Michael R. Strain, Columnist

Rising Incomes Render Republican Strategy Obsolete

Workers were suffering in 2016. But the politics of grievance will likely make no sense in 2024.

April 22, 2021 at 12:33 PM UTC

Michael R. Strain is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is director of economic policy studies and Arthur F. Burns Scholar in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of “The American Dream Is Not Dead: (But Populism Could Kill It).”

The economy is going their way.
Photographer: Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images

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To listen to Republican politicians, you’d think it was still 2016. Many of them, especially the presidential aspirants, are parroting the same grievance-based, stick-it-to-the-man rhetoric that Donald Trump reveled in.

But that approach is not likely to work with the general electorate in the 2024 presidential election or in many state races. Why not? The economic experience of voters looks likely to be much more positive over the next few years than it was in the run-up to Trump’s 2016 victory.