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notahacker | on: Trump wins presidency for second time
I think the bigger problem isn't that the Dems didn't try to take credit for growth, but that they didn't point out that actually things weren't that rosy in 2020 and basically conceded the entirely false argument that Trump's term made the economy better and Biden's made it worse.

Sure, Trump didn't cause the pandemic, but neither did Biden and the inflation isn't unrelated to Trump's fiscal policy being looser than it needed to be even before the pandemic either, as well as being fundamentally the Fed's job to solve[2]. It's difficult[1] for an incumbent to win by attacking the track record of the last government especially when much of it was factors outside their control, but not impossible, especially since Trump has presented wavering voters with plenty of other reasons not to vote for him. Trump is living proof that excuses work...

[1]Not impossible though: an unpopular British government won a majority in 2014 by constantly blaming slow post recession growth on the other party's borrowing five years earlier

[2]You can absolutely guarantee that if Trump was in power the US would have experienced at least as much inflation, and he'd have wasted no time in blaming the Fed

xnx | parent | next
I agree, but also think the number of voters that have the attention to be influenced by such a nuanced argument is vanishingly small.
notahacker | root | parent
Tbh I imagined it less as nuance and more as attack ads which focused on reminding people that 2020 was a really shit year for people's incomes and that Trump didn't actually deliver on his promises, not even the wall.

Would have been more effective to remind people why they didn't vote for him than remind them of his behaviour afterwards which he's perfectly good at doing himself.

jghn | parent
> I think the bigger problem isn't that the Dems didn't try to take credit for growth, but that they didn't point out that actually things weren't that rosy in 2020 and basically conceded the entirely false argument that Trump's term made the economy better and Biden's made it worse.

This is more or less the direction I was heading w/ my post. I don't think it's a messaging issue per se. Rather it's control of the messaging. The economy in general has been on a steady path for a while, despite ups & downs: it's trending towards a bimodal distribution where certain parties are doing quite well and others are doing less well. But what I've seen the last several election cycles is the indicators that dominate what I see on TV, read online, etc swap depending on who is in power. So my expectation is that literally nothing will change yet we'll be hearing about how awesome the economy is for everyone in several months.