Playbook PM: The economy is coming back. Do voters believe it?

From: POLITICO Playbook - Wednesday Nov 24,2021 05:19 pm

Nov 24, 2021

By Rachael Bade, Garrett Ross and Eli Okun

Presented by

POSITIVE ECONOMIC NEWS — The number of Americans seeking unemployment benefits fell to a historic low this week, AP’s Paul Wiseman reports . “Jobless claims dropped by 71,000 to 199,000, the lowest since mid-November 1969. But seasonal adjustments around the Thanksgiving holiday contributed significantly to the bigger-than-expected drop. Unadjusted, claims actually ticked up by more than 18,000 to nearly 259,000. The four-week average of claims, which smooths out weekly ups and downs, also dropped — by 21,000 to just over 252,000, the lowest since mid-March 2020, when the pandemic slammed the economy.”

— WSJ’s Sarah Chaney Cambon reports that “household spending rose 1.3% in October from a month earlier, while personal income increased 0.5% last month.”

BUT, BUT, BUT … Even while these numbers are good, don’t expect them to immediately change Americans’ negative perceptions of the economy. There’s still a major disconnect between these sorts of positive statistics and how everyday voters feel about their own finances. At the moment, it all comes back to fears about inflation — and growing concerns that Democrats aren’t doing enough to address it.

Case in point: In a mini Twitter thread on Tuesday, Obama bro/“Pod Save America” host JON FAVREAU drew his followers’ attention to a Third Way/ALG Research study of Virginia voters who supported both JOE BIDEN in 2020 and GLENN YOUNGKIN in 2021. It was released in mid-November to little fanfare, but is definitely worth a read. Some of the tough-love toplines for Democrats:

— “Voters couldn’t name anything that Democrats had done, except a few who said we passed the infrastructure bill.”

— “Voters are unhappy with the direction of the country and don’t think we get it. They aren’t hearing solutions from us, they don’t think we’re doing anything to address the big issues

— “Voters believe the economy is bad, and no amount of stats can change their mind (at least in the short term). Jobs numbers, wage numbers, and the number of people we’ve put back to work don’t move them. We should still talk about these (more the wage and back-to-work numbers), but we should realize that they will have limited impact.”

— And this one is particularly interesting: “Voters think we are focused on social issues, not the economy. They aren’t hearing us talk about the economy enough, and the things they are hearing about our agenda (people mentioned the child tax credit, paid leave, free college) don’t have to do with getting people back to work or taking on the cost of goods. That’s deadly in an environment when it’s the top issue.”

Dem leaders might not want to admit that, and instead continue to paint a rosy picture of their ability to sell the Build Back Better package to the public. But Favreau has a reality check: “I completely understand the frustration that might come from reading this, and I share it. But I promise you that dismissing or caricaturing these kinds of voters — our fellow citizens — is not the way to win them back. And there’s no path to victory without winning them back.”

Good Wednesday afternoon. We’re sending Playbook PM a little early today so Rachael can go eat Skyline for lunch in Ohio.

ALSO … PROGRAMMING NOTE — Playbook PM will be off on Thursday and Friday for the Thanksgiving holiday. We’ll be back in your inbox on Monday afternoon.

THANKSGIVING HISTORY LESSON — WaPo’s Ronald Shafer has the story on “Franksgiving” — the time that FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT tried to move Thanksgiving up a week in 1939 in a bid to boost the economy. “ALF LANDON, the Republican whom Roosevelt had trounced in the 1936 election, accused FDR of arbitrarily acting ‘with the omnipotence of a Hitler.’ But the business world was delighted with the change.”

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JAN. 6 AND ITS AFTERMATH

COMING TO THE COMMITTEE — Former President DONALD TRUMP said in a statement today that he would grant permission for BERNIE KERIK to testify publicly and provide documents to the Jan. 6 select committee, after Kerik asked him to waive attorney-client privilege. The full statement, via Vice’s Elizabeth Landers

— Trump’s statement comes a day after Kerik told the committee that he planned to comply with a subpoena, our colleague Betsy Woodruff Swan scooped. “The committee subpoenaed Kerik in part because its investigators believed he attended a meeting at the Willard Hotel in Washington on Jan. 5 with [RUDY] GIULIANI, STEVE BANNON and others. But according to the letter POLITICO reviewed — which his lawyer sent Tuesday to the panel’s chair, Rep. BENNIE THOMPSON (D-Miss.) — that’s a fabrication.”

TRUMP CARDS

PAYMENTS PERTURB GOP — Recent reports that the RNC made payments to a law firm representing Trump are stirring up some frustration among top Republicans, CNN’s Gabby Orr reports . “[S]ome RNC members and donors accused the party of running afoul of its own neutrality rules and misplacing its priorities. Some of these same officials who spoke to CNN also questioned why the party would foot the legal bills of a self-professed billionaire who was sitting on a $102 million war chest as recently as July and has previously used his various political committees to cover legal costs.”

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JUDICIARY SQUARE

SCOTUS WATCH — Republican state legislators’ ability to legally defend North Carolina’s voter ID law is set to come before the Supreme Court, Josh Gerstein reports. “The justices on Wednesday granted a request from the GOP state senate and house leaders to take up a 4th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that denied their request to intervene in a suit the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP brought against the voter ID law. The move means arguments in the case will likely be scheduled at the Supreme Court early next year, with a decision expected by June or July.”

POLICY CORNER

CLIMATE FILES — The White House is creating a new energy division within the Office of Science and Technology, and appointed Stanford-based energy expert SALLY BENSON to coordinate climate policy, WaPo’s Maxine Joselow reports . “Benson will serve as deputy director for energy and chief strategist for the energy transition at OSTP. … Benson said that one of her top priorities is ensuring that the swift transition to a clean energy economy benefits all Americans, rather than leaving behind some workers in the oil and gas sector and other polluting industries.”

HOW WE GOT HERE — NYT’s Jim Tankersley takes a microscope to the inflation issue and how the Biden administration miscalculated where the nation was headed earlier this year. “From the administration’s perspective, the problem is not that there is too much money sloshing around, as Republicans and some economists insist, but that consumers are throwing an unexpectedly large amount of that money at a narrow set of things to buy. Put another way: If Mr. Biden had sent people travel vouchers or DoorDash gift cards for services — instead of sending Americans direct payments as part of his $1.9 trillion rescue plan in March — the inflation picture might look different right now.”

NEVER TELL ME THE ODDS — NASA has undergone a new mission to protect the Earth, NYT’s Joey Roulette writes . “On Wednesday at 1:21 a.m. Eastern time, NASA launched the Double Asteroid Redirection Test mission, or DART, from a U.S. Space Force base in California (it was Tuesday local time). A 1,200-pound, refrigerator-size spacecraft will trek around the sun to slam into a small asteroid named Dimorphos at 15,000 miles per hour next year. If the mission succeeds, it could demonstrate for the first time humanity’s ability to punch a potentially hazardous asteroid away from Earth.” ICYMI: “Whose job is it to prevent Armageddon?” by Bryan Bender

THE PANDEMIC

WHERE THE SPIKES ARE — NYT’s Keith Collins has a helpful collection of visualizations that show where coronavirus cases are rising across the country.

CONGRESS

KNOWING CORI BUSH — Rep. CORI BUSH (D-Mo.) talks to BuzzFeed News about her place in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party after nearly one year in Congress. “Bush is determined not to fit in,” Lissandra Villa writes . “She’s not in Congress to move up in leadership, she says, or hoard institutional power. But what power that leaves her with is uncertain. Progressives in Congress are in a precarious spot, trying to flex over Biden’s agenda while getting heat from constituents about symbolic votes and looking down the very real possibility of being a small slice of the House minority after next year’s elections. The tension between her role in Congress as she sees it and the realities of the institution, her party, and its leadership are palpable.”

— To wit, here’s Bush on how she differs from Speaker NANCY PELOSI: “I don’t wear those same glasses that she wears. For me, I’m not a woman first, I’m Black first. I don’t care about party lines the way that she does. I don’t care about looking like I’m leading, or care about being the one that is staying within — like, just playing the game.”

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BEYOND THE BELTWAY

PROBING THE POLICE — In the absence of federal oversight, a handful of states have empowered their attorney general to conduct “investigations into the ‘pattern or practice’ of civil rights abuses by police departments,” WaPo’s Kimberly Kindy reports . “So far, the new laws have only passed in Democratic-controlled state legislatures, but bills containing the measures received some bipartisan support in two of the four states. Since the bills became law, pattern or practice investigations have been launched exclusively by Democratic state attorneys general. … Among the four states that recently granted these new powers to their attorneys general, Colorado is the first to complete an investigation, which looked into the Aurora Police Department.”

CRISIS OF CARE — NYT’s Jennifer Steinhauer reports on the shortage of care available to veterans, including IAN FISHBACK, “who had retired from the Army, died last week, in circumstances still unclear, alone and broke in a group home, convinced he was being persecuted by the very forces he had once embraced. He was 42. … A shortage of psychiatrists, psychologists and psychiatric nurse practitioners across the United States has worsened during the coronavirus pandemic, mental health experts say, and lawmakers have struggled to find a solution.”

AMERICA AND THE WORLD

FOR YOUR RADAR — “Russia staged military drills in the Black Sea, south of Ukraine, on Wednesday, and said it needed to sharpen the combat-readiness of its conventional and nuclear forces because of heightened NATO activity near its borders,” Reuters’ Alexander Marrow and Pavel Polityuk report in Moscow and Kyiv.

IRAN SO FAR AWAY — “The head of the United Nations atomic watchdog agency left Iran late Tuesday after failing to reach a deal to allow inspectors access to a factory making equipment for Tehran’s nuclear program, diplomats said Wednesday, casting a fresh shadow over international nuclear talks set for next week,” WSJ’s Laurence Norman reports in Berlin.

PLAYBOOKERS

IN MEMORIAM — Veteran Washington meteorologist Doug Hill “was 71 when he died Nov. 22 at his home in Leland, N.C. His daughter, Maggie Hill, confirmed the death but did not cite a cause,” WaPo’s Harrison Smith writes. “An Air Force veteran who served for six years in the Prince George’s County Police Department, Mr. Hill took a winding path to meteorology. But he had tracked the weather ever since he was a boy, getting an early introduction to the power of thunderstorms on his seventh birthday, when a backyard celebration at his family’s rowhouse in the Baltimore suburbs was forced inside by the sound of thunder.”