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Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics, power and prejudices.

This year, 2024, is an election year in America, a presidential election year. And so we will be doing two podcasts a week, rather than our usual one,

because we want to and because we know you can't get enough Americano in your life.

I am delighted to be joined today by Patrick Rafini,

who is a pollster at Echelon Insights and the author of Party of the People

Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP.

Patrick, good to have you back on.

I'm curious about the economy and Joe Biden's poll numbers

because we had some more polls out over the weekend suggesting that Trump's lead is perhaps

growing overall. And this is on the back of some very, very good numbers for the American economy

earlier in the week. And the Biden administration

has been saying for a long time that the economy is going well, but people don't seem to feel it.

Now, I think we could say consumer sentiment seems to be picking up in the US. And certainly there's a bit

more optimism about the American economy more broadly.

And yet this is not translating into support for Biden. What do you think is going on there?

I think that what's happening is you've seen the rising consumer sentiment numbers, and you've

also seen rising ratings in terms of people's overall assessments of the U.S. economy are still quite negative,

but they've been rising. They're nowhere near where they were at the bottom. And now the bottom

was actually back in 2022. So they've been rising for quite a while. And yet Joe Biden really has

...