Trump’s Win Shows Limits of Biden’s Industrial Policy

When President Biden addressed the nation this week after a gutting election, his reflections on his economic legacy offered a glimpse into why Democrats were resoundingly defeated.

The efforts by the Biden-Harris administration to reshape American manufacturing were the most ambitious economic plans in a generation, but most voters had yet to see the fruits of those policies.

“We have legislation we passed that’s only now just really kicking in,” Mr. Biden said, explaining that a “vast majority” of the benefits from federal investments that his administration made would be felt over the next decade.

Legislation enacted by the Biden-Harris administration was designed to pump hundreds of billions of dollars into the United States economy to develop domestic clean energy and semiconductor sectors. The investments were likened to a modern-day New Deal that would make American supply chains less reliant on foreign adversaries while creating thousands of jobs, including for workers without a college degree.

But anger over more immediate and tangible economic issues — including rapid inflation and high mortgage rates — dwarfed optimism about factories that had yet to be built. That reality helped topple Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign and showed the limits of industrial policy as a winning political strategy.

In the days since Mr. Trump’s victory, current and former Biden administration officials have been grappling both privately and publicly with why their economic strategy did not prove to be more popular. They have comforted themselves with the fact that inflation has led to the defeat of incumbent leaders around the world, although most of those governments were also struggling with weak economies, whereas growth in the United States remains robust.