This column last week suggested that a moment of truth may be nearing for President Biden, Democrats, and other members of the anti-Trump coalition, specifically on whether the country's improved economic fortunes of late will translate into a polling bounce for President Biden. Economic and polling data released in the past week shed some new light on the question.
Late January’s economic news contained the kind of numbers that Democrats had long been praying to hear. On Thursday, the Commerce Department released its “advance” (preliminary) real-gross-domestic-product numbers for the fourth quarter of 2023, indicating the economy grew at a solid 3.3 percent. A bit cooler than Q3’s sizzling 4.9 percent growth, some called it a Goldilocks report—not too hot and not too cold.
On Friday, Commerce released the Personal Consumption Expenditures price index, showing that the inflation rate for December was just 2.6 percent for the second consecutive month, not as low as the Fed’s target rate of 2 percent but a lot closer than it had been, and lower than the Consumer Price Index number released earlier in the
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