In the last few months, American politics has become a little mysterious, if not downright confounding. By almost every measure, President Joe Biden and the Democratic party have had an extremely successful year. Remember we started this year with an insurrection in the very heart of our government, with armed vigilantes roaming the halls of Congress. We also had a brand new set of vaccines but almost no Americans were vaccinated against a deadly pandemic. Unemployment was still six and a half percent. Economic output was hundreds of billions of dollars lower than the start of the pandemic.
Fast forward to the end of October: GDP had fully recovered and grown beyond pre-pandemic levels, employers were adding half a million jobs a month, unemployment was down to 4.6%, and people were leaving their jobs at a record rate because the job market was so good. Wages were up 5.0% over the year. And Americans had accumulated $2.3 trillion more in savings, with the median household’s checking account balance 50 percent higher than before the pandemic. The US had also carried out the fastest vaccination campaign in our history, and after a painful, wrenching takeover by the Taliban that cost American lives, the US managed to end its longest war, successfully evacuating 124,000 people, including 6000 U.S. citizens, in the largest airlift in U.S. history.
And yet, Democrats running on these successes, and contrasting with the disastrous leadership the country had suffered under Donald Trump, saw a massive swing of voter sentiment against them. President Biden’s approval rating has cratered, and Republican turnout surged so strongly in the New Jersey and Virginia elections that Democrats lost everything in Virginia, and nearly so in New Jersey.
Some of the smartest minds in politics set out last month to find out why. Aliza Astrow is a political analyst at the think Tank Third Way, she helped organize this research effort, and she’s here to tell us what they found.
