Bidenomics is going belly-up where it matters most

President Joe Biden‘s dogged focus on “Bidenomics” is starting to cost him.

For months, Biden has built up his economic platform as the central tenet of his reelection pitch, even in the face of worsening polling and as some national Democrats have urged the president to reframe his campaign message.

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The president’s team has argued that as more of Biden’s landmark spending programs are implemented, more American households will feel the benefits of Bidenomics. However, while inflation has slowed, costs for housing, food, and energy continue to rise.

And a poll published on Thursday by Morning Consult and Bloomberg showed that Biden’s messaging is actually helping former President Donald Trump, his likely opponent in the 2024 general election, at his own expense.

The Morning Consult poll sampled more than 5,000 voters across Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin and found that 49% trust Trump “significantly more” than Biden on the economy, compared to just 35% who feel the opposite.

On average, Biden now trails Trump by 4% across those battleground states and is only leading Trump in Nevada. For comparison, Biden carried six of those battlegrounds, excluding North Carolina, in 2020.

The president fares even worse among independents in swing states, with just 25% of them trusting Biden’s economic stewardship.

Perhaps most troubling for the president is how much money the campaign has invested into the Bidenomics brand thus far.

Biden, the Democratic National Committee, and their joint fundraising efforts brought in a historic amount of donations in the third quarter of this year. The campaign is heading into the fourth quarter with nearly $91 million on hand, more than the entire GOP field and more than “any Democratic candidate in history at this point in the cycle,” campaign officials said.

And the Biden campaign has devoted that cash primarily to pushing Bidenomics in battleground states, where it has staffed up and bought more than $25 million in ad space to push Bidenomics. That includes running ads on multiple platforms and in multiple languages.

The RealClearPolitics polling average shows Biden and Trump locked in a dead heat, with neither candidate leading his opponent by more than 2 points since Trump announced his bid in November 2022. RealClearPolitics also shows Biden’s aggregate economic approval at just 37.3% support, the lowest mark of his nearly three years in office.

A number of Democrats have come forward publicly to urge Biden to shift his campaign focus from the economy to the “danger” posed by Trump and “extreme MAGA Republicans,” especially given the chaos on display from GOP lawmakers in the House of Representatives.

“If Biden isn’t getting credit for how he’s improved the economy by now, then he won’t get such credit anytime soon. I say this as a Democrat who supports President Biden and was the press secretary for his wife, Jill Biden, the president needs to reevaluate the approach to how and what he is communicating to the American people,” said Michael LaRosa, the former press secretary for the first lady. “More than that, he needs to make the election about how Republicans have disqualified themselves from leading the country. As part of that strategy, he can do what Republicans have done effectively and use wedge issues to motivate and outrage their own voters.”

“That’s scary and concerning,” added Faiz Shakir, a Democratic strategist and campaign manager for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). “If you’re Joe Biden, if you’re any Democrat running for office, you’ve got to pull in a healthy amount of people who are young. And if you’re not, that should be of concern to you.”

Still, the Biden team has not shown signs of changing course, at least in the immediate future.

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“Bidenomics is the president’s economic agenda and it is strongly supported by the American people,” White House spokesman Michael Kikukawa said in a statement. “That work and our message build on what the midterms and recent special elections proved: Americans favor the president’s vision for growing the economy from the middle out and the bottom up over trickle-down MAGAnomics.”

“Americans will face a choice between MAGA Republicans whose agenda serves the rich and powerful, and Joe Biden, whose agenda serves the middle class,” Biden campaign spokesman Kevin Munoz added.