I think it's because a) prices are cumulatively up 20% under Biden, 2) most Americans have no experience in their lifetimes of inflation at these levels, & 3) people don't understand inflation. They expect Trump to bring prices back down to pre-pandemic prices as @crampell.bsky.social has reported.
Plausible! I agree on all three of these, although overall I'm on Team Pandemic Put Everyone in a Sour Mood with the inflation spike interpreted through that.
(Which is speculating, but as far as I can tell all anyone has is speculating so far).
The only comparable inflation spike as far as I know is the postwar one, which crushed Dems in 1946. But in that case Truman recovered once the spike ended.
...although 1944-1948 was a bigger Dem slump than 2020-2024. (I don't think we have consumer sentiment for 1948? Too lazy to look).
Don't think we can talk about this w/out mentioning right wing propaganda machine. Fox doesn't do nuance. The Youtubers, Tik Tokers, Influencers that swing voters (non-college whites and hispanics) listen to talk about this stuff without nuance (or basic understanding) constantly tying Biden to it.
I think it’s also important to recognize the particular stuff with high prices. Housing costs in many places are crippling (with lots of homeless) and food prices are extremely high. And of course income inequality is an issue. These are things in people’s faces every day.
1) Prices never do that. This is a totally new, fabricated yardstick we/the media never talked about before, even in the 1970s
2) Americans are more worried about inflation than Germans (data coming soon) despite inflation coming down faster & real income actually declining there
Humans have 4 other coronaviruses that present as the common cold, and undoubtedly some point in history they were far more lethal. But they can't be too lethal or else they won't be able to spread readily. This is never going away.
What is your definition of a pandemic? COVID is still rampant, but the danger of the virus seems to have been traded for transmission. People are still getting sick, but it's much less life threatening as it was due to many factors.
It isn't any less life threatening to folks with conditions such as psychiatric illnesses, immune disorders, anyone undergoing any kind of infusion or chemotherapy, etc etc. Also, is that your only criterion for danger? Do you not care about brain damage or cardiovascular disease risk?
The reason expecting prices to go down is « irrational » is because one of the biggest components of prices is wages for labor. If prices go down, the main way companies deal with reduce revenue is either cutting wages or cutting labor. Deflation would require mass layoffs like at pandemic start
The question a political scientist would ask is something like - why have voter expectations changed so much from previous elections?
Covid seems like a major difference. Did WFH and online classes alter people’s behaviors and news gathering. Podcasts by MMA stars instead of journalists?
Before 2021 it'd been 30 years since Americans had experienced inflation of over 4% annually. I think how inflation works & why deflation isn't desirable has fallen out of the collective understanding. And news no longer tries to explain or inform on serious issues.
Prices could come down, if we had a competitive marketplace for the goods that experienced inflation. Think of how well gas prices move to supply/demand, because there's competition on every corner in some places. Supply/demand is broken in oligopoly sectors like food production & distribution.
Yup. Unprecedented Press+Social media misinformation campaign. If you proved Trump blackmailed them in 2021 to dump the economy relentlessly through 2024 election, the coverage would make total sense.
(Spoiler: He didn’t blackmail, they just did it willingly)
Mark if you lay the price increases of financing, housing, cars, etc against real income gains maybe it would be more apparent. It is significantly more expensive to live now than it used to be. In the range of last 20 years.
I think it’s the distribution of that economic goodness that’s the problem. Corporate profits have been great but that wealth has gone upwards to shareholders not employees, creating the perception (and reality) of economic hardship for so many
This too. And another thing that falls into the "Biden/Harris didn't fix it" perceptual bin. The ever increasing inequality meant that any broad scale, macro economic gains never hit working families and households. So Biden and every Dem is saying the economy is great but it was only for the top 1%
instead cost of credit is a sneaky under-discussed component here esp compared to the extraordinarily cheap pre-covid environment. spikes in both cost of financing and the purchase price of financed products like cars & houses which have an outsize psychological impact and it feels way worse now
100%, I have a killer mortgage rate which is neat but if I ever want to access my equity it's insanely expensive. Not to mention here in E Idaho houses are still double the price they should be. I have friends making $80k as a household that can't even afford a 1000 sq ft house here.
What I do to get is a lot of the cost spikes happened while Trump was president. Housing prices went through the roof in his term. Why do people think he's going to fix it?!?
There's also the issue of companies not wanting to lower prices again, which got kelloggs for example kicked out of German supermarkets (30% price increase is insane).
In case I got the terms wrong again, I'm fully on OPs side on this because I get where he's coming from.
Yes this is part of where messaging and assigning blame accurately comes in.
I do think dems tried to do this and then when inflation went down it turned into simply telling people it was down which was not effective bc prices were still high
All Trump needs to do is keep on the same course, and the memories of past prices will fade. Even the slightly higher inflation from deficit spending and tariffs will be fine.
Also, the Biden administration did NO messaging on the economy. Our inflation was lower than the rest of the world. Trump would've been yelling over his helicopter every day about how eggs cost $40 in France, and $30 in Mexico and they were really only expensive in states that didn't vote for him
What they don't understand is that we were in recovery mode. Things just don't happen over night. Now with Drumpfy coming back in everything's on the rise again.
I hope this discussion is taking into consideration the artificial jacking-up of prices a la disaster capitalism. Most corps are hoping people will begrudgingly get used to it, even as people struggled to make rent and eat BEFORE they did this.
How much of a factor is the sudden change of tune by Murdoch, Sinclair, etc? Did perception change because they went much further than in the past? I heard the "me and my family are doing great, but overall it's a mess" story way too often.
It takes years for people to overcome the feeling of economic insecurity. People remembered 70s insecurity when they demanded competent economic administration for the next couple of decades (through Clinton). Bush Jr. failed at it, so 2007/08 banking crisis anxiety overhang, and now, the pandemic.
I'm wondering about that "expected" curve, and what data are comprised in that. And surveys? A global once/hundred-year pandemic is unique to anything anyone has experienced in our lifetimes. Economic anxiety was probably as high as during the 1930s, with similar lagging effects.
This is low-info voters exposed to a mature MAGA media operation hitting from all angles (TV/blogs/podcasts/social media/youtube/radio/local TV/ newspapers) 24/7/365, with weaksauce democratic media pushback.
It wont change till the left rolls up it's sleeves and puts money behind counter-efforts.
It was deliberate. The oligarchs that own the Zombie Fourth Estate saw their opportunity and took it. The complicit, self-satisfied "journalist" zombies who hate being talked down to by liberals that point out their perfidy and avarice were easy to convince their time of vengeance was at hand.
Is there a chart like this which tracks consumer sentiment according to household income decile? (Would also be interested if there's one which tracks sentiment by % income spent on housing.)
It does seem that chart would be really useful in showing whether the real culprit is inequality as many people seem to expect. Like the overall numbers are up but how is that in different brackets? A small number of *very* happy wealthy people wouldn't offset the bad vibes of everyone else.
Simple, how well people think economy is doing is now, like everything else, politically polarized. When it’s Trump democrats think is bad, and vice versa under Biden.
(1) R’s inhabit a media environment that amplified economic problems and downplayed good news. (2) Core inflation excludes food prices — i.e., the inflated prices consumers are fixated on and feel the most. (3) Short-run inflation led folks to more acutely feel longstanding cost of living issues.
Yes (1) is the main answer; my research is on this; (3) is part of it but we don’t know how to measure that, so we’re calling it “inflation”; (2), yes, but gas prices are also not in core, back to 2011-14 levels ($~2 <2022), & everyone used to claim this was the price that mattered most politically.
@mcopelov.bsky.social , something else I'm hearing is that interest rates are not accounted for by measures of inflation. Are you taking that into account as well?
Oh, I missed that about gas prices. That does call into question the core inflation measurement explanation. It seems the simplest (hybrid?) theory would be that if there is anything objectively bad — eg food prices — conservative media can make that the sole determinant of R economic sentiment.
Part of it, I hypothesize, is that income rises lagged inflation, so many people's spending ate into their savings. That amplifies a feeling of things being precarious (legacy of covid + gig economy etc.). (Of course the recovery isn't spread evenly but that's nothing new.)
I think the perception of inflation (which seems to mean "price level" in many folks' minds) is the meaning of this explanation. Also the absurd notion that Trump is somehow a successful businessman.
The economy can be the strongest in the world, numbers going up in all sorts of fun ways...it's still massively dysfunctional, inequitable, and punitive to working people, & every time a downturn breaches our psychological stasis, merely returning to the previous dysfunction doesn't mend the breach.
I think the key takeaway regarding the economy as a whole and inflation in particular is that Harris a woman and too many Americans balked at having a woman for POTUS.
Perhaps had those in my industry done a better job explaining reality instead of just "listening" to voters without confronting ignorance...A girl can dream.
It’s the brainwashing by rightwing media. It was easy when eggs remained expensive due to the bird flu. Beef is outrageous, but I believe that’s gouging by the very few meat packers - because they nearly have a monopoly.
This is what's so frustrating to me. Once trump convinces his people he's solved inflation by emphasizing the actual numbers here, they'll hail him as their savior (yet again).
How can we undo that with a willfully ignorant populace incapable of critical thought?
I don't know where I saw it on here, but there's a chart showing the partisan divide on economic sentiment. Republican confidence levels have hovered around 10% ever since Biden took over, no matter what the realities. The right has embraced never admitting to anything good from a Dem.
Pet unfounded conspiracy theory: prices of necessary goods suddenly plummet in the next 6-12 months, now that the "inflation" was successful in achieving its goal
If we're talking to the people as a whole, why wouldn't they? You're broke, you vote for change. 4 others vote to stay the course because they're doing as well or better than 4 years ago. People were not voting according to their personal situation.
The explanation: people's information diet primed them to believe the economy was bad. Any Biden economy, including one with low inflation but higher unemployment and lower wages, would have been similarly coded as bad. The root cause is the lies that are being injected into people's brains.
Wasn't there also a huge divergence between people's positive assessment of their economic situation and the negative opinion of the economy in general?
It's simple. 75% of Americans aren't middle class anymore. Our incomes are eaten by monopolies: overpriced but terrible housing, health care, autos and suburban sprawl cellphones, ISPs, digital platforms, education. Everyday, we drown in a tidal wave of plutocratic grift.
Yep, and what’s saddening is that the Trump regime will be working every day for the next four years to embolden those monopolies. Things will worsen fast.
Republicans and right-wing media relentlessly slammed the economy under Biden. It seeped in everywhere. Other media feared being accused of Democratic cheerleading. Dems with a Dem president do less partisan cheerleading than R with R president.
It was left, center, & right. Online leftists harped on the economy b/c they wanted Biden to drop out. The right-wing media machine did what it always does & the centrist legacy media had 9 times more stories about recession than about economic recovery, but there's no recession.
I work in a job where I have to pay close attention to economic news, and I 100% agree that 3+ years of mainstream news headlines warning about a recession made a lot of people think we were actually in a recession even though we never wear. The norms of news media are failing us.
There has got to be a media analysis somewhere that tracks the way economics gets reported as compared to the interests of the managerial and trader classes. “Gonna be a recession” was the drumbeat before 2020 in my recollection (I never understood why) and that’s the crowd who started it afair.
And now that we are clearly headed for disaster if he’s able to enact his plans, I can’t find a good article. Do we hide money in cash in a hole somewhere? Emigrate?
There were really bad signs that there was going to be a recession with widespread layoffs (see inverted yield curve). It was because of stimulus and good policy that we avoided. But no one ever gets credit for something *not* happening.
I work in public health so I can say with confidence that new medications that treat 100,000 patients *after* they get sick get ten times the attention as preventative policy that prevents 1,000,000 from getting sick in the first place
I noticed that even the headlines used in the Trump ads hitting Harris on the economy were "Worries about economy persist" and not "No one can afford to eat"
I bet 70%. Even Dems believed it and said they were voting human rights over economy. 😵💫 And even liberal biased journalists just constantly repeated the belief but not the reality. 😭
The people in charge of calling recessions have revised what metrics actually count multiple times, and then revised their reported numbers into their truer and less impressive forms reliably every few months once ppl were on to other things, so idk if this is ultimately too useful for any argument
There were definitely individual states that went through smaller recessions in the past four years, but they tended to be short term. Arguments can be made the feeling of recession can be partially chalked up to a K-shaped recovery, but data doesn’t reeeally bear that out I think
That's the real side-by-side tracking we need to see: life as you're experiencing it vs life as it's being described to you by those who profit off your anger and anxiety.
I’m not sure they feared being accused of bias so much as the mainstream media likes Donald Trump and wanted him to win the election. That lens explains a lot more of their behavior than the fear of bias one
Been saying this. In MAGAland the unvaccinated have the most repeat COVID infections.COVID causes cognitive impairment. Many recover but it takes time.
I think maybe huge numbers of voters are 2 grade levels below where they used to be in the ability to reason & we should speak/write accordingly.
I think *part* of the explanation is that people hadn't experienced real inflation for so long that whole generations saw it as a unique sign of collapse, especially as it didn't come alongside an overheating economy. But clearly that isn't remotely the whole story.
The Big Lie for this election was inflation. Biden always fumbled this. Trump's superpower is repetition. Biden should over and over and over have said "if you think its bad here look at the rest of the world." Biden, who I love, is living proof of thedangers of a lack of presidential showmanship.
Anyone who thinks IS workers are doing great doesn’t have any friends, like I do, who have been unemployed for over a year, or now have to do more work because their team was downsized. 2023 was my worst year as a freelancer. Do any of these people ever log on to linked in? It’s a bloodbath.
(I’m dumb about the economy, but) is there any chance the leading indicators are…maybe outdated? cause it certainly *feels* tough out here. groceries are high, rent is high, and I just had my second layoff in a year (and I know SO many in a similar boat).
the 4% unemployment especially doesn’t compute with the super rough job market I’ve seen in my industries (tech/games/film). I know just tons of people out of work. but idk if that’s unique to those industries right now, or if there are others struggling. either way, that 4% number feels…off
not at all, I'm saying I don't even know if it's specific to those industries or not! all I know is, I see the number "4%", and then I look at the people around me, and it feels very very not that. so is it my feelings that are wrong? is it incomplete data? I'm just not sure
facts and figures are very useful, but if they're this far off from what people are feeling, I think the facts and figures at the very least need to be reexamined
All that the chart shows is that the economists' model was wrong. It was considering the wrong inputs and / or inappropriately weighting them. Stop sharing the bad graph.
Evictions, and the percent of adults who say they can’t afford food, are both above the pre-pandemic average in many areas as of mid-2024. Based on those data plus the qualitative research I’ve been doing, I feel like there’s something about family economic hardship that these metrics are missing.
Is that chart tracking middle class feelings (the sample makeup) versus actual economic impact (which was not realized in that segment of the population)? I haven’t checked this data but that’s where I’d look first for this type of perception/reality mismatch in my own research.
*Actual* inflation? Or the tortured third derivative gobbledygook that economists pretend means anything for poor people, like the price of flatscreens and international air travel, which conveniently excludes things like food, utilities, housing, etc?
And do they compare it to *actual* rent? Or just the laughably stupid "owner's equivalent rent", where they call the landline of a 90 year old homeowner & ask what they think their rent would be if they had to rent their own house (they don't know how much rent costs). Hint: it's the second.
Still not fast enough to make up for that growing rift. But plenty for pundits to beat us over the head with, when we make the mistake of pointing it all out in the first place.
I think housing might be the *biggest* part of it. Though we had high inflation, less and less of our income has been going to food over the years. Housing has only gone up.
That said, I don't think an electorate that doesn't understand how tariffs work was concerned about her housing plan details.
You keep moving the goalposts away from the reality that, on the balance, people who weren't already rich have felt escalating financial misery over the last 4 years under Biden.
With inflation came speculation about when / if a recession was going to happen. It never happened, but there was a lot of gloom talk about one being around the corner.
I think a lot of it has to do with the info environment. People glued to their screens being told econ news that bleeds & leads. Social media algorithms that reinforce bad stories. Half the country getting Fox "news" over and over.
I suspect that the explanation will involve non-economic variables derived from psychology, sociology & communications. I’m thinking of (a) audience filtering via cognitive frameworks and feedback loops reinforced by epistemic closure; and (b) propaganda via right wing media, social media, etc.
Come on. You're missing the point. They're saying "inflation" and "the economy" because they don't want to admit to themselves their problem is "poverty". They and you falsely believe in trickle-down economics. The problem is that wealth inequality has increased.
Many companies, even making good profits, aren't sharing the bounty with the people on the lower levels.
They rarely offer raises or give better benefits.
And there's no real incentives for those employees to change jobs: the average salary, in many sectors, is always kept low.
I wonder how the calculated "expected" value. Do you have the source? My largely-uninformed hunch is that inflation has a much bigger impact on impressions of the economy than people think. I wish the chart had gone back another decade so we could have seen that in the 70s.
Comments
(Which is speculating, but as far as I can tell all anyone has is speculating so far).
But if we do have a new price level theory of 🇺🇸 politics, or gas prices don't matter anymore, we really do want to know that.
...although 1944-1948 was a bigger Dem slump than 2020-2024. (I don't think we have consumer sentiment for 1948? Too lazy to look).
1) Prices never do that. This is a totally new, fabricated yardstick we/the media never talked about before, even in the 1970s
2) Americans are more worried about inflation than Germans (data coming soon) despite inflation coming down faster & real income actually declining there
https://www.alabamapublichealth.gov/covid19/coronavirus.html
Do you remember what people were like in the leaded gas era? That's coming back because of COVID.
And you're willing to just accept this??
It's in the endemic stage, not pandemic.
The purpose of a system is what it does.
Covid seems like a major difference. Did WFH and online classes alter people’s behaviors and news gathering. Podcasts by MMA stars instead of journalists?
(Spoiler: He didn’t blackmail, they just did it willingly)
(My previous trainer has bank notes from that time. It was insane looking at them.)
Anyways just saying prices don’t go down is not going to make people HAPPY about high prices that feel like they went up overnight
In case I got the terms wrong again, I'm fully on OPs side on this because I get where he's coming from.
I do think dems tried to do this and then when inflation went down it turned into simply telling people it was down which was not effective bc prices were still high
People don’t like high inflation and it influences their votes
That should be rather obvious
It wont change till the left rolls up it's sleeves and puts money behind counter-efforts.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2023/09/07/the-pandemic-has-broken-a-closely-followed-survey-of-sentiment
How can we undo that with a willfully ignorant populace incapable of critical thought?
I think maybe huge numbers of voters are 2 grade levels below where they used to be in the ability to reason & we should speak/write accordingly.
Groceries are high, but so are Kroger's profits. Rent is high, but property companies' profits are great.
Layoffs happen, but they cause stocks to rise.
So while folks are getting squeezed, businesses and econ people continue to be happy.
I don't wanna just "that's Capitalism for ya", but... The system is working as designed
If your argument is that the economy is more than GDP and the stock market, I completely agree, but it still doesn't mean the economy is bad.
I'm sorry Joe Biden couldn't produce a communist utopia for you in 4 years.
The fear of homelessness for so many people in the US right now is very real, and very visible in many neighborhoods like mine
Democrats recognize the problems of capitalism but fail to propose real solutions
https://www.vox.com/policy/369525/kamala-harris-housing-plan-corporate-landlords-homeownership
That said, I don't think an electorate that doesn't understand how tariffs work was concerned about her housing plan details.
Thank you
It's sad this is the state of the world...
That chart only proves that generative models are good at looking back.
We'll see a continued increase in "mobile housing."
They rarely offer raises or give better benefits.
And there's no real incentives for those employees to change jobs: the average salary, in many sectors, is always kept low.
https://www.audible.com/pd/B0BWK9HVRS?source_code=ASSORAP0511160006&share_location=library_overflow