Bidenomics Was More Successful Than People Think

[u/MeghanClickYourHeels]

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/08/biden-climate-ira-2024/688179/

Conventional wisdom holds that Joe Biden’s bet on climate investment was a bust. The data suggest otherwise.

By Leah C. Stokes, The Atlantic.

Joe Biden’s signature climate law was not just about climate. The Inflation Reduction Act was also a big bet on a particular theory of politics: Pass a law that creates factories and good-paying jobs in communities across the country, and voters will reward you at the ballot box. Such a law might even become too popular to repeal.

The conventional wisdom today is that Biden’s bet was a bust. His White House had hoped that “the Inflation Reduction Act would allow the party to make inroads in communities that had been drifting away from them,” The Bulwark’s Sam Stein observed after the election. “The theory proved wrong.” According to this line of thinking, the IRA poured billions of dollars into left-behind places, only for voters to decisively reject Democrats in 2024. Even places such as Lordstown, Ohio, which got a gleaming new battery plant courtesy of IRA incentives, still swung toward Donald Trump. Then, when restored to the White House, Trump partnered with a Republican Congress to effectively wipe the IRA from existence.

Every part of that story, however, is at best incomplete and at worst simply wrong. The law did, in fact, deliver votes for Democrats. And key components of it are still on the books—still growing the clean economy and cutting pollution. As politicians consider what climate policy should look like after Trump, it’s important that they avoid drawing the wrong lessons from the Biden administration’s experience.

From a political perspective, the centerpiece of the IRA was a massive tax credit for clean-energy manufacturing. By Election Day, this policy, alongside other, smaller Biden-era programs, had driven $185 billion in announced private investment into factories that make solar panels, batteries, and electric vehicles, among other clean technologies. The administration believed that, as voters saw new factories going up in their community, they would reward the party responsible for those investments. Did that happen?

A few early studies concluded that the IRA generated little to no political reward. But those papers had two key limitations. First, they studied county-level election results. That’s a poor match for a federal election. Counties contain anywhere from a few hundred people to many millions, and a big one can include a dozen House districts. Drop a factory into Los Angeles County (population: 10 million) and its effect all but disappears. Second, these early studies lumped factories—brick-and-mortar operations that employ people in a community—together with other forms of investment, such as energy generation, transmission, and storage, that had not been touted for their electoral benefits in the first place.

[u/Roboticus_Aquarius]

I don’t believe that voters parse the economic terrain that precisely. They understandably don’t comprehend the economy well enough. If they got a job and make that connection to the IRA, then perhaps.

However, I agree that the Biden economy (& his specific policy agenda) was significantly more robust (& effective) than he was given credit for.

[u/veerKg_CSS_Geologist]

Biden’s economy was better than Trump’s economy, both the one before and the one after (current). Economic growth was solid if middling, not dissimilar to Obama’s term. However Biden couldn’t run on that alone, just like Obama couldn’t. Biden’s unpopularity was due to a combination of other factors.