For Republican governors, the Biden boom ends at state lines and the national economy is in recession

WASHINGTON — Gov. Greg Abbott, R-Texas, often raps President Joe Biden about high inflation and a looming recession — a standard GOP argument ahead of November’s election.

But inflation is worse in major Texas cities than it is across the country. Government figures show that inflation in the Houston area is 10.2% and in the Dallas area is 9.4%, above the recent national average of 8.5%.

Abbott and other GOP leaders make a paradoxical argument that the US economy has slipped into recession, but Republican-led parts of the country are still booming. These officials blame Biden’s policies for sky-high gas and food prices while acknowledging the labor gains those policies have helped spur them on.

The Texas governor tweeted on July 28: “The US economy is in recession under Biden. Meanwhile, Texas was #1 in the nation for job growth in June, and more Texans are in jobs today than at any time in our state’s history.”

The Associated Press found a familiar pattern in 15 Republican-led states, where governors tweeted praise for their states’ job growth while senators simultaneously said the national economy as a whole had collapsed. These seemingly contradictory claims have also been repeated in public statements.

GOP leaders say government measures like low tax rates and keeping businesses open during the pandemic have helped boost hiring and investment. But their claims tend to ignore how job growth was also boosted by a historic injection of federal money that began in March 2020 and continued under Biden with last year’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package.

Biden and his Democrats have acknowledged the pain caused by inflation, which hit a 40-year high this summer. However, the President has stressed that the US has avoided a recession due to the low unemployment rate of 3.5%. He argues that global factors such as the pandemic, fragile supply chains and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have pushed prices higher – and that he is meeting the public’s needs with the economic and climate package signed on Tuesday.

“Too often we hand over the biggest mic to the critics and cynics who delight in explaining failure while those who champion real progress do the hard work of governing,” Biden said with a dig at the GOP.

Several polls show that voters have premonitions about the economy and that most people blame the president. Researchers said there isn’t much academic analysis to show why many voters seem willing to blame the inflation on White House policies and give state houses a pass, given that inflation has been low and less one in recent decades factor in elections than it was in jobs.

Andrew Reeves, a political science professor at Washington University in St. Louis, said most voters are likely to use different metrics to judge local and national economies. When it comes to state and local officials, voters form their opinions through what they observe in their daily lives. But they often measure the national economy by hard numbers and political ideologies.

“The ‘national economy’ is this nebulous thing that none of us really experience,” Reeves said. “It’s an abstract concept. We may be more willing to let our partisanship cloud our view of what is going on at the national level. Joe Biden is well into his tenure, so the honeymoon is over and he owns this economy – whether his policies are directly responsible for it or not.”

Republican governors like Florida’s Ron DeSantis and Georgia’s Brian Kemp have been largely spared inflation, despite consumer prices in both states being well above the national average. Inflation is 10.6% in the Miami area, 11.2% in Tampa and 11.5% in Atlanta.

What many voters in Republican states are hearing is an economic argument similar to what Biden has attempted nationally — that job growth and government finances are strong enough to protect people from a downturn.

DeSantis dismissed Biden’s claims that the US economy was staying healthy, calling it an “Orwellian double entender.” The governor said at the Florida Airports Council conference Aug. 1 that his state’s budget surplus could protect him from a downturn.

“We’re not immune to inflation, we’re not immune to energy prices,” DeSantis said. “Because Florida is open, because Florida has excelled economically, we are able to meet those needs of the state no matter what Uncle Joe of Washington, DC throws at us.”

Job growth was broad across the country. Data released by the Bureau of Statistics on Friday showed that employment rose in 43 states and was essentially flat in seven states over the past 12 months.

But the bipartisan research group EIG analyzed job growth in the big three Republican states (Texas, Arizona and Florida) and the big three Democratic states (California, Illinois and New York). It found that GOP areas have fully recovered, exceeding their total jobs in the pandemic, while recovery has been slower in democracies.

The much overriding priority among voters appears not to be job creation but inflation, said John Lettieri, EIG President and CEO. In a time of political polarization, he notices how price fears transcend generational, class, regional and party boundaries.

“There is strong consensus that the economy is a problem, inflation is problem #1, and Biden is to blame,” Lettieri said. “It goes beyond all borders. All these different ways that we’re chopping up the electorate, they’re all reacting to it in a strong way in one way or another.”

Inflation looks like an inescapable challenge for Biden, even as other issues like abortion rights seem to be rallying Democratic voters. Republicans are able to promote job gains to say why they would be better placed to run the economy without, as Biden has pointed out in speeches, having to list their own consumer price-cutting policies.

Gabriel Lenz, a political science professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said the “best measure of what voters are experiencing personally” is a metric known as real disposable personal income. This number shows how much money people have after adjusting for taxes and inflation. Its changes over the past two years reflect the political fortunes of the Democrats.

When Biden signed the pandemic relief bill into law in March 2021, people’s real disposable income was up 28.7% year over year. The aid helped the economy recover, while some notable economists warned it could also be inflationary. As prices have risen over the past year and much aid has expired, real disposable income has fallen by 3.5% over the past 12 months.

Based on that number, Lenz concluded, “It’s no surprise that people are gloomy.”

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