RECESSION AND THE 2024 CAMPAIGN. For more than two years now, Republicans have been predicting that President Joe Biden s big-spending policies will crash the U.S. economy into recession. It hasn t happened yet, although the country did experience two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth, a widely accepted definition of a recession, in the first and second quarters of 2022. But the economy climbed back into positive growth territory in the next quarter and has stayed there since.