Democrats have a powerful story of economic success that should resonate with the average American worker and can counter all prospective Republican wage/ job creation claims for the 2024 campaign. This narrative emerges from a detailed analysis of the respective economic gains during Democratic versus Republican administrations over the last 40 years, and the distribution of those gains. Democratic administrations have vastly outperformed Republicans over the past 40 years both in generating real wage gains, and in lifting private-sector job creation for everyday working Americans. This finding is summarized in the charts in this memorandum. They are based upon standard, widely respected, and widely used Bureau of the Census and Department of Labor public data, and are easily replicable.

The Republican Party’s policies in recent decades have been founded on its belief that a ‘trickle-down’ approach to the country’s economy will yield larger economic gains for all Americans. However, Republican administrations have not coupled their relentless pursuit of this approach with financial incentives for investors, employers, and managers to spread those gains to average workers. Instead, Republicans have been content for the gains from growth to stay mainly at the top, stalling wage growth for most American workers.

By contrast, Democratic policies have aggressively advanced a wide range of incentives to spread the gains from economic growth to boost wages for average workers. Democratic policies do so in a variety of ways, many of which Republicans fervently oppose. They include promoting increases in the minimum wage, bolstering unions and interpreting labor regulations more favorably for workers, expanding job training and apprenticeship programs, creating major job-creating infrastructure projects, and stiffening anti-trust regulations within labor markets, among many others.

Although the nation’s average overall economy grew at nearly the same percentage annually from 1980 through January 2020, the gains from that growth were distributed far more broadly to average working Americans when Democrats held office than when Republicans did. Thus, the real median wage for working Americans* rose fully 10 times more during the 16 years when Democrats were in the presidency than it did during the entire 23 years when Republicans were in office, 14.6 times greater per year (see Chart 1 below). President Biden has sustained and increased the positive trend of this distribution pattern, as we show below.

Said simply, very little real wage growth for average working Americans occurred under Republicans. The prolonged wage stagnation that working Americans have endured for four decades took place during years when Republicans—and not Democrats—controlled the presidency.

The numbers highlight the economic consequences of this truth for most Americans. If Republican administrations had delivered the same average annual performance during the 23 years when they were in office from 1980-2019 that Democratic administrations did during their 16 years, the wage earned by the average working American, the median wage, would have been $9,900 higher annually during 2019 and $14,800 for a typical working family with 1½ workers.**

(For the specific wage difference between the parties that faced workers within ten individual swing and near-swing states, see Table 1 below).

Many Americans at or below the median wage say they would be unable today to put together $400 to meet an emergency. Adding $9,900 annually in pay—more than $800 each month—would have transformed the economic circumstances of nearly all these Americans.

In addition, private-sector job creation per year under Democrats was more than twice as great as when Republicans were in office, 2.1 million jobs per year versus 950,000 for Republicans (see Chart 2 below).

President Biden has continued and enhanced the historic Democratic success in distributing gains more broadly. In his first two years in office, from 2020-2022, the real wage increase for the average working American was more than half of the Republican administrations’ total real wage increase during their entire cumulative 23 years in office, not to mention being $1,300 more than during Donald Trump’s first two years in office (see Chart 3, next page). Under Biden, the economy has already operated to counteract fully 40% of the wage differential for lower-paid everyday workers that took place under Republicans over the past four decades.

Similarly, the Biden economy outperformed Republicans’ average annual private-sector job creation, 5 million jobs to 1 million jobs, and more than doubled Trump’s job-creation performance during his first two years (see Chart 4, next page). Over the past 12 months, the Biden economy expanded by 2.7 million jobs, better than Trump’s performance in any single year. We’ve now soared more than 2 million jobs beyond the Congressional Budget Office’s January 2020 pre-pandemic estimate for today.

Unfortunately, despite this economic reality, substantial pluralities of Americans continue to view Republicans as better for them on the economy. Democrats have the facts to dispel this belief. Those facts reveal Democrats have made the economic lives of working Americans much better than have the Republicans and that creating incentives and requirements for companies to spread the gains from growth, as Democrats have strongly promoted and Republicans have generally resisted, is essential to the economy delivering real wage growth to everyday working Americans and to generating increased private-sector jobs. It’s a story 40 years in the making.