With Election Day less than two weeks away, Americans are putting the economy at or near the top of their list of most important issues. And as Forbes reported on Thursday, recent polls show voters wrongly perceive Republican Donald Trump as the stronger option to lead the U.S. economy over the next four years.

That misperception, however, is completely at odds with the history of and forecasts for the American economy. For starters, the overwhelming consensus of economists is that the program of Vice President Kamala Harris will deliver faster economic growth and smaller budget deficits while Trump’s plans promise runaway national debt, steep inflation, a drained Social Security Trust Fund and massive tax cut windfall for the wealthy. Those warnings come even as notoriously conservative publications including the Wall Street Journal (“U.S. Economy Again Leads the World, IMF Says”) and The Economist (“The Envy of the World”) proclaimed “the American economy has left other rich countries in the dust.” And then there is the answer to the quadrennial question, “Is our economy better off than it was four years ago?”

The answer is absolutely, positively yes. Put another way, when examining which President of the United States produced the stronger economy during his tenure, the data clearly show it’s Biden by a landslide.

Before digging through the numbers, a little context is in order. When Donald Trump took the oath of office on January 20, 2017, he was the beneficiary of the Obama boom. After bringing the American financial system back from the brink of collapse, President Obama bequeathed 13 million new jobs, a 4.7% unemployment rate, strong GDP growth, stock market records and plummeting deficits to his successor. As former Obama communications director turned MSNBC host Jen Psaki put it in September 2018, “A buffoon could have kept the recovery going, and in fact one has so far.”

But that buffoon and his successor ran out of luck when the COVID pandemic struck in the spring of 2020. The rapidly spreading contagion and the host of public health “shutdowns” to slow caused a brief, though sharp recession, in the second quarter, with GDP nosediving by 30% and unemployment surging to almost 15%. But trillions of dollars in federal stimulus spending started under Trump and significantly expanded by President Biden (in programs like the American Rescue Plan, the CHIPS Act, the bipartisan infrastructure bill, and the Inflation Reduction Act) jump-started the strong recovery of the American recovery from COVID.

But the COVID pandemic did not on January 20, 2021.The death toll remained high throughout 2021, Biden’s first year in the White House. (Thanks to the COVID denialism and anti-vaccine posture of Trump and his MAGA allies, the U.S. COVID death rate far exceeded most other leading economies. And by late 2022, the death rate was higher for white Americans than black.) The labor market disruptions, the supply chain breakdowns and global inflation—all made worse the Russian war in Ukraine—fueled most of the painful price increases into mid-2023. The result is both the Trump-Pence and the Biden-Harris administrations each governed during COVID and non-COVID periods. And as Steven Rattner detailed in July, the team of President Biden and Vice President Harris did better during each.

For starters, consider economic growth. During his first White House run, Donald Trump repeatedly promised to average four percent annual economic growth. This pledge was obviously problematic at the time, as no President had hit the four percent annual target since Democrats Lyndon Johnson and John F. Kennedy achieved that growth in the 1960’s. Nevertheless, Trump in September 2016 announced, “I believe it's time to establish a national goal of reaching four percent economic growth.” Days later, he proclaimed he would aim even higher:

“We are looking at a 3% but we think it could be 5 [percent] or even 6 [percent]. We are going to have growth that will be tremendous.”

It didn’t work out that way. Trump didn’t achieve four percent GDP in any year he was in office. Overall, under his guidance the American economy over four years grew by only 8.6%. As of the end of the second quarter 2024, real gross domestic product (GDP) during the Biden-Harris administration expanded to $23.2 trillion, a 10.3% increase.

Biden’s superior performance was even more marked when it comes to job creation. Trump didn’t merely promise to “create 25 million new jobs over the next 10 years.” As a candidate and as President-elect, Donald Trump guaranteed, “I will be the greatest jobs producer that God ever created.” As it turned out, not so much. Presiding over a loss of 2.7 million jobs during his term according to the Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) website, Donald Trump turned in the worst jobs record since Herbert Hoover. Four years after the Wall Street Journal reported “Bush On Jobs: The Worst Track Record On Record,” the Washington Post explained that “Trump will have the worst jobs record in modern U.S. history. It’s not just the pandemic.”

In stark contrast, Joe Biden produced the greatest one-term jobs gain of any modern President. Total employment exploded to 159.1 million from just 142.9 million—a stunning gain of 16.2 million—when Trump ambled out of the Oval Office for the last time. Importantly, 90% of those jobs (14.5 million) were added in the private sector, dispelling GOP mythology about “government jobs.” (The lion’s share of the new jobs were also full-time, and not part-time.) As a result, the unemployment rate plunged from 6.4% in Trump’s last month in office to just 4.1% in September 2024. Despite Trump’s recent claims to the contrary (“Their unemployment rate is through the roof. Wait ‘til you hear the numbers.”), unemployment for black Americans dropped to 5.7% now from Trump’s January 2021 level of 9.3%. Meanwhile, the jobless rates for white (5.7% to 3.6%) and Hispanic Americans (8.5% to 5.1%) came down as well.

The health of the labor market under the Biden-Harris administration is also reflected in the size of the total workforce and its participation rates. The total labor force grew to 168.7 million workers last month, up 8.7 million from Donald Trump’s last days in office. Significantly, millions of workers who had given up looking for jobs reentered the labor pool. The overall labor force participation rate grew to 62.7%, 83.8% among “prime-age workers” from 25 to 54. Only among older workers—those ages 55 to 64—has the labor participation rate not yet returned to its pre-COVID pandemic levels.

To be sure, Americans’ real incomes took a serious hit during the pandemic and the first year of the war in Ukraine. High unemployment rates continued into 2021, and global inflation due to the COVID and war-ravaged supply chains ate into wages until early 2023. Nevertheless, real median household income is higher now ($80,610 a year) than in Trump’s last month in Washington ($79,560). And while the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that growth in real wages was greater in January 2021 than last month, the steep decline in inflation since early 2023 has resulted in almost two years of monthly real wage gains.

The strength of the Biden-Harris economy is reflected in other measures, too. All three leading stock markets have recently hit record highs, with Dow Jones up 39.8% during Biden’ tenure, while the NASDAQ and S&P 500 mushroomed by 35.7% and 53.8%, respectively. While gas prices ($3.17 a gallon for all formulations as of October 14) have not yet returned to January 2021 levels ($2.34), fuel prices continue their global decline. Meanwhile, U.S, oil production hit a record high of 13.3 million barrels a month in December 2023. July’s figure of 13.2 million barrels a month topped Trump’s last month in office by over two million barrels.

And so it goes. In July 2015, Alan S. Blinder and Mark W. Watson from Woodrow Wilson School and Department of Economics at Princeton University published a revealing study about American Presidents and the performance of the American economy. As they summarized their findings:

An extensive and well-known body of scholarly research documents and explores the fact that macroeconomic performance is a strong predictor of U.S. presidential election outcomes. Scores of papers find that better performance boosts the vote of the incumbent’s party.¹ In stark contrast, economists have paid scant attention to predictive power running in the opposite direction: from election outcomes to subsequent macroeconomic performance. The answer, while hardly a secret, is not nearly as widely known as it should be.² The U.S. economy performs much better when a Democrat is president than when a Republican is. [Emphasis mine.]

This dynamic—that GDP, growth, job creation, income gains, stock market expansion and other measures of the U.S. economy almost always do better when a Democrat sits in the White House—isn’t entirely unknown. After all, I wrote about it repeatedly, including in the run-up to the 2012 election between Democrat Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney. But I was hardly alone. None other than Donald Trump himself made the same observation about the historical record back in 2004:

“I’ve been around for a long time and it just seems that the economy does better under the Democrats than the Republicans.”

Now, past performance may not be a guarantee of future results. But that past performance is clear: the American economy is much strong now under President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris than when Donald Trump and his nearly-hung and now-forgotten Veep Mike Pence left Washington on January 20, 2021.