What do Americans want that Biden can give them?

Gas prices, immigration, and the economy are things Americans say they care about.

First of all, let me just say that if you thought this was a nonpartisan blog, think again. I absolutely want Joe Biden to win reelection in 2024. I think Donald Trump is an authoritarian figure who tried to execute a coup to overturn an election, whose foreign policy is chaotic and potentially disastrous, and whose mere presence in the White House turns American politics and society into an unceasing screaming match. The 2010s were not a fun decade, and I do not want them back. So let’s just get that out of the way.

Anyway, I was thinking about what Biden could do in the year until the election in order to make the American people happier. Right now, satisfaction with the direction of the country is at a pretty low ebb, and Biden’s own approval rating remains at a mediocre 40%. Of course, part of Americans’ general unhappiness is probably due to the decade of unrest they just went through, and the feeling that the country is coming apart — when you ask them what the most important problem is, “the government/poor leadership” is the most common answer.

Source: Gallup

I’m honestly not sure Biden can do much about that — Republicans will hate any Democratic President (and vice versa), no matter how much uplifting unifying rhetoric he spouts or how many bipartisan bills he passes. In America, adherents of both parties tend to see the other side’s leaders less as individuals than as living avatars of the other side’s most rabid activist base. I don’t think that’s going to change anytime soon, unfortunately.

But on the margin, I think there are a few substantive issues where Biden could make his constituents people feel more positive about where the country is right now. In the poll above, Americans’ other most commonly cited concerns include, inflation, the economy in general, and immigration. I think Biden could probably a bit on all of these fronts. It’s not going to overpower the vibes or cancel the culture wars, but it would be better than nothing.

First, and most importantly, Biden can probably take more steps to fight inflation and enable the Fed to start cutting interest rates.

How Biden can address inflation and interest rates

On inflation, there’s plenty of good news to report. Core PCE inflation, which is what the Fed officially targets, is coming down rapidly. If you look at the 3-month measure, it’s already back down to the 2% target:

Source: Jason Furman

But when it comes to headline inflation — i.e. the actual prices that consumers experience — the situation is not entirely rosy. Headline CPI inflation is still running at around 3.7% in year-over-year terms, and in month-over-month terms August saw inflation of over 7%.

The reason isn’t hard to see; it’s just oil prices. Oil prices came down for about a year, and then started rising again in July:

That’s bad for the economy — and bad for Biden — in three major ways.

First of all, there’s research suggesting that even beyond inflation itself, people just really really hate high gasoline prices. Robert Shiller did a survey in 1997 in which almost all Americans said that if gas prices go up, the government should try to push them back to where they used to be. And here’s political scientist Laurel Harbridge-Yong discussing some of her findings about gas prices and presidential approval:

When we look at data from January, 1976 through July, 2007, we find that even when taking into account other measures of the economy such as employment and inflationary pressures in other areas of the economy, that we still find an effect of gas prices on presidential approval…[T]his relationship is not impacted by the amount of media coverage on gas prices at the time suggesting it’s working through people’s own evaluations of what gas prices are doing.

According to Harbridge-Yong’s estimates, if Biden could reverse the 70-cent increase in gasoline prices since the beginning of this year, his approval rating would go up by 4%! I’m pretty skeptical of that, but I do think gas prices are clearly a daily pain point for hundreds of millions of Americans.

Oil prices also feed into core inflation eventually. Oil is an important cost of doing business for most businesses, because of road transportation. Higher costs eventually feed through to higher prices. Which means that if oil stays expensive, inflation could rebound.

And if inflation rebounds, or even threatens to rebound, the Fed will keep interest rates high for a long time. This will be the worst consequence of all for the economy — and probably for the Biden presidency. Higher rates make it harder for Americans to afford mortgage payments; some people believe that this is what’s driving negative consumer sentiment. Higher rates will also eventually weaken the banking system, slow down lending, and weaken the job market, which could easily cause trouble for Biden in 2024.

It’s worth remembering that a big reason Jimmy Carter went down to defeat in 1980 was that there was a big oil shock associated with the Iranian Revolution, which A) caused stagflation, and B) caused the Fed to raise interest rates a lot, which sparked a deep recession. Those economic woes led to Carter’s defeat. Of course the current $20 rise in oil prices is nowhere near as big as the Iran-induced oil shock during Carter’s term. But still, if you’re a President seeking reelection, it makes a lot of sense to try to make oil prices as low as possible.

So what can Biden do to bring down oil prices? One thing is just to drill for oil in America. A big reason oil has rebounded is that the Saudis cut production in order to drive up prices; by boosting production to compensate, America can help break the Saudis’ market power. Biden recently offered three oil leases in the Gulf, which is more than he promised he would do, but a lot less than usual. He also canceled the last oil drilling leases in Alaska, a move he could reverse. And he could encourage more oil fracking.

Boosting U.S. oil production, of course, would be bad for the climate and bad for the environment. But a Trump victory in 2024 would be a lot worse. Lowering oil prices also hurts Russia’s ability to continue the Ukraine war.

Biden can also encourage and help other countries to boost oil production. Lifting all sanctions on the Maduro regime in Venezuela would help funnel investment toward getting that impoverished country’s petroleum industry started again. Biden could also partially lift the sanctions on Iran; in the grand scheme of things, both Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump are infinitely greater threats to global liberalism than Iran is.

If American, Venezuelan, and Iranian oil glutted the global market, oil prices would plunge again, reducing inflation, lowering costs for American companies, lowering gas prices for American voters, and allowing interest rates to come down more quickly. There’s almost certainly no other action that Biden could take that would achieve such dramatic and positive economic results in so short a space of time.

That said, becoming an oil booster would entail political costs for Biden. Oil is bad for the environment, so boosting production would make progressive environmentalists angry — especially because Biden campaigned on replacing fossil fuels back in 2020. Of course, Biden’s electric car subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act will eventually help replace oil demand in the U.S., but it’ll be many years before that happens. In the meantime, Biden becoming a pro-oil President would anger his base.

I don’t know if there’s a solution to that, but I think the best idea would be to take dramatic steps to boost global oil production, but not emphasize it much in campaign rhetoric. Let lower energy prices speak for themselves.

Time for a little border security (theater)

Other than the economy and the government itself, the issue Americans in that Gallup poll are most concerned about is immigration. Of course, different people are probably concerned for different reasons; some progressives are probably still worried about maltreatment of asylum seekers, lack of opportunity for unauthorized immigrants, and so on. But overall, the sentiment seems to be swinging toward restrictionism:

Source: Gallup

A detailed breakdown from earlier this year showed that although the swing has been more pronounced among Republicans, there’s some reversion among Democrats too. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that “America has turned against immigration”, but there’s definitely a shift toward restrictionism.

Why? Well, polls show that Americans feel positive about pretty much all immigrants, but feel that immigration itself is too high. It’s possible that Americans are simply inconsistent in their poll answers and that polls mean nothing. But a simple way of resolving the seeming contradiction is if Americans like immigrants, but don’t like chaos at the border. Other polls find that a very large percent of Americans thinks illegal immigration — which has surged since the pandemic after years of decline — is a problem. Here’s an example from 2021:

Source: Harvard Harris poll (2001)

Basically, Americans like immigration, but they also like being able to control it. As long as they get to collectively decide who gets in, they’re fine with almost all of the people who come in, and they’re willing to tolerate large inflows of workers. But as soon as it seems like immigration is getting procedurally out of control, Americans feel like they want to bring it back under control.

Think about what the average American feels when they watch a video of migrants using cardboard to get under razor wire at the border:

Some people see this as incredibly inspiring, and are angry at the U.S. for not letting these people and anyone like them into the country. But it seems like most Americans, when they see migrants flouting and evading our border control measures like this, feel like anarchy has been loosed upon the world. And they want to stop the anarchy.

In other words, Elon Musk was probably expressing the typical American attitude in this tweet:

And even many immigrants feel the same:

In his magisterial book A Nation by Design, Aristide Zolberg argues persuasively that countries reserve the right to act as exclusive clubs and decide whom they want to let in. By simply posting a huge number of videos of border chaos, right-wingers have managed to weaponize that desire. But it works! And it has pushed some progressives into supporting open borders (sometimes in very clumsy, unproductive ways).

Biden will never be able to appease the right-wingers, of course; they simply want to stop all immigration (or all nonwhite immigration), and will use whatever rhetorical techniques they have available to scare Americans. But what Biden can do is triangulate the issue by enacting humane but strict policies to get the southwestern border under control, so that right-wingers are unable to panic normal voters.

In fact, Biden is already doing this in substance, just not in rhetoric. Biden is authorizing construction of more border walls in Texas. He has sent 1500 troops to the Mexican border. And he has resurrected some Trump-era restrictions on asylum, in a modified form, to stop people from being able to apply for asylum by crossing the border illegally. I’m not sure about the troops, but the border walls are probably going to be effective, and the restrictions on the illegal-immigration-to-asylum pipeline were probably always going to have to happen.

But even as he’s taken these measures, Biden and his people have downplayed them and avoided talking about them. The obvious reason is that measures to restrict any kind of immigration will enrage the progressive base (at least until they find something else to be enraged about the next week). But as my friend Armand Domalewski has pointed out, keeping the border security measures on the down-low means that the fears of the average American will remain unquieted.

Illegal immigration isn’t a problem that the President needs to handle on the down-low — the President simply needs to convince the American populace that it’s being handled.

So those are my two suggestions for the Biden administration for its reelection campaign: do whatever is necessary to push oil prices down, and make a big show out of border security. I don’t think those measures will sweep Biden to victory, but I think they’d probably make at least a slight difference.

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