The elderly incumbent president was heading into a general election against a member of the previous administration. The economy was improving, but many Americans were still hurting.
So, what did Ronald Reagan do? He declared, “It’s morning again in America.”
The famous gauzy 1984 general election ad painted a rosy picture of American life compared to 1980, stretching the economic truth with cherry-picked data yet striking an emotional chord.
Can President Joe Biden do the same? The challenge for the 46th president is steeper. Reagan dropped his ad in September 1984 when he was already trouncing former Vice President Walter Mondale in the polls, and much of the public already accepted that the economy was superior to the one left behind by Jimmy Carter.
The Biden economy is by nearly every significant measure better than the 1984 Reagan economy: the unemployment rate is lower, earnings are higher, the poverty rate is lower, inflation is lower, and interest rates are lower. Yet public sentiment towards Biden hasn’t caught up to the economic data, the media continues to harp on his age, and Donald Trump is furiously retconning the economic narrative of the last seven years.
The public may come to credit Biden with the improved economy, so long as the improvement continues, in time for Election Day. But with counterwinds, Biden can’t assume credit will organically materialize. Because his challenge is steeper than Reagan’s, he should not wait until September to marshal his best arguments.
Granted, an inherent risk with bragging about economic data is that it can go south. A good number in an ad today may turn sour by November, humiliating the candidate. But a review of the original Morning in America spot reminds us that emotion, not data, made it resonate.
Norman Rockwell-esque scenes grace the screen while a gentle narrator (the ad’s creator, Hal Riney) tells a tale of a revitalized America:
It’s morning again in America. Today, more men and women will go to work than ever before in our country’s history. With interest rates at about half the record highs of 1980, nearly 2,000 families today will buy new homes, more than at any time in the past four years. This afternoon, 6,500 young men and women will be married, and with inflation at less than half of what it was just four years ago, they can look forward with confidence to the future.
It’s morning again in America, and under the leadership of President Reagan, our country is prouder and stronger and better. Why would we ever want to return to where we were less than four short years ago?
A lot was left out.
While “more men and women will go to work than ever before” was nominally true in terms of raw numbers, thanks to population growth, it was wholly untrue in terms of share of the population. The unemployment rate in August 1984 was 7.5 percent, down from 10.8 percent at the nadir of the 1981-1982 recession, but identical to the unemployment rate on Election Day 1980.
Regarding the Federal Reserve’s key interest rate, it’s true that between June 1981 and August 1984, it was cut by “nearly half”—from 19.10 to 11.64 percent—if we generously round up the amount of the cut from 39 percent. But by the end of August, the average 30-year mortgage rate had only dropped 21 percent from an October 1981 peak. And that still left the rate at a heart-stopping 14.36 percent, a tick higher than the Election Day 1980 rate.
Furthermore, new single-family home sales in August 1984 (expressed as an annualized rate) was 567,000. (On a daily basis, that comes out to 1553, not exactly 2000, though the preceding spring and summer months were better). That wasn’t much different from the 561,000 in October 1980 and lower than the August 1980 figure of 659,000. The ad makers claimed the home sale rate was “more than at any time in the past four years,” but that’s because home sales tanked during the recession that began in Reagan’s first year in office before rebounding.
Completely unmentioned was the 1983 poverty rate (a figure released by the Census Bureau in August 1984, a month before the ad’s release) of 15.2 percent. That was higher than under Carter, and the highest since 1965, before Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society anti-poverty programs kicked in.
None of those fact-checks mattered because the ad told a reassuring story that felt right about a nation of people working more, buying homes, getting married, and living the traditional American Dream. Besides, the economy was better following the recession. Inflation was dramatically lower than in the Carter years (thanks to high-interest rates imposed by Carter’s appointee as Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker). Why get hung up on details?
This doesn’t mean Biden and his ad makers should cherry-pick as disingenuously as the Reagan team. On the contrary, the fact-checking industry is tougher these days. Trump will disparage any such ad false regardless of the facts, but his attacks will hit harder if the media backs him up.
It means the story comes first, and the data, lightly sprinkled, second.
A Biden version of Morning in America could sound like this:
It’s morning in America. Today, more Americans will go to work than ever in our country’s history.
Why not lift directly from the original’s first line? It’s technically accurate as a matter of raw numbers: in every month of 2023, for the first time, over 160 million Americans were employed. But the unemployment rate has been at 4 percent or below for the last two years, which hasn’t happened in over 50 years. Even if the unemployment rate ticks up some, the line will almost surely remain technically true.
And we’re building things in America again. Nearly one in ten of those workers has a job in manufacturing.
As of January 2024, we have 13 million manufacturing workers (about 8 percent of the workforce), the most in 15 years.
We’re enjoying the fruits of our labor, living in safer neighborhoods, and taking more vacations.
The 2023 murder rate is down 12 percent from the prior year, according to crime data analyst Jeff Asher, and all violent crime (through the third quarter of 2023) is down 8 percent.
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York survey from December 2023 found that 32.8 percent of households made a “large” purchase of vacation in the past four months, the highest percentage since 2015 when the bank began collecting such survey data. A Deloitte survey in the spring of 2023 found that 50 percent planned to take a summer vacation that involved paid lodging, the highest percentage since at least 2019, when 42 percent planned getaways.
And all of us are benefiting, with the difference in employment between whites, African-Americans, and Latinos near the smallest ever.
In January 2024, the gap between the white and Black unemployment rates was 1.9 percentage points, and between the white and Hispanic rates, 1.6. For African Americans, that gap rose from 3.1 just before the pandemic in February 2020 to 5.4 in August 2020, then gradually narrowed since. The February 2020 gap for Hispanics was 1.3, which rose to 5.3 in May 2020 but has been mostly below two since the middle of 2021.
Then, to close the ad, why change a word?
It’s morning again in America, and under the leadership of President Biden, our country is prouder and stronger and better. Why would we ever want to return to where we were less than four short years ago?
Reagan’s advertising team decided to push extreme optimism, according to an account from ad director Doug Watts, because in 1984, “it was the beginning of the 24-7 news cycle. That started to have an impact on the American psyche. So, it was important to find the optimism that was still in most people, but they were starting to lose a grip on it.”
The constant gloom-and-doom in our social media-driven discourse is greater now, requiring a more robust optimism operation—not just a few ads near the end of the campaign, but a months-long effort enlisting an army of surrogates.
Ideally, the Biden campaign would tap people from all walks of life—small business owners, PTA presidents, first responders, community bankers, blue-collar workers, stay-at-home parents, community college students, and retirees—from every state or even every county, to echo similar messages in local media about how the economy has turned around. Such a communications effort would till the soil for a national Morning in America campaign, which would not have to consist of just one ad but several versions tailored to different demographics.
And a hyper-positive advertising effort does not preclude a parallel negative blitz, which Reagan also used. How that could look will be the subject of a future column.
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