Exclusive Harris poll for the Guardian shows 55% believe economy is shrinking, in troubling sign for president’s re-election bid

Nearly three in five Americans wrongly believe the US is in an economic recession, and the majority blame the Biden administration, according to a Harris poll conducted exclusively for the Guardian. The survey found persistent pessimism about the economy as election day draws closer.

The poll highlighted many misconceptions people have about the economy, including:

  • 55% believe the economy is shrinking, and 56% think the US is experiencing a recession, though the broadest measure of the economy, gross domestic product (GDP), has been growing.

  • 49% believe the S&P 500 stock market index is down for the year, though the index went up about 24% in 2023 and is up more than 12% this year.

  • 49% believe that unemployment is at a 50-year high, though the unemployment rate has been under 4%, a near 50-year low.

  • cryostars
    56·
    30 days ago

    Good little write-up. I was just thinking along these lines today. It’s a real shame Biden didn’t try just a little harder to connect with the working class.

    • SupahRevs@lemmy.world
      2·
      29 days ago

      His state of the union definitely was pro-working class. A couple quotes from that speech: “A future where the days of trickle-down economics are over and the wealthy and biggest corporations no longer get all the breaks.” “America’s comeback is building a future of American possibilities, building an economy from the middle out and the bottom up, not the top down, investing in all of America, in all Americans to make sure everyone has a fair shot and we leave no one behind!”

    • secretlyaddictedtolinux@lemmy.world
      22·
      29 days ago

      It’s frustrating because these economic problems are not that hard to change through sensible policy. I’ve thought about making TikTok videos about several things that could be done, but I am concerned about TikTok’s privacy policies and they are about to get banned as a platform anyway. I’m mostly stupid at everything except economics. The only other way to reach people is YouTube and YouTube shorts don’t have any reach and and YouTube also has terrible privacy policies. Both political parties keep making disastrous economic policy decisions instead of making the smart decisions and just taking 3 minutes to explain it to voters. I can’t believe that our politicians are actually this bad at economic policy. With Republicans, I think they are just genuinely evil bad people that are either corrupt or delusional about their impact. For Democrats, it seems like they actually don’t understand economics or can’t make sense of data. I’ve even thought about running for office, but I don’t have a normal job history and was arrested once and charged with assault with a great bodily injury enhancement and am probably too tainted by that to ever appeal to Democrat voters. I’ve also have sucked way too many dicks to appeal to Republicans, just a vast, vast amount of dicks. I don’t think I could be a politician and an openly prolific slut. Ranting on YouTube or TikTok might be a bad look, even if my views are all rigorous and accurate. The policy decisions of our elected officials are so stupid they often make me filled with apoplectic rage, so there would possibly be angry vitriolic ranting if I did try to make any videos going over current bad policy decisions and solutions to correct the problems. It’s probably better to stay quiet and try to live a private life at this point and continue to let our respectable leaders make horrible decisions while occasionally a mild boring economist makes bland commentary without any real policy suggestions or impact. We’re all going to likely be horribly impacted by climate change soon anyway, and there’s a certain seize the day nihilism that goes with that reality and the fact that large amounts of the population don’t understand the brutal cruelty of how exponents look on an x-y coordinate plan when you zoom out.

      I don’t think I could somehow get Biden to do the 3 or 4 things he would need to do in order to win the election, and I hesitate to discuss them on here because Trump’s team could just make those points part of a plan and then it would make Biden’s situation worse. But Biden is on track to lose.

      Trans people should be doing things like installing Briar. It’s that bad. Briar so they can communicate by bluetooth. They should be installing Graphene now, not later. These should be learning the obfuscation techniques practices in China by people trying to break past the great firewall. They are the new scary boogeyman and need to organize now and not once Trump is elected. Many trans people are incredibly smart and great at computers but they need to start planning now to be in a situation in which normal organization may be harder. If they are not in a trans friendly state now, they need to leave now, not later, or plan to leave before the election. This is not going to go well for trans people and it’s horrible to understand what will likely happen.