Biden by the numbers

Immediate assessments of presidencies are often difficult.

After all, it took only a few years for Americans to return to a favorable view of George W. Bush, who spent his final days in office with an approval rating in the 20s. The fact that Donald Trump, who left office in 2021 as a political and cultural pariah, is himself days away from returning to the White House is a testament to the difficulty. That Biden’s age likely means his post-presidency will be extremely short further complicates the picture.

Furthermore, the 2024 results clearly indicated a growing gap between Americans’ experiences and historians’ assessments. So instead of grand historical analysis, we decided to do something different. With Joe Biden’s presidency drawing to a close, here is the story of his time in office through five clear issues: Manufacturing, poverty, immigration, unemployment, and political standing. 

1. Manufacturing: Spending soared — but jobs growth still lags

Biden premised his 2020 campaign on the core claim that he was uniquely positioned to reverse the legislative paralysis that had gripped Washington. For all the criticism and mockery in his final days, the president can boast a promise kept. In 2021 and 2022, he signed multiple pieces of big-ticket legislation that both of his immediate predecessors would have sacrificed an aide for. Chief among them were the bipartisan infrastructure bill, the CHIPS Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act, which collectively poured hundreds of billions of dollars into the manufacturing sector.

When factoring in private investment, the total effect of the laws is well over $1 trillion (the scope of the IRA in particular has risen as its clean energy tax credits and subsidies have proven more popular, and more expensive, than projected).  Collectively, the efforts have resulted in a level of factory investment unseen in decades.

At the same time, that rebound has not resulted in a return to the halcyon days of widespread manufacturing employment. The reasons for that are complex — modern manufacturing is far more expensive, meaning the spending is simply not going as far, and many of the new jobs won’t be hired for several years. But much of it is attributable to the deep hole U.S. manufacturing has been in after decades of decline. Reversing that trend takes longer than four years. 

2. Poverty: A complicated picture that tells a broader story

Of the many complicated economic indicators, none get to the paradox of the country’s post-COVID economy more than the poverty rate. Beginning in 2009, the federal government began to publish an additional measure of poverty, the “Supplemental Poverty Rate.” In contrast to the longstanding official rate, which simply measures how many Americans’ annual income places them below the designated poverty line, the SPM takes into account government aid and household costs, which can fluctuate more than incomes.

For years, the two measurements tracked closely. Then, during the COVID pandemic, the country unleashed trillions of dollars in aid programs, massively expanding programs like Medicaid, the child tax credit, and unemployment insurance. Those programs largely ended during Biden’s presidency, resulting in a SPM spike even as the official poverty rate declined.

The unprecedented divergence underscores the complex economic picture under Biden: While macro-level growth was robust, outstripping other nations and economists’ expectations, the loss of pandemic-era aid and the rapid rise in consumer costs meant many Americans — including the poorest — did indeed see their actual standard of living decline the past few years. That fact goes a long way towards explaining the significant shift of working class voters towards Donald Trump in November.  

3. Immigration: The largest surge in history

On no other issue did the center of political gravity shift as much during Biden’s term as immigration. After four years in which Trump’s efforts at border enforcement were associated with xenophobia and cruelty, Biden entered office with over two-thirds of Americans supporting immigration kept at current levels or increased, according to Gallup. Now, a firm majority support decreasing immigration levels for the first time in decades.

The sea change is not hard to decipher: By its own admission, the administration faced sustained, very public difficulty in managing the country’s immigration system. Almost immediately after Biden took office, crossings exploded at the U.S.-Mexico border to the highest level in history — a surge initially attributable to the end of the COVID pandemic and the perception of a more welcoming U.S. after Trump. But in the years that followed, the situation only worsened. 2022 broke 2021’s record and 2023 saw only a small decline.

By the time 2024 dawned, Democrats were scrambling to redefine their immigration record, lobbying for a bipartisan deal that Trump ultimately played a hand in scuttling. Biden was forced to reverse many of his own policies by executive action, a tacit but significant concession towards the right. In December, the New York Times published an analysis that assessed the past few years in stark terms, revealing the surge of new arrivals was “the largest in U.S. history, surpassing the great immigration boom of the late 1800s and early 1900s.”

4. Unemployment: The U.S. ran laps around other countries

For those who closely followed employment and inflation numbers, the past four years have been a roller coaster. After unleashing gargantuan federal recovery aid in the 2021 American Rescue Plan, the Biden administration watched the American economy bounce back quicker than experts forecasted and peer countries experienced. The swift recovery was especially significant given the anemic growth after the Great Recession. Quickly though, the economic story transitioned to inflation; by 2022, most mainstream analysts predicted at least a small recession would be necessary to tame prices.

That proved incorrect. As Biden leaves office, inflation has closed in on the Federal Reserve’s target of 2% and the U.S. never entered recession. No other developed country can tout a recovery that so robustly reclaimed jobs and so quickly tamed inflation. There are still warning signs — inflation is not conquered and there are signs of a weakening job market — but for all the legitimate complexity of Biden’s record, the employment picture is a genuine achievement.

5. Political standing: Democrats lost little ground

In 2021, Trump left office as the first president since Herbert Hoover to oversee his party losing the House, Senate, and presidency in one term of office. That political failure, which became reality the evening of the Georgia Senate runoffs on January 5th, 2021, was always a key driver in Republicans’ repudiation of Trump for the attack on January 6th, 2021: His time atop the party coincided with the GOP experiencing a repudiation not seen since before the Great Depression. 

Four years later, Biden too is departing D.C. having lost the House, Senate, and presidency in one term of office. At the same time, he avoided the wave elections and midterm wipeouts the previous four presidents endured. This is partly due to the historically slim margins Democrats commanded when he entered office; there was simply far less ground available to lose. Still, compared to his immediate predecessors, Biden oversaw his party losing substantially less ground in Congress.

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