WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Household cash is near record levels in the United States, and consumers are using it to pack restaurants and airplanes and buy new cars. Jobs are there for the taking. Net worth is 30% higher than before the pandemic, more so for those in the bottom half.
And people have soured on President Joe Biden despite all of that.
Midterm elections on Tuesday could hamstring the Democratic president with a Republican-controlled Congress, and opinion polls and public sentiment surveys suggest that a gloomy mood around economic issues is pushing voters in that direction.
It is a fact of American politics that the party in the White House struggles in the congressional races held every two years between presidential contests.
It is a fact of this moment that there is a roaring, real-time dissonance between the president’s 40% approval rating and broader economic conditions that are at worst mixed – with high inflation top of mind for many but also one of the strongest jobs markets in decades and a 3.7% unemployment rate. Overall, the economy is expected to grow in 2022, albeit slowly, after concerns earlier in the year that it had begun to contract.
Yet 56% of respondents in a recent Morning Consult poll gave the economy a failing grade, and an index of consumer confidence “has been lower in recent weeks than it was during the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020.”
A CNN poll said a strong majority felt the country was in a recession, though by almost any standard it is not.
It…
