Source: Blog – Alliance for American Manufacturing

Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz

But they don’t like calling it “Bidenomics.”

President Joe Biden’s got a new campaign ad out this week across Pennsylvania that highlights his support for domestic manufacturing. It’s narrated by a welder who works in a Philadelphia shipyard. Check it out:

This ad – which is airing in the Philly, Pittsburgh and Scranton media markets, and on national cable news channels, according to the Pennsylvania Capital-Star – hits all the notes. In its 30 seconds there are about a hundred energetic cuts showing heavy industry, sparks, shop floors and lots of smiles. The name “Joe Biden” is said approximately a dozen times. There’s a driving rock song in the background with lots of electric guitar and crashing cymbals. Very lively!

“Joe Biden is bringing manufacturing back, creating good jobs and standing up for workers,” says Emily, the ad’s subject. “Pretty much everyone who I work with got their job because of Joe Biden.”

Who knows if that’s true, but they’ve been hiring at the Philly Shipyard this year and manufacturing employment nationally is up; it has not only recovered to its pre-Covid level but passed it. That’s thanks in large part to the industrial policies enacted in the past few years, under Biden’s watch. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the CHIPS Act and the Buy America policies that govern them all encourage domestic production and therefore spur domestic investment. And, as such, factory construction in the United States is booming.

These policies make up a significant chunk of what president’s re-election campaign calls “Bidenomics,” a term it adopted from a Wall Street Journal editorial that didn’t mean it as a compliment.

And while the industrial policy has proven wise, adopting the term might not have been. Biden is asking voters to back him on his economic record and, according to the pollsters, they aren’t. Swing state voters don’t like the way he’s handling the economy. They specifically don’t like “Bidenomics.”

Now, look, there’s a disconnect here that I’m not qualified to suss out. Maybe voters are scared of his dog and it’s projecting as disapproval of economic policy. I’m willing to entertain this idea. Or maybe a lot of them are driven by partisanship; maybe there’s a chunk of the country that won’t vote for him, period, because he’s a Democrat, just as there’s a bloc of voters that won’t vote for the Republican nominee.

That may be it. The Alliance for American Manufacturing’s own polling of Republican voters, released ahead of the last GOP presidential primary debate, reveals they overwhelmingly support the kinds of policies that constitute Bidenomics. We’ve even got Pennsylvania-specific data (and Ohio-specific, too).

A few takeaways from that polling:

Nearly 90% of Republican primary voters in Pennsylvania support the Buy America policies that Biden signed into law in 2021.

Two-thirds of them (66%) think tax benefits for clean energy projects should be greater if developed using American-made materials and products. The clean energy inducements in the IRA include a production tax credit for solar panels, wind turbines and batteries, and another for building facilities that make that kind of equipment.

Another 73% don’t want to lose domestic electric vehicle manufacturing to China. There’s a $7,500 tax credit for the purchase American-made EV in the IRA, too.

Over 90% think the tariffs on Chinese imports should be kept in place; four in ten think they should be raised. The Biden administration has maintained them virtually untouched.

Nearly 60% believe manufacturing jobs will increase in the United States. But only a third (34%) believe that manufacturing is presently coming back to the United States.

So Republican voters like industrial policy, but they don’t like Bidenomics. Partisanship is a tough nut to crack.

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