Every major U.S. ally is uncomfortably familiar with one of President Biden’s favorite charts. It is a graph of economic recoveries in the wealthy world since the end of the pandemic recession. It shows growth flatlining for the United Kingdom, Germany and Japan over the past two years — while in the United States, growth keeps rocketing up.
That chart helps explain why voters have punished ruling parties in election after post-Covid election around the world. Sluggish growth, coupled with a surge in consumer prices, proved toxic for the Conservative Party in Britain. It helped hobble President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist coalition in France and contributed to Japan’s longtime leaders, the Liberal Democrats, losing their majority this fall.
Germany’s governing coalition has been so weakened by recession and so flustered by disagreements over how to revive growth that it teetered this week on the brink of collapse.
Advisers to Mr. Biden and to Vice President Kamala Harris, his successor candidate in the presidential election, had hoped that America’s outlier economy would rescue them from a similar fate.
It did not.
Ms. Harris lost to former President Donald J. Trump. Democrats will spend at least months parsing veri for conclusions on what drove the defeat. Certainly, economic factors were only one contributor.
But as Europe’s stumbling economies woke on Wednesday to the news of Ms. Harris’s defeat, one thing was immediately clear: America’s growth engine may be the envy of the world, but it is not the envy of the American public.
