Editor’s Note: Fareed Zakaria is the host of Fareed Zakaria GPS, airing at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET Sundays on CNN. Follow Fareed on X, and read news, analysis, and insights from Fareed and his team in the daily CNN newsletter Fareed’s Global Briefing. This article is adapted in part from Fareed’s new book, “Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present,” which will be published March 26. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. Read more CNN Opinion here.
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The central puzzle about this election campaign, that has pollsters and pundits opining, is the disconnect between the state of the economy and President Joe Biden’s approval ratings. A simple rule of thumb is that a president’s approval rating predicts the chances of reelection. It used to be that the public’s view of the president depended mostly on its view of the economy. But that relationship has gone haywire recently.
Look at the current state of the economy. America is in unusually good health. It has recovered better from the Covid-19 pandemic than any other major economy. For two years the unemployment rate has been under 4%, a streak the US hasn’t seen in more than five decades.
Inflation, which was worrying, has dropped sharply since mid-2022 and is now 3.2%. Wage growth for lower-income workers over the past few years has outpaced that of high-income workers.
The flood of good news also includes some unprecedented data. In a reversal of a decades-long trend, Black workers’ participation rate in the labor force is now higher than that of White workers. And yet, Biden’s third-year average approval rating was about 40%, the second lowest of modern presidents. It’s currently around 38%.
Part of the answer is probably the disconnect around people’s perception and feelings. While consumer sentiment is up dramatically from its all-time low in June 2022 and many people have positive views of their personal finances, they are still gloomy on the economy at large.
Explanations for this disconnect abound. Some say it’s a time lag, others that people are being swayed by social media, still others that residual feelings about inflation tends to trump all else. But I think that the real answer is that politics is no longer fundamentally driven by economics – that our political preferences are today shaped more by issues of culture, class and tribalism than by how much money we make.
That is one of the core theses of my new book, “Age of Revolutions,” which argues that we are living through a huge backlash after decades of rapid accelerations in technology and globalization. And this backlash is largely centered on cultural anxiety in a fast-changing world.
The disconnect between economics and politics has been growing for a while. As Nate Cohn of The New York Times has noted, ever since Barack Obama’s presidency, the rock-solid connection between the health of the economy and a president’s approval ratings has “almost gone.”
Former President Donald Trump presided over a very strong economy until Covid-19, and yet his approval ratings were extremely low, just like Biden’s. And during the 2020 election, something extraordinary happened: Democrats’ and Republicans’ views of the economy flipped massively in the months around Biden’s inauguration.
Democrats who had previously thought the economy was in terrible shape now thought it was booming, and Republicans did the opposite. A similar flip-flop occurred when Trump was elected in 2016. In other words, peoples’ political leanings shaped their views of the economy, not vice versa.
What then is shaping peoples’ political affiliations? I argue in the book that it is identity — which encompasses culture, class and tribalism. In the 20th century, political leanings were shaped by economics. Where you sat economically determined where you voted politically.
It made sense in a much poorer age when vast numbers of working-class voters were fundamentally motivated by moving up to secure a decent living. (America’s per capita GDP in 1950, adjusted…
Read More: Opinion: Why a booming economy isn’t helping Biden