The US Presidential Election Will Be a War of Competing Messages

President Joe Biden crosses his fingers when asked about a cease-fire in the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas.

President Joe Biden will visit Pennsylvania on Friday, and Donald Trump plans to hold a rally in Georgia on Saturday.Both men will be campaigning hard for eight months and have many other things to do. Biden is a president, and Trump is facing many criminal and civil lawsuits.

It promises to be a very personal fight. Biden spent much of his televised address on Thursday calling his predecessor an existential threat to American democracy.

Trump appeared to follow the speech in real time, posting dozens of comments on Truth Social, his social media platform, criticizing Biden's hairstyle, tone of voice, and policy positions.

Biden and his surrogates will do their best to stress the strong economic numbers of the past year and remind voters why Trump left office with the highest final disapproval rating of any president since Nixon.

Meanwhile, Trump will continue to hammer on the fact that consumer prices have increased by about 20% since Biden took office, to draw attention to the migration crisis at the southern border, to remind voters of Biden's age, and to say that global crises that emerged during Biden's term, Messaging challenges for both parties.

Jacob Neiheisel, an associate professor of political science at the University at Buffalo, said that both candidates would like the campaign to be about. I think they'll try to stick to that message as closely as they can, as world circumstances and evidence from their own internal polls will allow.

Neiheisel told VOA that both candidates will have a hard time imposing their preferred narrative on the election.

Trump wants this campaign to be about remembering the good days, the time before COVID when the economy was going crazy. I want you to associate that kind of thing with me,'" he said.

The issue is that he is an incumbent in many ways, and people remember not only those times, but also the COVID times. I think he's going to have a hard time with that message.

Biden, he said, appears to be placing a lot of faith in the idea that campaigning as a defender of democracy is a formula for winning the election.

"I don't know how mobilizing the defense of democracy is an issue," Neiheisel said. "I certainly think it is for high-information voters, but I'm not sure how well that resonates across the spectrum."

Talking about the economyBoth candidates are certain to spend much of the campaign trying to shape voters' views of the economy, a contest that played out very publicly Thursday night.

In Washington, Biden repeatedly returned to the theme of the country's economic progress during his tenure, calling it the "greatest comeback story never told."

"Folks, I inherited an economy that was on the brink," Biden said. "Now our economy is literally the envy of the world. Fifteen million new jobs in just three years — a record, a record. Unemployment at 50-year lows."

At the same time, Trump was active on social media, writing, "INFLATION UNDER BIDEN IS KILLING AMERICA!"

The former president followed up with several memes highlighting price increases that Americans have experienced over the past three years, including for gasoline, food, rent, mortgages and electricity.

Hard to break throughCaroline Fohlin, a professor of economics at Emory University and an expert on public perceptions of the economy, said it will be difficult for either Trump or Biden to influence voters' feelings about the economy through rhetoric alone.

"There will definitely be a massive amount of credit-taking and blame-shifting, even for things that are really not the result of anything either candidate did," she told VOA. But such claims are typically outweighed by kitchen-table economics.

"We can tell people all the numbers we want, and yet, what they make decisions on is mostly what's in front of them," Fohlin said. "So, people who are doing well have a positive view, people who are struggling have a negative view."

Fohlin said that Biden has been having difficulty persuading the American public to take a brighter view of the economy. Despite the fact that wages have been growing at a rate higher than that of inflation, she said, people still see bills that are significantly higher than they were in 2020, and associate the change with the president who was in office at the time.

However, she said, public perceptions could well improve before November and take some of the sting out of the former president's attacks.

"If we're still in declining inflation rates, and employment is still very good, and the stock market's still doing really well, it's very hard for Trump to tell a story that Biden has ruined the economy."