The Lived Experience of the Economy
By 
I’ve long believed that looking at the economy in terms of numbers is nonsense. The reason for that is that you can’t measure people’s experiences through numbers (sorry social “scientists”) and people don’t respond to data in isolation. In other words, the economic numbers can say what they want and they can even be “right,” whatever that really means. But people vote based on the lived experience of the economy, regardless of whether that is backed up by the “data” (a meaningless term if there ever was one).
This gets to a core question of the 2024 election: given that Biden has been at the very worst the second best president for unions in American history, and I’d probably still argue he’s first based on what the president actually did versus just responding to larger trends in American life, why were union voters were fleeing from Biden big time and only now are settling back to Harris perhaps? The answer is fundamentally the lived experience of the economy over the past four years, much of which was outside of Biden’s direct control.
An important qualifier to this data, pointed out by some economists, is that the “pandemic and downturn led to a spurious rise/fall in average wage due to composition effects, as low-wage workers disproportionately lost jobs in 2020, and gained them back in 2021.” In other words, average real wages went up under Trump because many unemployed low-wage workers were not counted in the wage data.
But as the Economic Policy Institute pointed out, “Union workers had more job security during the pandemic . . . [and] industries with lower unionization rates tended to experience greater job loss during the pandemic.” So the wage experience of union members may be different from that of nonunion workers.
Nevertheless, the decline in real wages for union members under Biden — at least according to the Employer Cost Index — helps explain why many union voters in the swing states believe they were financially better off under Trump than Biden.
Of course, inflation resulted from the pandemic and broken supply chains. Given a divided Congress and lack of control over monetary policy, I’m skeptical that Biden could do much about it. However, using the Employer Cost Index, real wages did indeed decline for union workers due to the corrosive impact of inflation.
In addition, union wages are stickier than nonunion wages because of collective-bargaining agreements (many of which do not have cost-of-living increases). So as inflation soared under Biden, union workers were bound by contracts that couldn’t (or wouldn’t) be renegotiated to catch up to the increase in the cost of living. The flip side is that unions have negotiated large wage increases in the latest round of bargaining, and many union workers will likely see significant increases in real wages under the next presidential term (and hopefully, Trump will not be there to take credit for it).
Whatever the cause of the ebbing support of union members for Harris, it is crucial for the labor movement that she wins. As I’ve argued elsewhere, labor is one or two bad election cycles from an extinction-level event. The labor movement needs four more years to take advantage of the Biden labor reforms, organize more members into unions, and rebuild its political power to push for policies that address the real economic anxieties of the working class. That won’t be possible under a Trump administration.
In short, union members may not in fact be realizing that their personal lived experience is better than their non-union family members and friends because they are talking to those family members and friends. But also thanks to our complete lack of working-class political education (and unions are highly responsible for this failure among their members), they are seeing inflation as a huge deal, even as their wages eventually catch up to it. With better economic education from a specifically working class perspective, people might realize that some inflation is actually a good thing, especially if your wages are keeping up and you have, say, student debt. But that’s not the world we live in right now.
The truth is that if Trump had even the tiniest amount of personal discipline, he’d probably be winning in a runaway right now because economic nostalgia for pre-pandemic prices is very real. Of course, he had any discipline, he would never have won the nomination in 2016 to begin with, so we have to understand the appeal of Trump here. But if Harris wins, it will be in spite of the general public really disliking the Biden economy, even if they are wrong to do so. After all, you have to deal with the electorate you have, not the one in your mind that has any remote level of intelligence.