This is the Obama-Biden-Harris economic legacy
No amount of hyperbole or wishful thinking can change their stimulus choices

With Election Day less than two weeks away, both presidential campaigns have entered the window of closing arguments, a kind of political twilight zone for candidates who race from target state to target state trying to win over the remaining undecided voters and energize supporters to head to the polls. It’s always a frantic time of big rallies, big promises and powerful surrogates decrying the opposition and declaring victory is at hand.
We hear a lot about immigration, abortion, crime and the candidates’ personal flaws, all important issues. But in the end, this election will be won or lost on the basis of who voters believe will deliver a stronger, more stable economy.
Earlier this month, former President Barack Obama entered the fray to stump for Vice President Kamala Harris in Pennsylvania and made a head-turning claim about the economy. In a speech to a crowd in Pittsburgh, the former president declared, “And the reason some people think, ‘I don’t know, I remember that economy when [Donald Trump] first came in being pretty good.’ Yeah, it was pretty good, because it was my economy.”
He went on to tell supporters, “We had had 75 straight months of job growth that I handed over to him. It wasn’t something he did. I spent eight years cleaning up the mess that the Republicans had left me the last time. So just in case everybody has a hazy memory, he didn’t do nothing except those big tax cuts.”
Obama was half right. There was a streak all right — just not the one he described, and certainly not the electorate’s assessment of his economic legacy in 2016. During his presidency, Obama presided over a 30-month stretch of 9 percent or greater unemployment that began shortly after he signed the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in February 2009.
In a report released just days before he took office, Obama’s top economists, Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein, estimated that with passage of the bill, unemployment would not go over 8 percent. By April of that year, job losses pushed unemployment over 9 percent, where it stayed through September 2011, peaking at 10 percent in October 2009.
To find a period when unemployment consistently reached 9 percent for a longer period of time than on President Obama’s watch, you have to go back to the Great Depression of the 1930s.
By the time of the 2010 congressional elections, voters had experienced 19 consecutive months of 9 percent or higher unemployment. In that election, Democrats suffered their worst defeat in the House since 1938, losing 63 seats. That set the tone for the electorate’s view of his economic tenure.
By the time of the 2016 election, people hadn’t changed their minds about Obama’s economic track record. Fifty-two percent of the country thought the economy was the most important issue in the exit poll, and only 36 percent thought the economy was excellent/good, while 62 percent thought it was not so good/poor.
People who had a negative view of the economy voted for Trump by a 2-1 margin (62 percent to 31 percent). This was a key reason why Hillary Clinton lost in 2016.
This correlation was most evident in the Rust Belt states. In Michigan, 59 percent thought the economy was not so good/poor, and they voted Trump, 66-29. In Pennsylvania, 65 percent also had a negative view; they voted for Trump by 67-29. Finally, in Wisconsin, 61 percent had a negative view, and they voted for Trump by 68-27.
The last time any of those states had gone Republican was in the 1988 election, and the last time all three were carried by a Republican was in Ronald Reagan’s 1984 rout of Walter Mondale, who lost 49 states.
Economic growth under Obama was another factor in voters’ negative assessment of his economic record. In 2016, Obama’s last year in office, GDP only increased by a weak 1.8 percent annually. That was the economy Obama handed Trump.
By the end of 2017, under President Trump, annual GDP growth had increased to 2.5 percent. After the Republican tax cuts were passed in 2018, GDP rose by 3 percent, and in 2019 it was 2.5 percent. COVID-19 stopped the economy in its tracks, but it rebounded within months.
When President Joe Biden took office, he inherited a solid 1.4 percent inflation rate from Trump and a 6.4 percent unemployment rate despite hitting a high of 14.8 percent just nine months earlier during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the last quarter of 2020, Trump handed Biden a 4.2 percent GDP growth rate.
Two years after Trump’s election, in the 2018 exit polls, the electorate’s view of the economy had dramatically improved. Sixty-eight percent had a positive view, while only 31 percent had a negative view. On the Friday before the 2018 election, Democratic economist Jared Bernstein described the just-released October employment numbers as “pretty much everything you could want in a monthly jobs report.”
Unfortunately for Republicans, the White House focused more on immigration, in particular the “caravan” situation, rather than the economy over that last weekend prior to the election. The 8 percent of voters who said they decided over the past few days went Democratic by a 12-point margin, 53-41.
So while Republicans had produced a better economy than Obama’s, their decision to emphasize other issues for the party’s closing argument cost them seats.
That was the GOP’s mistake. Ironically, for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, their mistake was looking to Barack Obama for economic policy advice. Their post-pandemic stimulus package, the American Rescue Plan, was nothing less than a page out of Obama’s playbook — on steroids — and just about as effective.
They embraced the same Keynesian economics that produced 30 months of 9 percent unemployment for Obama, and for Biden-Harris, 15 months of the worst inflation the country has seen since the summer of 1982. Both presidencies ended with a whimper, not a bang, and no amount of hyperbole can change the numbers.
It’s not surprising to see former presidents’ views of their legacy at odds with the electorate’s; but it is the electorate, in the end, that’s the final arbiters of the success or failure of presidents, their policies and their performance.
David Winston is the president of The Winston Group and a longtime adviser to congressional Republicans. He previously served as the director of planning for Speaker Newt Gingrich. He advises Fortune 100 companies, foundations and nonprofit organizations on strategic planning and public policy issues, as well as serving as an election analyst for CBS News.