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Editor's Note: Julian Zelizer, CNN political analyst, is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University and author of the upcoming book, “Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, The Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party ”. Follow him on Twitter at: @julianzelizer. The opinions expressed in this comment are yours. See more opinion pieces at CNNE.com/opinion.
(CNN) - After most of the country spent weeks in confinement to help stop the spread of the coronavirus, the Labor Department announced Friday that the U.S. economy lost 20.5 million jobs in April, with rates of unemployment soared to 14.7%. We are now facing an economic crisis that could rival the Great Depression, a historical recession that lasted a decade and destroyed the economic security of the United States. This time, some call it Trump's depression.
The current situation is even worse for the black and Latino communities, where unemployment figures have reached 16.7% and 18.9%, respectively. While the president suggested that the employment figures were only temporary, saying "those jobs will come back and they will do it very soon," many economists disagree.
“The damage that we are seeing from the great coronavirus recession is traumatic. It will be a long time before the labor market recovers its pre-crisis state, ”said Gregory Daco, a US economist at Oxford Economics.
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Jobs will now be a defining issue in the 2020 elections. President Trump, who has spent much of his term boasting about low unemployment rates and job growth, has lost a basic pillar of his political rhetoric. No matter what chaos was brewing in the first three years of his presidency, Trump always trusted and took credit for the strength of the economy.
But that ended. The state of the Union, as the famous phrase President Gerald Ford from 1975 says, "is not good." If the situation continues to worsen in the coming months, voters will decide President Trump's fate, taking into account their own bleak prospects for the future. With tens of millions of Americans out of work, the electorate will not be happy.
In some ways, the situation could echo the 1992 election, when President George HW Bush saw the political bottom line of his reelection effort drop, largely due to a recession that left many Americans jobless and in debt. In the months leading up to the elections, Bush enjoyed a booming approval rating in the wake of Operation Desert Storm, which saw US forces successfully expel Iraqi troops from Kuwait.
But he lost the election to Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, who focused on the recession and used it to paint an administration that was out of touch with the electorate. Clinton strategist James Carville reminded his team in the campaign room: "It's the economy, stupid!" every time someone strayed from the path.
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But Democrats would do well to think about the many ways Trump still has an advantage. Its base of support, for example, remains much stronger than Bush had.
We are, of course, in the midst of a global pandemic. President Trump, using his conservative media propaganda machine, will pinpoint the economic situation and try to blame, arguing that China, or the World Health Organization, did not sound the alarm in time. He may try to pinpoint the social distancing and other public health measures (which his own White House task force recommended) as a "Democratic hoax" that imposed a devastating effect on the nation. So far, polls show that most people are concerned that states are reopening too soon.
Joe Biden will have to give voters a better idea of how he will lead the economic recovery process if he becomes president. The Democratic Party needs to set a clear agenda on how it would move the country from its current state to a period of growth.
Biden's campaign must take Carville's words seriously and make it clear to voters that the administration's lagged response to covid-19 helped lead to the dire situation we find ourselves in today.
Democrats must point out that public health initiatives and economic recovery go hand in hand. If we rush to reopen businesses without contact trackers, aggressive testing programs, and enough hospital supplies, we will face a second wave of outbreaks that will ultimately deliver an even more devastating blow to the economy.
The United States faces a free fall in the economy and the President has not offered a realistic path beyond the stimulus laws passed by Congress. He is responsible. This represents an enormous weakness for the Republican Party in the elections, with the majority of the Senate and the White House at stake.
The question is whether Democrats can respond effectively to the situation. Joe Biden and the Democrats in Congress will have to do more to explain what their New Deal would consist of and how they plan to offer a better economic program to make the country great again.
2020 Elections United States