By Jim Geraghty
Monday, April 29, 2024
This presidential election is a battle between two
candidates and campaigns whose primary concerns and worries are light-years
away from those of the majority of the electorate.
Joe Biden would love for this year’s election to be about
forgiving student loans, union jobs, climate change, gun control,
abortion, those oh-so-plausible tales of him saving six people
from drowning as a lifeguard, how he was arrested for standing with a black
family during protests of desegregation, and how he was “runner-up in state
scoring” in football . . . until his teenage asthma kept him out of the draft for Vietnam.
Donald Trump wants this election to be about how unfairly
he’s been treated and how he’s being persecuted for his political views, how he
was the real winner in the 2020 presidential election, and how he embodies
“retribution” for his supporters.
Meanwhile, the average American voter is desperately
yearning for a candidate who would just focus on fighting inflation and getting
the cost of living under control. Yes, American voters have other priorities,
but that is the most-often-mentioned priority by a wide margin.
Don’t take it from me, take it from this weekend’s new CNN poll, which had Trump ahead of
Biden, 49 percent to 43 percent:
In the new poll, 65% of registered
voters call the economy extremely important to their vote for president. . . .
Considering other issue priorities
for the upcoming election, 58% of voters call protecting democracy an extremely
important issue, the only other issue tested that a majority considers central
to their choice. Nearly half call immigration, crime and gun policy deeply
important (48% each), with health care (43%), abortion (42%) and nominations to
the US Supreme Court (39%) each deeply important to about 4 in 10 voters. At
the lower end of the scale, just 33% consider foreign policy that important,
27% climate change, 26% the war between Israel and Hamas, and 24% student
loans.
You get slightly different answers when Americans are
asked which issue is their top priority, compared to whether
an issue is important to their vote for president; more on that in a moment.
The average American doesn’t lose any sleep thinking
about climate change, gun control, LGBTQ+ rights, DEI initiatives, or whether the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have access to
enough food. This is not to say that if the average American doesn’t think
about an issue very much, it doesn’t matter.
The antisemitic chaos on campus at Columbia University feels awfully
far away to the average American. In an argument against my own interests, the
average American doesn’t spend a lot of time thinking about the Ukrainian fight against the invading Russians; or
the threat of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan; or the national
debt, which is currently $34.5 trillion; or the annual deficit, which
is $1 trillion for the fiscal year that began in October.
Most Americans feel a vague sense of distrust and animosity toward
China, Russia, and Iran, but don’t spend much time thinking about foreign
policy or national security.
(Also note: “The 5% naming the United States as the nation’s
greatest enemy is the highest Gallup has recorded since first asking this
question in 2001. Before now, no more than 2% of Americans (including 1% in
2023) have ever identified the U.S. as its own worst enemy.” I would interpret
this as a small but loud minority of Americans who are so full of rage at their
fellow Americans that they have no anger left over for regimes in places such
as Beijing, Moscow, or Tehran.)
The average American will not notice TikTok is gone until the day it disappears.
If and when it happens, based upon India’s experience, content creators,
influencers, and their audiences will just move over to Instagram, YouTube, and
other apps, and life will go on.
Once a month, Gallup asks Americans an open-ended question: “What do you
think is the most important problem facing the country today?” I find this a
particularly revealing survey because it doesn’t list any options; Gallup just
transcribes what the respondents say and then attempts to fit it into a
category.
Consistently, every month, the top issue is the economy.
In March, it was the pick of 30 percent of respondents; last October, it was
the answer of 38 percent of repondents. The sub-category “high cost of living”
or “inflation” consistently garners between 9 and 14 percent. Immigration is
almost always the second most common answer, and it has been steadily
increasing the past six months. In March, 28 percent of respondents listed that
as the most important problem facing the country today.
Interestingly, “the government/poor leadership” is also
consistently a high finisher, garnering anywhere from 16 to 21 percent.
In these monthly surveys by Gallup between September 2023
and March, “gun control” hit 3 percent once, and was usually at 2 percent.
“Climate change” received similar minimal mention. “Abortion” topped out at 3
percent in March. “Race relations/racism” topped out at 4 percent.
Medicare never reached 1 percent. “LGBT rights” hit 1
percent twice. “Police brutality” never hit 1 percent.
Intriguingly, “lack of respect for each other” hit 3
percent twice.
Most of the things Biden talks about on any given day are
niche issues. He’s attempting to re-run the 2012 Obama campaign, firing up the
progressive grassroots enough to compensate for his weakness among the voters
in the middle.
Donald Trump is following his own signature instinctive
approach to politics, which is to focus upon whatever is on his mind at any
given moment. Trump is spending four out of every five weekdays in a Manhattan
courtroom, so he talks about his own criminal prosecution as if it is the most
important issue facing the country.
You’re Not the Average American
If you’re reading this, you’re probably quite different
from the average American.
Just 54 percent of Americans said they read a book in the year 2023.
Seventy-three percent of Americans without a college degree said they did not
read a book that year. If you read four books last year, you read more books
than 62 percent of your fellow Americans.*
In late 2023, just 38 percent of U.S. adults told
the Pew Research Organization that they “followed the news
all or most of the time.” One-fifth of American adults said they followed the
news “only now and then,” and 10 percent said they “hardly ever” follow the
news.
(Before we go any further, make sure you remember
the differences among mean, median, and mode. Determining the
“mean” involves adding up the sums and dividing them by the number of numbers.
The median is the middle value in a list, and the mode is the most frequently
occurring value in a list. In the list “1, 1, 2, 3, 9,” the mean would be 3.2, the
median would be two, and the mode would be one.)
The median household income in 2022 was $74,755, according
to the U.S. Census Bureau. That’s household income, and obviously many
households have more than one earner.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics,
the national average (or mean) salary in the U.S. in the
fourth quarter of 2023 was $59,384.
The average American cannot afford the price of the
average used car, as of February, or more
specifically, “Only households earning in the top 40 percent can afford the
average used car.”
One study calculated, “An average earner who makes $71,214
per year is not in a position to buy a house even in the most remote areas in
the country.”
Arguably the single most important quote about the U.S.
economy came in a September 2023 Wall Street Journal article:
“Buying a home or car right now is ‘completely unaffordable for the typical
American household because you’re mixing the higher borrowing costs with the
high prices,’ said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics.”
In the context of data like that, the Democrats’ lament
that the public isn’t giving Joe Biden enough credit for a roaring economy is
ludicrously tone-deaf.
As for Biden’s favorite crusades of 2024, he likes
to boast that he has provided “more than 40 million
working- and middle-class Americans student debt relief.” That sounds like a
lot of people, but it’s actually only a small percentage of the American
public. Only 35.7 percent of Americans have a bachelor’s degree or higher, as of 2022, and only about 13 percent of Americans have student-loan debt.
As for Biden’s insistence that he’s only helping
“working- and middle-class Americans,” his initial plan, announced in 2022, capped relief for those making under
$125,000 per year, or $250,000 per married couple. About 7.3 percent of American households made $250,000 or more
in 2022, so under Biden’s definition, if you’re making more than 92 percent
of the rest of the country, you’re still “working and middle class.”
Student-loan debt is roughly proportional to income
level. Americans with student-loan debt making $27,000 per year or less owe, on
average, $33,694. Those making between $27,001 and $52,000 owe, on average,
$44,320. There’s only a mild jump to the next quartile; those making between
$52,001 and $97,000 per year owe, on average, $44,968. And those making between
$97,001 and $173,000 owe, on average, $52,392.
You will often hear the argument that abortion is “a common experience for U.S. women.”
Roughly one in four American women have an abortion by
the age of 45. There is a widespread perception that most abortions are among
women who are still in their teenage years, having an unexpected pregnancy from
an early sexual experience. But less than 12 percent of those women getting an
abortion are under age 20. About 60 percent are in their twenties. A bit more
than a quarter have already given birth; about a third have had two or more
births before the abortion.
Surveys and medical reporting consistently indicate that
roughly 1 percent of women who had an abortion did so because they were raped,
and one-half of 1 percent did so because they were the victim of incest.
*The survey did not specify books purchased vs. books
finished, and so it is unclear how to classify those of us who have the habit
of buying a new book before we’ve finished the old book.
No comments:
Post a Comment