SIOUX CITY, Iowa — Democratic presidential candidates need you to hate the economy. Their problem is that the economy is really good.
“The president wants us to think the economy is doing great,” Pete Buttigieg said in Sioux City on Thursday night, “because the Dow Jones is up. But not a lot of that seems to be getting to our kitchen tables.”
It is probably true that not a lot of American families have large piles of money on their kitchen tables. That’s because most people, aside from mafiosi, don’t put their money in piles on kitchen tables.
What Buttigieg means is that middle-class and working-class families aren’t reaping the benefits of a growing stock market and a rising GDP — that all this wealth is going only to the wealthy. “A lot of that growth,” Buttigieg claimed at a campaign rally in Sioux City, “isn’t getting to most of us.”
In the December Democratic debate, Buttigieg made the same claim. “This economy is not working for most of us, for the middle class.”
Tom Steyer is hitting the same theme with radio ads he’s running in Iowa. Steyer argues that he can beat Trump “on the economy” by promising to bring about economic growth “for everyone, and not just the 1%.”
It’s a compelling populist message that the current economic boom is not lifting up the regular guy. The only problem is that it’s not true. The working class is indeed reaping the gains of the Trump-era economy, and in fact, more than anyone else. Since 2016, wages have grown far faster for the lowest 25% of earners than for everyone else, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.
Unemployment is at an astonishingly low 3.5% (2.6% in Iowa), meaning that many of the people who struggled the most a decade ago — those out of work — now have jobs. Inflation has averaged less than 2% a year over the past four years. That’s an economy that’s good for the poor and the middle class.
So Buttigieg and Steyer are pinning their candidacies on frustration over the blue-collar and middle-class economy at a time when the blue-collar and middle-class economy is actually doing really, really well. This seems politically unwise. Why try to run against a problem that doesn’t exist? Won’t the doom-and-gloom message sound irrelevant or out of touch?
It’s possible that Steyer, Buttigieg, and the others are simply behind the times — that they haven’t refreshed their taking points to go with the new economic situation. It’s also possible that they know what they’re doing and that this is just a primary-season bankshot.
That is, when Buttigieg talks about working-class woes, he isn’t appealing to the working class. He is appealing to upper-middle-class white liberals who want to feel like they are helping the working class with their votes. At the same time, he’s appealing to the retired or late-career baby boomers who, having passed their professional peak, aren’t reaping the fruits of the booming job market.
So while bad-mouthing the working man’s condition may be counterproductive in a general election, where a Democrat needs to do better than Hillary Clinton did among the working class, the message can work in the Iowa and New Hampshire nominating contests, where retired or near-retired baby boomers will make up a huge chunk of the voters.
“If you go to the grocery stores, our groceries go up all the time,” Colleen Chaussee, a retired bank employee told me after Buttigieg’s rally in Sioux City. She and her husband John, a retired school teacher, have seen their Social Security check increase only $15 a month. “Is that really going to change the quality of your life?” she asked.
The Chaussees’ experience is a very different one from that of Robert, a truck driver I met at Sioux City’s Marto Brewing Company on Thursday night. Robert gets as much work as he wants, and more, and he’s raking in the bucks. When he visits working-class towns, he checks out the job market and finds them booming. He had just come up from Dodge City, Kansas, where the meat-packing plants are desperate for workers. “Their lowest paying job is $18 an hour,” Robert said.
Middle-class and working-class Americans have employers fighting over them.
Marsha, who runs the Radio Shack in Orange City, Iowa, complained about her difficulty in hiring workers. “It’s really hard to find good people,” Marsha said. “We’ve been looking for somebody part-time here for the last six months.”
There are “a lot of really good jobs, the manufacturing jobs around here,” Mark Muilenberg, a doctor in Orange City said. “Most of the businesses around here, they’d hire 25, 30 more people today if they could, because unemployment is so low.”
That’s tough for employers. It’s great news for the working man — even if the politicians don’t want to hear it.
