The General Election Scenario That Democrats Are Dreading
26th May 2020
“We are about to see the best economic data we’ve seen in the history of this country,” says a top former economic adviser to Obama.
Instead, he believes, the way to think about the current economic drop-off, at least in the first two phases, is more like what happens to a thriving economy during and after a natural disaster: a quick and steep decline in economic activity followed by a quick and steep rebound.
The Covid-19 recession started with a sudden shuttering of many businesses, a nationwide decline in consumption and massive increase in unemployment. But starting around April 15, when economic reopening started to spread but the overall numbers still looked grim, Furman noticed some data that pointed to the kind of recovery that economists often see after a hurricane or industrywide catastrophe like the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
Prior to the pandemic imbroglio, Trump presided over the best economic performance of any President in my lifetime. It would be very easy to make the case that the existing super-strong economy is what is making the recovery very resilient — so, even if the economy is still weak at election time, Trump can point out that it would have been far worse without the prior ginormous gains.