Two weeks ago, Americans received another round of good economic news: GDP growth in the final three months of 2023 easily outpaced modest expectations, and economic growth across the entire year was quite good — despite overwhelming chatter a year ago about a looming recession.
The New York Times’ Paul Krugman, taking stock of the data, concluded that President Joe Biden “couldn’t have asked for better numbers.” A private sector economist characterized the data as “stunning and spectacular.”
Naturally, I was curious how Republicans would respond to the news. As it turns out, they pretended the good news didn’t exist.
A week later, the news on the U.S. job market was even better. The economy added 353,000 jobs in January — far exceeding expectations — and the unemployment rate remained at 3.7%, a rate so low that the United States never reached it throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.
The economy has now added jobs for 37 consecutive months, and the jobless rate has been below 4% for 24 consecutive months — a streak unseen in the United States since the 1960s.
For good measure, let’s also note the data for all of 2023 was revised by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and we now know that more than 3 million jobs were created across last year. Excluding 2021 and 2022, when the domestic economy was still recovering from pandemic-era job losses, it’s fair to say 2023 was the best year for job creation in the United States since 1999.
And what, pray tell, did Republican leaders have to say about these developments? In keeping with the recent trend, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Mike Johnson responded to the job numbers by saying literally nothing about the good news. No press releases, no tweets, and no public comments.
It appears that the American job market is so good, Republicans have literally found themselves speechless — again.
Circling back to our earlier coverage, this wasn’t at all new: The GOP leadership in both chambers has spent nearly all of the Biden era pretending not to notice extraordinarily good job growth.
(For its part, the Republican National Committee issued a statement that read in part, “Nearly four years after the pandemic, Joe Biden’s economic policies have failed to get people back to work.” Perhaps the party was referring to job creation in some other country.)
The political implications make a degree of sense. Economic growth is healthy; economic confidence is growing; the stock market is up; wages are up; the job market looks great; and the United States is experiencing the world’s best post-pandemic recovery. If Republicans were to talk about this, voters might hear about it — and if voters heard about it, Democrats might reap electoral rewards.
GOP silence is intended to keep the public conversation away from good news that might interfere with Republicans’ election-year strategies.
But part of the party’s plan included attacking Democrats on the economy, which as Politico reported, is suddenly more difficult than GOP officials had hoped.
The U.S. economy just keeps getting better. And it’s forcing Donald Trump and his allies to contort the talking points they thought would guide them back to the White House. A remarkable run of good economic news has tripped up the Trump campaign’s initial plans to paint President Joe Biden as a disaster on the economy. Now, the GOP frontrunner is grasping for new ways to attack the administration’s increasingly robust record.
The Heritage Foundation’s Stephen Moore, who is closely aligned with the Trump campaign, told Politico, “I think that is the question of the day. You can’t blame the president when policies go wrong, and then say he’s not responsible if things are going right.”
If recent history is any guide, Republicans will simply pretend things aren’t going right, ask voters to believe their version of reality, and hope for the best.
So far, that’s working: Despite the fact that Biden’s economic record far exceeds his predecessor’s, the latest NBC News poll found Trump with a 20-point advantage over the Democratic incumbent on handling the economy.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
