While most opinion polls link President Joe Biden’s poor job approval rating to the economy’s performance, a new survey has shown that it has to do mostly with voter perception rather than reality.
Pessimism In The Air: A majority of Americans believe that the U.S. economy is in a recession, blaming the president for the predicament, the results of a Guardian-commissioned Harris Poll showed Wednesday. Fifty-five percent of the respondents said the economy was contracting and 56% said the economy was in a recession.
Incidentally, after emerging from a COVID-19-induced recession in the third quarter of 2020, the U.S. economy has shown positive growth for much of Biden’s tenure, except for the first and second quarters of 2022.
The two consecutive quarters of negative growth, technically called a recession, were not considered as one because other economic indicators such as those measuring the labor market remained resilient, economists said.
The Harris poll showed that 49% of Americans said the unemployment rate is at a 50-year high, while the jobless rate has been languishing at a near 50-year low of sub-4% for quite some time now.
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics
A little less than half (49%) said the stock ...