It’s the Economic Vibe, Stupid

The war on inflation is all but won.

That was the message from the Federal Reserve on Wednesday when it cut interest rates by half a percentage point, making a surprisingly large move that hands the Biden administration a big win on an issue that has caused Democrats — not to mention millions of Americans — big headaches over the last few years.

It’s the latest in a run of good economic news for President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, even though the low unemployment rate has begun to tick up. Writing this morning, my colleague Jim Tankersley summed up the sunny data this way:

The real question for November, though, is whether all that good news will be enough to improve the economic vibe.

Biden and Harris have led the country through a period of economic growth and job gains while inflation came down, but they have struggled to turn those achievements into broadly happy feelings among voters. The gap between the good news about the economy and the way voters are perceiving it has turned into one of the defining — and for Democrats, one of the most confounding — dynamics of this election.

Polling shows voters are feeling persistently sour about the economy. The most recent national poll by The New York Times and Siena College found that just 2 percent of the likely electorate considered the economy to be “excellent,” while 21 percent called it “good.” Twenty-eight percent of voters called it “only fair,” while nearly half — 49 percent — rated it “poor.”

One of those voters was Kelly Hunt, 56, a former nurse from Elyria, Ohio, who now relies on a fixed disability income to feed her five grandchildren. Hunt, who told me she was a registered Democrat who backed Hillary Clinton in 2016 and former President Donald Trump