Voters don't care about macroeconomic indicators

Politico discovers the obvious: workers care about their material conditions, not about holistic assessments of the economy.

Photo by Ludomił Sawicki on Unsplash

Scott Waldman, writing for Politico earlier this week, searches for gratitude in Ohio for the miracle of Bidenomics. Here he’s in Middleton, where a steel plant mill is set to receive a $500 million grant from the government. Yet somehow, most of the people he talks to don’t even know about the grant, and even when they learn about it some still expect to vote for Donald Trump. How is this happening?

Experts and analysts say there are several reasons the Biden administration’s spending hasn’t resonated more broadly. Poor political messaging is one. Entrenched political partisanship is another.

Both of these are plausible, but allow me to propose a third option: the workers in this article don’t care about this grant because its benefits for them are still hypothetical and fairly marginal.