Democrats’ economic message was always a hard sell. Now it's a wounded salesman

livemint.com:

Presidential debates are mostly about style, not substance; the intended audience isn’t economists, but wavering voters. Last week’s debate was a case in point: President Biden’s disastrous performance led to calls for him to drop out of the race, recasting the election campaign. But substance still matters, and the debate left wavering voters without a clear case for either party on the economy.

Much of what former President Donald Trump said was hyperbolic or wrong. “We had the greatest economy in the history of our country" before Covid hit, he claimed. Unemployment and inflation were indeed low.

But Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton all enjoyed stretches of growth in economic output, jobs and real (after inflation) wages that were as good as or better than Trump’s first three years. Asked about the soaring national debt under his watch, Trump claimed, “We were ready to start paying down debt" until Covid hit.

His own budget didn’t envision that. To make his point, Trump only had to note that prices rose 8% over his term, and they are up 20% during Biden’s. Wages, after inflation, rose when he was president; they are down under Biden.

Trump’s last year was a bad one for the economy. As Biden noted, unemployment reached almost 15%, and the budget deficit hit a record. But that was the result of a global pandemic.

The public didn’t hold Trump responsible for the economic harm, then or now. Most of that harm came not from the virus but from lockdowns and social-distancing rules, and Trump could have pointed out that the (mostly Republican-led) states that took his advice and quickly lifted lockdowns and restored in-person classes rebounded faster than Democratic-led states that didn’t. By the time