One of the advantages that a candidate challenging an incumbent president usually enjoys is that he or she can make sweeping promises about how they would use executive power. Whatever issue is most powerful to voters, the challenger can promise that by forcing Congress or issuing an executive order or invoking some kind of ancient magic, they could fix it. Voters may not believe it, and the incumbent president may disapprove, but those kinds of promises are what can overcome the incumbent’s power.
Donald Trump, who is challenging the incumbent president in 2024, has no such advantage. Instead, he has a track record of his own, having held presidential power for four years. He can still promise to use that power in new ways, but his identification of a problem he will tackle prompts an obvious backlash: Well, why didn’t you fix it last time?
On Wednesday evening we saw how this can filter through through ticket sales.
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) accepted the Republican Party’s vice presidential nomination in a speech that laid out his personal biography and the ticket’s agenda should he and Trump win in November. Vance was chosen because he is partly from the Midwest and — Trump hopes — can appeal to voters in the swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. That meant Vance spent a significant portion of his speech describing how Trump (if elected for a second term) and did (when he was president) would address the economic concerns often cited as the reason Trump won those states in 2016.
In his speech, Vance claimed that Trump’s presidency had already done the job.
“He created the greatest economy in history for workers,” Vance said, echoing the hyperbolic rhetoric Trump embraced. “It was truly amazing. There’s a chart that shows worker wages, and they were stagnant pretty much my entire life until President Donald J. Trump came along. Worker wages went through the roof.”
It’s not clear what chart he was referring to, but it could have been something like this one, which shows weekly incomes in the United States adjusted for inflation. This chart starts in 1993, when Bill Clinton took office — shortly after Vance was born in 1984.
You can see the increase he seems to be referring to. Weekly earnings began rising in 2014 (during President Barack Obama’s administration) and rose steadily through 2020. Then there was a spike, one that quickly began to fade during President Biden’s first year in office. That spike was, quite clearly, a function of the tumult associated with the coronavirus pandemic. Median earnings rose in part because lower-paid workers were furloughed; as they were slowly brought back to work, the median gradually fell again.
Another metric we can look at is month-to-month wage growth. That data shows that wage growth held steady under Trump, after rising under Obama. The rate of growth increased under Biden, particularly among lower-paid workers.
Of course, this has its own caveat: inflation has eaten away at many of those profits. Wage increases have outpaced cost increases recently.
Vance’s pitch to his audience — and Midwestern voters specifically — focused on the decline in manufacturing that has led to skyrocketing unemployment in the region. Echoing Trump in 2016, Vance pointed to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) as a key reason for the decline.
It’s true that manufacturing employment in the United States and the Midwestern states Vance targets declined after the passage of NAFTA in 1994. But the decline only became more severe in the 2000s, during the George W. Bush administration.
When Clinton took office in 1993, there were 16.8 million Americans working in manufacturing. When he left office, there were 17.1 million. When Bush was inaugurated for his second term in 2005, there were 14.3 million. When he left office, there were 12.6 million.
Vance (along with Trump) isn’t worried about blaming fellow Republican Bush for the decline, not at all. But there wasn’t much of a rebound during the Trump administration. In Obama’s second term, the country added 383,000 manufacturing jobs. From the time Trump took office to the peak in manufacturing employment during his administration, the country had added 462,000 jobs. But he left office with the loss of 178,000 manufacturing jobs, largely due to the pandemic. Since Biden took office, the country has added 770,000, though that’s again due to the pandemic and job recovery. But the most recent data is also up 130,000 from the peak under Trump.
That’s national. In the swing states, manufacturing has been up since Biden took office, but down from the peaks under Trump. But those peaks were down in the winter of 2018-19 or that summer. Manufacturing jobs were already falling before the pandemic hit.
A similar pattern is seen in the median household income data. Nationally and in the swing states, incomes (adjusted for inflation) peaked in 2019. They fell in 2020 and 2021. Those 2019 peaks are generally consistent with the upward trend that began under Obama.
Trump tends not to focus on specific numbers, preferring to make sweeping statements about how great the economy has been under his administration. Then again, it’s hard to lament the decades-long stagnation of jobs and wages in America without noting that Trump was president for a chunk of those decades. Unless, of course, you cherry-pick wage data.
There’s another interesting point here. Should Biden be replaced as the Democratic nominee, the November election will take on a truly new perspective: the incumbent party will have a candidate who has never been president, and the challenging party will offer voters a candidate with a presidential record.
It would be all the more difficult to present voters with a blank slate.
