WASHINGTON — As high prices at supermarkets, gas stations and pharmacies harmed many voters in his first term, President Joe Biden developed a populist response: blame big corporations for inflation, not me.
But despite facing a tough re-election battle where economic issues will be central, Biden has not leaned on that message as often or naturally as some other Democrats, including senators running for competitive seats in the Southwest and industrial Midwest. Biden’s campaign has not focused its television or online ads on messages rebuking companies for high prices, unlike Senators Bob Casey of Pennsylvania and Sherrod Brown of Ohio, who have made the issue a centerpiece of their campaigns. – and who are outperforming Biden in the polls. .
Now, some progressives are urging Biden to follow the example of these senators and make “greed-inflation,” as they call it, a driving theme of his re-election bid. They say taking the fight to big business could reinforce the broader Main Street versus Wall Street argument he makes against former President Donald Trump, especially with the black working-class voters Biden needs to motivate. And they believe polls show that voters are prepared to hear the president condemn large corporations in stronger terms.
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“It’s a winning message for Democrats,” said April Verrett, president of the Service Employees International Union, which is knocking on doors in swing states as part of a $200 million voter turnout operation. “And clearly, Bob Casey, who is polling better than the president, is proving that this is the winning message.”
Inflation soared under Biden in 2021 and 2022 as the economy emerged from the pandemic recession. Its causes were complex, including tangled global supply chains, Federal Reserve stimulus policies and, to some extent, federal fiscal policies, including COVID relief bills signed by Trump and the 1.1 emergency spending measure. 9 billion dollars that Biden signed shortly after taking office to help people and businesses harmed by the recession.
What Republicans call “Bidenflation” has become one of the president’s biggest political liabilities in his rematch with Trump. In response, Biden sought to simultaneously applaud progress in stabilizing or reducing prices – growth has slowed sharply since a year ago – while also acknowledging the pain that voters still feel in their pocketbooks.
Biden also attacked companies for pricing practices in certain sectors, such as meatpacking, snacks, concert tickets and gasoline. His administration has worked to cap the prices of prescription drugs such as insulin and inhalers, control bank overdrafts and credit card fees, and make air travel cheaper and more transparent, achievements he often argues during the campaign.
“We are standing up to corporate greed to lower the price of gas, food and rent by eliminating undue fees,” Biden told a crowd of 1,000 supporters in Philadelphia last week.
Still, leaning on that combative message isn’t always a natural fit for Biden. He proudly calls himself a “capitalist” and has long maintained a close, if sometimes controversial, relationship with corporate America. Some economists close to your White House disagree that companies raising prices to make profits from juice is one of the main drivers of inflation.
And while Biden is happy to tell a folksy anecdote about Snickers bars shrinking in size without doing the same in price, other Democrats have appeared much more aggressive on this issue. The pressure to blame corporations has united many factions of the Democratic Party, including progressives, swing-state populists, labor leaders and environmentalists.
Brown, who represents a state that Trump won handily in 2020, has released several web ads proclaiming that he is “cracking down on companies ripping off Ohio.” Casey cut a campaign ad showing executives in suits sneaking into a supermarket in the dead of night and swapping boxes of cereal for smaller substitutes. Senate Democrats in close races, such as Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin and Jacky Rosen of Nevada, are making similar proposals.
“President Biden has a lot of freedom here to put the blame where it belongs and should not be ashamed to express it,” said Julián Castro, the former secretary of Housing and Urban Development who ran against Biden for the Democratic nomination in 2020. . “The alternative is they will blame you.”
But some of Biden’s progressive allies say the president has found effective — and popular — ways to talk about corporate pricing practices, including his focus on “junk fees” charged by airlines, concert promoters and more. They also say he must balance the issue with a broad set of campaign messages, including on abortion and democracy.
“You’re going to be more focused on kitchen table issues in a Senate race,” said Lindsay Owens, executive director of the progressive Groundwork Collaborative in Washington. Biden, she added, is “doing exactly the right thing. He is not focusing on the unstable and stubborn debates about the origins of inflation, and is focusing much more on the way Americans are feeling and experiencing price increases in their daily lives.”
The liberal argument that corporate greed drove prices higher flows from a recent surge in corporate profits, reaching record levels in the wake of the pandemic. They say that many companies, especially in industries with relatively little competition, have taken advantage of the reopening of the economy to test how aggressively they can raise prices.
Biden adapted his arguments about corporate greed to sectors where profit margins remained consistently high even as inflation began to fall, such as food and gasoline. White House economists this year calculated that profit margins have increased by 2 percentage points for food and beverage stores since the eve of the pandemic, an increase that could explain some — but not nearly all — of the food price increases in the country. country.
Many economists, including libertarians and even some former advisers to Democratic presidents, reject this argument, noting that there is little historical connection between profit levels and the rate of inflation. Economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco wrote last month that evidence suggests corporate profit margins were not the “main driver” of rising inflation under Biden, although they also found that profit margins have persisted in certain sectors , such as automobiles and oil.
Republican lawmakers have long accused Democrats of seeking a political distraction by blaming companies for price increases.
“For the past three years, the American people have been devastated by inflation,” Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., said last month at a Senate subcommittee hearing on price gouging. “This inflation, like all inflation, is caused by man. This man’s name is Joe Biden.”
Biden carefully targeted his arguments about corporate pricing to the evidence provided to him by his economic team, said Bharat Ramamurti, former deputy director of Biden’s National Economic Council.
“Maybe this will end up in something a little more reserved,” Ramamurti said. But when it comes to price increases, he said, “I think he’s been pretty vocal in calling it out when he sees it and when the economic data supports it.”
White House spokesman Andrew Bates said that “President Biden’s top priority is beating inflation, which is why he has taken historic action and continues to fight the corporate greed that keeps prices high.”
Few Democrats have done more to get the message across that corporations are driving inflation than Casey, who is running for re-election in Pennsylvania and has introduced a bill in the Senate that would crack down on “inflation curbing” — a term for companies that reduce the size of its products, but not by cutting prices. Biden praised this legislation during his State of the Union address.
In an interview, Casey acknowledged that Democrats have generally been slow to follow his lead in blaming corporations for higher prices.
“We may have been late,” he said. “But now that we’ve started to make this point, I think a lot of voters have the feeling that we understand and are trying to do something about it.”
For now, polls show Trump with a clear lead: 58% of voters in six key battleground states say Trump would do a better job handling the economy, compared with 36% who prefer Biden, according to a New York report Times/Siena College/Philadelphia. Inquirer research found last month.
But Democratic polls have found that many voters agree with the assertion that corporations are responsible for inflation. Nearly 6 in 10 voters said that companies being “greedy” was a major cause of inflation, including the majority of independent voters, according to a poll conducted by the progressive-leaning group Navigator Research.
Analysis of the Biden campaign’s internal polls found similar trends.
Akhenaton Mikell, a mental health therapist from Philadelphia, agreed that corporate greed was “the main reason” for the rising prices. But after voting for Biden in 2020, he’s not sure he’ll do it again.
“I used to go to the grocery store and buy a package of chicken wings for $6-7-8, and now it’s like $14-15-16,” said Mikell, 55. as well as. I had to cut a lot of things.”
There are signs that Biden plans to emphasize this issue more in the coming weeks. His team produced an ad about corporate greed and the tax code he plans to release soon. Lauren Hitt, a campaign spokeswoman, said Biden has “repeatedly taken on corporate greed” and would be “telling this story every day in every way possible during the campaign, from ads to door knocks and more.”
As for Trump, Biden and his allies have already worked to portray him as a friend of billionaires and plutocrats who would do little to address rising costs.
“The effort to curb corporate price gouging is part of the sharp contrast between Biden and Trump,” said Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who has been a leading Democratic voice on the issue. “Trump applauds corporate profiteers. Joe Biden fights them.”
Meanwhile, Biden’s allies are doing their part to amplify the message that companies are taking advantage of ordinary Americans. Progressive groups Climate Power and Future Forward USA Action have started a $50 million ad campaign that includes an ad featuring a South Carolina family farmer accusing big oil companies of making “huge profits at our expense.”
Ted Pappageorge, secretary-treasurer of the Nevada Culinary Workers Union, which is knocking on doors across the state, said voters were responding to those messages.
“What resonates with working-class voters is price gouging,” Pappageorge said. “Big oil and food companies will have to be controlled.”
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