In an interview with MSNBC on Tuesday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre continued to back the administration’s messaging on President Joe Biden’s economic agenda — dubbed “Bidenomics” — despite poll numbers showing voter frustration with the state the economy.
Jean-Pierre said it’s going to take “a little bit of time to feel what Bidenomics has been able to do.”
At the beginning of their interview, MSNBC reporter Willie Geist mentioned a USA Today/Suffolk’s poll showing high disapproval ratings for Biden and added that it shows “some warning signs for you all at the White House.”
The poll showed Biden’s support among Black voters has dropped from 87% in 2020 to 63% in 2024. Biden won Latino votes by 33 percentage points in 2020, and USA Today’s poll suggests that Donald Trump is now their popular choice.
Why are voters losing support for Biden amid unemployment rates dropping?
Referencing Biden’s approval rating dropping among Latino and Black voters, as well as young voters, Geist said, “They’re not just looking at Donald Trump, but they’re looking at other choices.” He asked Jean-Pierre, “How do you explain them sort of straying from this president and from the Democratic Party?”
Jean-Pierre responded, “What I will say is — and I think this is why it’s important for us, like Jared Bernstein and for people like myself and others — to talk to all of you and lay out what we’ve done for those two critical communities.”
The press secretary said, “The president has always put equity at the center of every policy he’s put forward, every legislation he’s put forward — because we understand that many communities have been left behind.”
Biden is ‘building from the bottom up’
“We’re not trying to do trickle down economics,” Jean-Pierre continued. She added that unemployment rates have gone down from 9.2% when Biden took office to currently hovering under 6%. “We’re building from the bottom up,” she said.
Geist acknowledged the decrease in unemployment rates and asked, “How do you explain them straying from this president and from the Democratic Party?”
“Look, we understand what they American people went through these past three years,” Jean-Pierre replied. “We came out of a pandemic, right — a pandemic that we haven’t seen in a hundred years — and when the president walked in, the economy was upside down.”
She continued, “And so we get it, it’s going to take a little bit of time for folks to feel what Bidenomics has been able to do. That’s not something that I’m saying, that’s something that economists have said. It takes a little bit of time. But it doesn’t mean that the president’s not going to continue to work.”
Jean-Pierre referenced a speech Biden gave at the most recent State of the Union address in February 2023. The president said, “Let’s get the job done,” and Jean-Pierre explained he will continue to work as he has for the past three years, “getting it done.”
How Bidenomics has impacted the American middle class
Jean-Pierre mentioned inflation and unemployment dropping during the Biden administration. In June 2022, inflation hit 9.1% and has declined since to 3.2% in November 2023, according to Statista.
Unemployment has similarly declined since Biden took office. Before COVID-19 layoffs, unemployment rates sat around 3.6%. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics recorded that in April 2020, inflation spiked to 14.7% and has declined over the past two years to 3.7% in November 2023.
Federal Reserve interest rates have been on the rise during the Biden administration, and it has caused the middle class to lose $2 trillion in wealth from July 2022 to July 2023, Bloomberg reported. They added, the average middle-class American household lost $33,000 of real wealth in the past year.
The Republican National Committee attributed this loss of wealth to Biden’s fiscal policies, writing, “That’s a recession for the middle class, and the result of Bidenomics.”
Over 17 months, starting in March 2022, the U.S. central bank “raised the fed funds rate by more than five percentage points” to reduce inflation, per Forbes. In March 2022, federal interest rates sat at 0.25-0.5%, and they’ve steadily risen monthly to 5.25-5.5% in December 2023.