off; that’s for sure,” he
said at a rally this month. “
“You have wars that never would have taken place,” Trump
claimed. “
The “are you better off” prompt traces its roots to the 1980
presidential race, when Ronald Reagan skewered then-incumbent President Jimmy
Carter during a televised debate and catapulted himself to the White House.
In a February AP-NORC poll, just 24% of Americans said they
were better off than they were when Biden became president, while 41% said they
were worse off and 34% said neither. Majorities also said the country as a
whole and the national economy were worse off than when Biden became president.
Biden aides contend that the question — like other polling
barometers of presidential performance — has been overtaken by partisanship.
They say their internal surveys have shown that voters tend to block out the
pandemic from their memories unless reminded of it, and that when asked about
Trump they tend to think of the pre-pandemic years rather than 2020.
Insisting that they are focused on meeting voters where they
are, Biden’s team had not intended to put the Reagan question to voters. But
once Trump chimed in, Biden was quick with a rejoinder.
Speaking to well-heeled
“Remember when he said inject bleach?” Biden asked in
Concurrently, Biden’s team released an ad highlighting some
of Trump’s most controversial moments from 2020, including the bleach comment,
his self-assessment that he’d rate his response to the pandemic a “10” and his
reflection on virus deaths that “it is what it is.”
Trump’s national press secretary Karoline Leavitt pushed
back at Biden’s claims in a statement.
“Joe Biden and his media allies can cherry-pick numbers from
the worst of the COVID crisis all they want, but Americans know Biden has been
a disaster and they were far better off under President Trump, which is why
President Trump continues to crush Biden in the polls,” she said.
Trump earned abysmal marks from voters four years ago for
his handling of the pandemic, which cost him the White House, and more than 1.1
million people in the U.S. would go on to die from COVID-19. But the majority
of those deaths occurred during Biden’s presidency as he struggled to contain
new variants and to drive up vaccination rates for the life-saving shots that
were developed during Trump’s term.
The “better-off” answer, then, can go in multiple
directions.
“Today, the answer is unequivocally ‘it depends,’” said
Republican strategist Alex Conant. “The pandemic is over, but nobody blames
Trump for causing the pandemic or credits him with the vaccines that ended it.
The economy is doing well, but only after a bout of historic inflation that
people are still upset about. For most voters, the answer isn’t clear — which
is why the outcome of the election itself is unclear this far out.”
He added: “I don’t think any voters want to go back to the
dark days of 2020, but judging by the poll numbers, most voters don’t like 2024
very much either.”
In some ways, many voters did feel better off during the
pandemic — because of massive dollops of government aid. Their bank accounts
grew dramatically in size, while the closures tied to the coronavirus kept
inflation and interest rates extremely low. Government borrowing is what paid
for those perceived gains, as budget deficits totaled $3.1 trillion in 2020 and
nearly $2.8 trillion in 2021, according to the Office of Management and Budget.
Average annual incomes spiked with each of the three rounds
of pandemic aid. In March 2021, the bottom 50% of U.S. earners saw their
average disposable income after inflation jump to $46,000 as they received
money from Biden’s coronavirus relief, according to economists at The
University of California, Berkeley. Average disposable income has since dipped
to $26,100 in March 2023. As a result, people may feel worse off, even though
their incomes are actually higher than they were before the pandemic broke out
in early 2020.
Biden, though, is trying to put a forward-looking slant on
the backward-looking question, as he aims to keep the contrast with Trump
central to his reelection campaign.
“The problem isn’t just going back to where Trump had the
country. It’s where he wants to take us now,” he told donors.
He concluded: “Folks, it’s not about me. It’s about him.”
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Miller reported from