Political impact:
The seeming good news for Democrat Hillary Clinton could prove negligible in November’s election.
The latest economic news from the Census Bureau Tuesday would seem to be a political godsend for Democrat Hillary Clinton: The nation’s median household income rose 5.2 percent in 2015, the biggest annual increase in nearly 50 years.
Not only did Democrats celebrate the news as proof that the Obama White House had revived the economy but also that a central tenet of Donald Trump’s campaign — that the economy is, in the Republican’s words, “cratering,” “Third World” and “rigged” — is fiction.
“So, now, let’s face it, Republicans don’t like to hear good news right now,” President Obama said Tuesday in citing the report at a rally for Clinton in Philadelphia. “But it’s important just to understand this is a big deal. More Americans are working, more have health insurance. Incomes are rising. Poverty is falling. So the steps that we have been taking over these years, they’re paying off. We’ve shown that progress is possible.”
But the political impact of those positive trends could prove negligible in November’s elections.
“There tends to be a significant lag between when macroeconomic news gets reported and when it makes an impact on voters,” said Ben Tulchin, who knows how economic news resonates in swing states from his days as a national pollster for Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign. “It usually requires several major positive reports for voters to notice it.”
Sanders, who made closing the income gap the centerpiece of his campaign, said Tuesday that while the report showed much progress, “the fact is that household incomes still are 1.6 percent below the 2007 level, the year before the last recession began. The wealthy, meanwhile, have never had it so good.”
Despite Tuesday’s report, expect Trump to ignore the statistics and continue to stress how badly the economy is doing, said John Powell, director of the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society at UC Berkeley.
“Trump feeds off of people feeling bad, feeling angry. Then he says, ‘I can save you,’ ” Powell said. “Much of their effort — by Republicans and Trump — is that they need to say that things are bad. Their campaign is one of deep anxiety and polarization, that the country is going to hell in a handbasket.”
That lag between good economic news and voter reaction can be frustrating to campaign operatives and grassroots activists. While they might get excited about news of the latest positive jobs report or even major economic news like the census report, it might not mean much to someone who is working two jobs, or staring down a mountain of student loan debt, or unable to afford a house.
Affordable-housing and antipoverty advocates welcomed the report, saying there hasn’t been enough discussion of those issues during the campaign. But they cautioned not to get too giddy about the positive trend lines in the report.
“Even though poverty is decreasing, we haven’t seen the same rates of decline for people who are black,” said Jessica Bartholow, of the Western Center on Law and Poverty in Sacramento. And women are still 35 percent more likely than men to be poor, she said.
Most frustrating, Bartholow said, is that “poverty continues to be ignored in the presidential debate.”
In terms of Americans potentially being able to afford housing, Tuesday’s report “is good news. But there are over 11 million people paying more than half of their income in rent — that’s a record high,” said Diane Yentel, president and CEO of the National Low Income Housing Coalition.
Regardless of its political impact, UC Berkeley’s Powell holds out hope that Tuesday’s report is the first of a series of positive economic trend lines for working people.
“I think the numbers are quite significant. But one cycle does not make a trend,” Powell said. “We’ve been in such a stagnant period.”