In the single smartest move of his reelection campaign, President Trump is letting the numbers speak for him.
It was a strategy successfully previewed in his Super Bowl ad. He again put it on full display at the State of the Union, delivering a speech devoid of his usual boasting and bullying. He relied instead on letting the record, on the economy and crime especially, speak for itself. That’s what made the speech the best of his career.
This morning, Trump woke up, vindicated, with one piece of very good news and another nothing short of amazing.
A hotly anticipated ADP and Moody’s Analytics report was due to record an increase of about 150,000 jobs in private payrolls. Instead, the report says, the economy gained 291,000 private payroll jobs in January. This kicks off 2020 with the economy’s best monthly gain since 2015, when increased job growth was expected as a part of the economy’s (exceptionally slow) recovery from the Great Recession.
Investors are celebrating the economy’s evident continued strength this morning, continuing to catapult the Dow Jones Industrial Average upward for the third day running. This provides an additional benefit to Trump, as 55% of the country holds assets in the stock market, even if partisans do frown upon presidents simply boasting about stock market gains.
One day after Gallup reported that Trump had achieved the highest approval rating of his presidency, the pollster reports that a record 59% of people say they’re better off financially than one year ago, and another 74% say they’ll be better off financially one year from now. These are the highest figures ever reported for this metric in Gallup’s 43 years of asking these questions. Both results are a product of a sharp uptick in polling since the beginning of the Trump administration.
These numbers in a vacuum are great news for Trump. But they’re made even more extraordinary by looking at the partisan breakdown.
As expected, Republicans, who overwhelmingly already approve of Trump, report higher positives on both fronts. But Democrats say the same thing — nearly half say that they’re financially better off today than one year ago, and a whopping 3 in 5 Democrats predict they’ll be better off a year from now. For reference, Democrats today are as optimistic about their future under Trump as combined respondents from all parties were under Barack Obama.
This is bad news for Joe Biden. He is running for the presidency on the promise of returning to normalcy. Most people may want that in terms of having a president with a more normal persona. But there’s no question that they want the Trump economy to be the new normal, permanently.
It’s even worse news for Bernie Sanders. He may boast of eating the rich, but normal people just won’t have much of an appetite for it. This is Trump’s election to lose, and the numbers continue to prove it.
