Biden’s agenda had a big impact. Will history give him credit?
LIBERTY, N.C. - A small town that voted overwhelmingly for President-elect Donald Trump may not seem like an ideal place for President Joe Biden to hold up as a jewel of his economic legacy. But as the president prepares to leave office, the White House is looking to communities like this former textile town outside Greensboro to validate the “Bidenomics” agenda that voters soundly rejected in November.
In a Dec. 10 speech on the economy, Biden praised a $13.9 billion electric vehicle plant that Toyota is building here - all but daring Trump to follow through on his threats to undo a Biden agenda that has sparked similar projects across the country, especially in Republican-leaning areas. “Do we continue to grow the economy from the middle out and the bottom up?” Biden demanded. “ … Or do we move backward?”
As construction cranes rise above Liberty and dozens of other Trump-friendly towns, the White House is grappling with the reality that the trillions injected into the economy by Biden’s policies did little to boost his party. With Trump set to return to the White House after campaigning against Biden’s economy - and the inflation that many Americans have come to associate with it - the president’s economic legacy, and that of his party, is in the hands of those who will only see benefits years or decades after he leaves office.
“Sometimes you do the right thing economically when you are president and you get electoral credit for it, and sometimes you don’t,” said Jared Bernstein, chair of the Council of Economic Advisers and one of Biden’s top advisers on the economy. “That’s the reality.”
By any account, Biden’s economic policies have spurred one of the largest industrial programs in a generation, a torrent of public and private investments designed to revitalize the nation’s transportation, semiconductor, clean energy, manufacturing, technology and pharmaceutical sectors. At the same time, Democrats’ struggles in the 2024 elections underscore the extent to which those investments failed to register with the public against the backdrop of high prices and a general sense of unease.
Trump has vowed to dismantle Biden’s agenda and reverse many of its most sweeping components. But for some White House officials, the fact that the public does not associate many of Biden’s policies with Biden himself is a potential silver lining. Rather than try to undo Biden’s agenda, these aides hope, Trump will simply take credit for any jobs and investment that materialize during his term.
Still, the outcome is tinged with bitterness for Biden’s allies, who say the benefits of his economic agenda are beyond dispute.
Drivers will see thousands of new electric vehicle charging stations in years to come. All lead pipes in American homes are slated to be removed, ending a major health hazard. Millions of households already have lower internet costs under Biden’s Affordable Connectivity Program. Medicare beneficiaries have seen their insulin costs drop to $35 a month; the costs of other drugs under Medicare are also set to fall.
That’s on top of the factories, roads, bridges and jobs that Biden’s legislation has spurred. Some of the results will take years to materialize by their very nature; in other cases, glitches and bureaucratic hang-ups have pushed certain rollouts far beyond Election Day.
In Liberty, where pro-Trump signs dot lawns and a Toyota water tower looms on the skyline, the political paradox of Biden’s industrial policy is on full display. Toyota, a prime beneficiary of subsidies under Biden’s signature climate law, is hiring thousands of people to staff a 7 million square-foot “mega site” for manufacturing electric vehicle batteries.
The project, the largest-ever commitment to electric vehicles in the United States by a foreign automaker, is one of several boosted by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act - a signature Biden bill that passed with no Republican votes, faced harsh criticism from Trump and devoted hundreds of billions of dollars to clean energy manufacturing.
Toyota, which announced a $1.3 billion investment for the Liberty mega site in 2021, increased that investment by $2.5 billion days after Biden signed the law, which provides tax credits for manufacturers and purchasers of electric vehicles. It announced another $8 billion expansion in 2023.
The well-paying jobs have already begun reviving an area that Forbes Magazine branded one of the nation’s “fastest-dying” communities in 2008 after textile and furniture manufacturing moved overseas, said Randolph County Commission Chair Darrell Frye.
But few voters in Liberty, population 2,700, connect the new sense of opportunity to Biden. “I have not seen anybody mentioning any credit or either way, good or bad, due to Washington,” said Shah Ardalan, president of Randolph Community College, which has trained more than 800 people to work at the new Toyota plant in Liberty.
That is endlessly frustrating to Biden’s supporters, who argue that the president has actually helped small-town and rural communities, while the GOP is content to stoke their grievances. Toyota, which announced the Liberty megasite in 2021, is set to begin producing batteries in March. The project, described by company officials as “121 football fields of battery production,” is slated to add more than 5,000 jobs to the region.
A spokesperson for Toyota declined to comment for this story.
Frye, a Republican who watched a series of manufacturers close their doors in the area before Toyota and a few other companies began massive new projects during the Biden administration, dismissed the notion that federal policies had any impact. “Just bluntly, Mr. Biden or Mr. Trump had absolutely nothing to do with that plant coming here,” he said in an interview.
Randolph County is one of several places that shifted toward Trump in November despite receiving large new manufacturing projects touted by the White House. More than 78 percent of voters in the county backed Trump, up about 1 percentage point from four years earlier. Trump’s vote share also increased from 2020 in places like Bryan County, Georgia, where Hyundai is investing $7.6 billion to build electric vehicles, and Superior, Wisconsin, where $1 billion in funding from Biden’s infrastructure bill is helping replace a long-decaying bridge.
Overall, about three-quarters of the clean-energy manufacturing investments announced since Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act have been in Republican-controlled districts, according to policy and data research firm Atlas Public Policy. As many of the new plants being built require millions of square feet, companies have sought out rural areas with affordable land and business-friendly policies.
As a result, they have often settled on GOP-friendly areas where support for Trump has grown during Biden’s term.
Republicans lambaste “Bidenomics” as a failure, citing the inflation that surged after Biden pushed through a $1.9 trillion stimulus bill and the slow rollout of initiatives like rural broadband and EV charging stations. Polls suggest that soaring gas and food prices have affected Americans’ views of Biden’s economy far more than the rapid job growth, rising stock market and manufacturing boom that also unfolded.
Biden himself has at times expressed frustration with the pace of progress in implementing his legislative agenda. In the aftermath of the election, administration officials have rushed to disburse funds from legislation including the $52 billion Chips and Science Act and the $1.2 trillion infrastructure package.
Biden and his aides have suggested that their audience now is less today’s voters than tomorrow’s historians. If Biden’s industrial initiatives proceed apace, they could reshape much of the nation’s economic landscape and rebuild American supply chains, a prospect his allies hope will change the way his one-term presidency is remembered.
In the telling of Biden’s aides, the second half of this decade will be marked by a flood of electric vehicles rolling off American manufacturing lines, a surge of semiconductor technology powering artificial intelligence from U.S. companies, and state-of-the-art transportation networks with pristine airports and renovated highways.
If the president’s policies are allowed to take hold, Bernstein said, Biden “will be remembered for transformative investments that led to an American comeback that he played a critical role in generating.”
But Trump’s victory means that Biden may also be remembered for his struggles to sell even the popular parts of his economic agenda to voters in real time.
Biden’s stumbles while touting his record during a disastrous June debate against Trump - “we finally beat Medicare,” the president said at one point - ultimately forced him to end his reelection bid in July. (Biden seemingly meant that he had overcome drug makers’ longtime resistance to letting Medicare negotiate drug prices.)
But long before the debate, Biden’s attempts to highlight statistics showing that the economy was on strong footing - with more than 16 million jobs created, steady growth, record small-business creation and historically low unemployment - often fell flat with Americans dealing with inflated prices and the aftermath of a global pandemic.
In the end, the term “Bidenomics” was used more often as a cudgel by the president’s foes than as a banner by his allies. And as voters chose Trump over Vice President Kamala Harris in November, they listed the economy as their top motivation.
In recent weeks, Biden and his aides have cast his presidency as a calculated case of economic delayed gratification - though such an argument seemed tailored to account for the election results. “We knew in the beginning this wasn’t going to [come to] fruition in my administration,” Biden said in his Dec. 10 speech. “It takes time to get this done. But watch two, four, six, eight, 10 years from now.”
But the fate of Biden’s legacy will rest in part in the hands of his chief rival. Trump has already vowed to claw back unspent funds from the Inflation Reduction Act, which he slammed during a news conference Tuesday as the “green new scam.” Subsidies like the law’s electric-vehicle tax credit could be on the chopping block as Trump seeks to find revenue to offset his promised tax cuts.
“All this money - trillions of dollars - it’s like throwing it right out the window what they’re doing, and they’re trying to spend so much now,” Trump told reporters Tuesday. “They’re just taking money and giving it to anybody that wants it for any project at all, if it’s certified under the green new scam. And they don’t work. And it’s too expensive.”
While Republican lawmakers have voted dozens of times to overturn parts of the Inflation Reduction Act, some GOP officials are now urging caution from the incoming Trump White House.
Biden regularly needles Republicans who opposed his agenda but took credit for the money it delivered to their districts, and he suggests that will make it harder for Trump to end the programs. “He’s going to have a lot of red-state senators who were opposed to all of it, and didn’t vote for it, deciding it’s very much in their interests to build the facilities,” Biden said recently.
That may apply here in Liberty. “If it’s working and providing a need and a service, don’t mess with it,” Frye said he would tell Trump if given the chance to discuss the electric-vehicle subsidies and the Toyota plant. Any attempt to undermine the economic opportunity created by the Toyota megasite would likely meet bipartisan resistance from lawmakers in North Carolina, Frye added.
Away from the politics, the plant’s arrival has been transformative for people living in central North Carolina who no longer must leave their community to find a good job, said Beth Pitonzo, senior vice president of Guilford Technical Community College in neighboring Guilford County. Pitonzo, whose son was hired to work at Toyota as an engineer, has been recruiting students to earn associate degrees as part of Toyota’s on-the-job training program.
Devante Culbertson, one of those trainees, said he plans to work for Toyota for years after receiving his degree in Mechatronics Engineering Technology. “I wanted to find something that had great culture, great pay, and also continuous education and training,” he said.
Monica Molina Palao and Josalyn Hernandez Rodriguez, who both recently began the training program after graduating from high school, said they were drawn by the opportunity to start their careers at a large company in their own community.
“It’s very exciting that I don’t have to worry about moving somewhere else or finding a new place to settle in,” Palao said.
None of the Toyota employees or trainees interviewed for this story credited Biden.
Still, White House officials are hoping their stories - and particularly the experiences of people who voted for Trump - will, at a minimum, insulate the president’s agenda once Trump takes office.
White House chief economist Lael Brainard predicted that future presidents will aim to build on rather than abandon Biden’s economic programs.
“If that happens, 10, 20 years from now you will see a fundamentally more productive America,” she said, “with innovation and manufacturing thriving in factory towns all across the country, particularly in the heartland, that have been left behind over the past two decades.”
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Jeff Stein contributed to this report.
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