Democrats are actively hoping for the economy to continue to collapse so that presumptive Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden can beat President Donald Trump in November.
In an article titled, “The general election scenario that Democrats are dreading,” Politico reported that multiple Biden campaign officials and Democratic strategists are dismayed at the possibility of an economic boom in the months before the presidential election. The coronavirus pandemic caused much of the country to shut down, which has led to the highest number of people filing for unemployment since the Great Depression.
Democrats – who have led the charge forcing people to lose their jobs and plummet the country’s economy – were hoping the economic downturn would get them back into the White House. But Jason Furman, one of the Obama administration’s top economists, threw cold water on their hopes during a Zoom conference call in early April, Politico reported.
Instead of validating Democrat hopes, Furman said, “We are about to see the best economic data we’ve seen in the history of this country.” As Politico reported, the conference call included officials from both parties, including former cabinet secretaries and Federal Reserve chairs.
“Everyone looked puzzled and thought I had misspoken,” Furman told Politico. He told the outlet he explained on the call how the months before the November election would see an economic boom that would allow Trump to boast about huge employment gains and GDP growth.
Furman, Politico reported, has been sharing this same prediction with others since that April call, including top members of Biden’s campaign.
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Furman’s counterintuitive pitch has caused some Democrats, especially Obama alumni, around Washington to panic. “This is my big worry,” said a former Obama White House official who is still close to the former president. Asked about the level of concern among top party officials, he said, “It’s high — high, high, high, high.”
And top policy officials on the Biden campaign are preparing for a fall economic debate that might look very different than the one predicted at the start of the pandemic in March. “They are very much aware of this,” said an informal adviser.
Furman said the economic collapse tied to the coronavirus pandemic was unlike the Great Depression or the Great Recession, after which recovery was slow. Furman predicted this economic downturn was more like what happens after a natural disaster, which is followed by a quick recovery. Furman said data already suggest this to be the case.
Consumption and hiring, he noted, began to increase “in gross terms, not in net terms,” after states and localities began reopening on April 15. Furman said that a “partial rebound” was already underway. This rebound “can be very very fast, because people go back to their original job, they get called back from furlough, you put the lights back on in your business. Given how many people were furloughed and how many businesses were closed you can get a big jump out of that. It will look like a V.”
Trump’s White House economic advisers and the president himself have made the same argument. Kenneth Baer, a Democrat strategist who worked for the Obama administration, told Politico that the economy will still “look historically terrible come November.”
“But relative to the depths of April, it will be on an upswing — 12 percent unemployment, for example, is better than 20, but historically terrible. On Election Day, we Democrats need voters to ask themselves, ‘Are you better off than you were four years ago?’ Republicans need voters to ask themselves, ‘Are you better off than you were four months ago?’” he added.
Another Democrat operative worried about recent polling that shows Biden loses to Trump on who can better handle the economy.
“Trump beats Biden on the economy even right now!” the operative told Politico. “This is going to be extremely difficult no matter what. It’s existential that we figure it out. In any of these economic scenarios Democrats are going to have to win the argument that our public health and economy are much worse off because of Donald Trump’s failure of leadership.”
“Even today when we are at over 20 million unemployed Trump gets high marks on the economy, so I can’t imagine what it looks like when things go in the other direction. I don’t think this is a challenge for the Biden campaign. This is the challenge for the Biden campaign. If they can’t figure this out they should all just go home,” the former Obama White House official told the outlet.