If the economy’s doing great, why are voters so worried? Don’t ask Joe Biden.

If you’ve been struggling to pay your heating bill, priced out of buying a home, or often find yourself making the decision between filling up your gas tank or feeding your family, President Joe Biden has a message for you: The economy is doing great.

“America has the best economy in the world,” Biden bragged this month. Of course, it does. America has been the world’s leading superpower since about 1898, when William McKinley was president.

That’s hardly the point. Since taking office in January 2021, Biden has overseen an economy that is causing pain, not prosperity, for millions of Americans.

Almost half of Pennsylvania voters feel they are now worse off financially than a year ago, according to a recent Franklin and Marshall College poll. Of those voters who see themselves as worse off financially, the top reasons cited are inflation and the increased cost of living.

Clearly, inflation is having an impact.

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A March poll by the Economist/YouGov shows more voters are now citing inflation and the cost of living as their top issue (22%), rather than jobs and the economy (7%).

This doesn’t seem to faze Biden and his economic apologists. In his State of the Union address this year, the president promised inflation would come down, and “the landing is and will be soft.”

Yes, inflation is coming down. However, lower inflation does not mean lower prices — it just means prices are rising at a slower pace. That doesn’t mean much when you’re standing at a gas pump making a life decision about whether to fill up, buy groceries, or get your prescription.

Administration officials are dismissive of this economic pain.

“It does take consumers a while to kind of see data consistently, and see prices that have actually come down, to feel really confident about them,” said Lael Brainard, director of the National Economic Council.

This is economic doublespeak for “The Excel spreadsheet looks great. Why aren’t you people getting it?” It’s akin to saying the Phillies were a better team on paper and should have walloped the Arizona Diamondbacks on their way to the World Series last season. Instead, Arizona’s sitting there with a pennant while the Phanatic is left crunching the numbers.

“Statisticians can tell any story they want, but President Biden’s policies are bankrupting the middle class,” said Andy Meehan, a financial adviser in Bucks County who ran as a Republican for U.S. Congress in 2020.

For his high-net-worth clients, the economy is good, he told me, but not for blue-collar and middle-class workers like his neighbors. “Joe Biden says gas is down 20% this year, right, but it was up by more than 50% the year before. That decrease doesn’t matter, working people are losing money.”

That financial pressure cuts across populations.

A Tufts University poll this month showed that Gen Z and millennial voters (ages 18 to 35) are freaking out about the economy, putting it as their top concern. An Axios Vibes survey by the Harris Poll shows that 60% of Hispanics are “more stressed out about their household budgets today than they were before the pandemic.”

And women, another key voting block for Biden, feel they are economically falling behind. According to the Axios poll, women were far less likely than men to describe themselves as getting ahead financially.

The White House’s response? Take credit for a good economy and gaslight people on its economic pain.

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Even some Democrats are outraged by the disconnect here. Former Obama administration senior adviser David Axelrod said that as people consider whether they are ready to “fire Biden” in November, the administration just “put out another photo op with the Bidenomics sign next to [Biden] … it’s just unbelievable to me.”

Biden’s rosy economic messaging and the reality of their daily struggles is also unbelievable to many Pennsylvanians. Just look at last week’s primary: In a notable act of political protest, hundreds of thousands of people — 287,083 to be precise — voted for someone other than Donald Trump and Biden, the two parties’ anointed presidential nominees.

In Philly parlance, it was a big ole political middle finger to current and former presidents who have been bedeviling the American voter for more than a decade. Still, voters are stuck with a binary choice in November, and according to the Franklin and Marshall poll, Pennsylvanians felt Trump was better able to handle the economy than Biden by almost 10 points (48%-39%).

The issues voters have with these two presidential candidates are legion, but it’s unwise to overcomplicate what is a simple calculation. To paraphrase Bill Clinton strategist James Carville: It’s still the economy, and voters aren’t stupid.

The Biden administration ignores people’s pain at its own peril.