Between Kentucky and Ohio, there’s a bridge that will eventually be rebuilt and replaced. Early last year, Joe Biden flew there and stood next to Mitch McConnell and they celebrated the $1.6 billion dedicated to this bridge from the infrastructure law’s $1.2 trillion budget. Sixteen months later, $15.7 million of federal funds have been spent toward the project, while the yearslong formal process for awarding the bulk of the money continues. Billions and billions of infrastructure money is similarly slowly winding its way through various processes, but, as Politico recently reported in an in-depth look at Mr. Biden’s domestic agenda, only some of it has been actually spent.
Gina Raimondo, the commerce secretary, has a huge team cutting grants in the billions and has said her goal is that 20 percent of the world’s most advanced logic semiconductors will be produced in the United States by the end of the decade, a transformative shift made possible through deals with Taiwanese and Korean-based firms and major government support to Intel. Currently the percentage produced is zero. Some of those factories might come online next year.
In reporting about voters’ views of Mr. Biden, it’s clear that at least some think he’s hardly doing anything at all — and that if re-elected, there might be no change. In the way the Biden campaign talks sometimes, they make it sound like manufacturing is already booming. He’s trapped in an in-between: Bigger changes are coming, and the things people said they wanted are coming, but not for years.
Dispersing funds on this scale takes years. To rewire international chip production takes years. To rebuild a bridge often takes years. Companies announce they will build factories to build chips and solar panels, and at a certain point, but not quite now, they very likely will. Someday, years from now, a new bridge will exist. In the intervening years, people will just have to imagine the bridge. Who feels the presence of a factory that isn’t yet there?
The Mr. Biden of 2020 was right; he could get Congress to pass major pieces of legislation. The CHIPS Act really might recalibrate chip manufacturing globally and — if fully implemented — the infrastructure and clean-energy laws will plow billions into physical and green infrastructure in the United States. This stuff is what many people said they wanted from a presidency (to make things in the U.S., to repair physical infrastructure).
But the physical results are happening on a timetable of years in the future. Even in the building trades’ recent and effusively pro-Biden, anti-Trump endorsement video, the challenge in how to perceive this agenda is framed through future-present reflection: “I think we’ll step back from where we’re at in a few years and we’ll realize how big the impact of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris has been.”
Time has loomed over the Biden presidency in any number of ways. There is, of course, his age, which voters worry about, and which has probably changed him in ways good and bad, like it does for anyone. But voters have changed and aged, too: The public’s memory of Donald Trump’s presidency seems to have faded and also warmed, even as he goes darker and more illiberal.
The very youngest voters — some of the ones who seem to have problems with Mr. Biden — were 10 years old when Mr. Trump won in 2016. “I don’t think Trump carries the same negative baggage with this youngest cohort as he does with older ones,” John Della Volpe, the director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics who studies the youth vote, told The Dispatch earlier this year. Those younger voters are some of the same who have no prior adult experience with sustained inflation or interest rate increases, and have already racked up a lot of debt.
Time hangs over this election. It is what we’re talking about, daily, with abortion limits. Time, too, is money lost: This presidency is the first one in decades during which inflation has eaten away at what people can buy and think they ought to be able to buy. Mortgage rates have suspended time a bit: People who might otherwise sell now are contemplating worse rates. This presidency began during the pandemic, a kind of time warp of disrupted routines and unstable expectations; people said they wanted things to return to normal, but the world ended up remaining chaotic.
In the winter, The Wall Street Journal interviewed a wide range of Americans about their dark thoughts about the strong economy, and found the idea of global chaos and dysfunction colored people’s thinking — like even good times could not be preserved. “Even though I’m OK right now, there’s a sense it could all go away in a second,” said one woman, who seemed to be in a good financial position.
Mr. Biden’s re-election effort is currently being talked about in terms of how much time is left to change its trajectory and ensure victory, though months do remain. There’s a vaguely haunting question in the latest New York Times/Siena College poll about what level of change Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump might effect if elected. Sixty-nine percent of registered voters say they want major changes, including 14 percent who want the political and economic system to “be torn down entirely.” With Mr. Trump, 70 percent of people say there will be major changes or the system will be torn down. With Mr. Biden, 71 percent say there will be minor changes or none at all. What kind of change each voter has in mind is unknown.
People wanted things to get back to normal after the pandemic, and now they want perhaps a different kind of change. People always say they want bridges and roads, but maybe the timetable for bridges and roads just isn’t enough for them. Some of the same people who fear the idea of the economy breaking Mr. Biden’s re-election prospects, even if the economy is working for them, also expected more from this presidency — even people who’d never think of doing anything but vote for Mr. Biden.
More of what? The “more” people seem to want can sometimes be articulated clearly in economic or foreign policy decisions, and at other times it sounds more like a vibe that would be hard to measure. Mr. Biden talks about the Constitution, free speech, unions, racism, antisemitism, morals and civil society — but people seem to want something more there, too, maybe something more cohesive, to connect events into a narrative that people actually hear and thread through their lives.
Can you get to a future where inflation is over, and the bridge and the factory are up and running? How fast is fast enough?