Voter anger over economy boosts Trump in 2024, baffling Democrats

“It turns out voters really like dislike inflation,” said Brian Riedl, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a center-right think tank. “Ultimately, voters focused heavily on their economic dissatisfaction, and that was primarily the result of an inflation rate that was unacceptable to them. It’s hard for your party to hold the White House when the inflation rate hits 9 percent under your watch.”

Republicans have relentlessly hammered Biden and Harris over inflation, blaming the 2021 economic rescue plan approved by Democrats, and Trump turned higher prices into a core feature of his stump speech. However, virtually all rich nations were hit with far higher inflation amid a covid-induced shift in consumption patterns and Russia’s war in Ukraine, which disrupted global supply chains. Nonpartisan economic studies found that Biden’s $1.9 trillion rescue plan in 2021 exacerbated inflation – perhaps by 3 percentage points – but also powered the economy’s growth out of one of the worst downturns in decades. Incumbents worldwide – Britain, France, Japan and elsewhere – have been punished for price hikes.

The Biden administration has touted a wide range of metrics as evidence of its successful economic stewardship. The stock market has reached all-time highs. The United States is now growing faster than its pre-pandemic trend. Unemployment is at 4.1 percent and reached its lowest level in more than five decades under Biden. The country appears to have safely avoided a recession for the rest of this year, powering through persistently high interest rates that the Federal Reserve is poised to cut again this week. The administration’s investments in infrastructure, clean energy and semiconductors showed signs of success.

Liberal and some centrist economists have pointed to a mismatch they believed hurt Democrats: Voters may have seen wage gains since 2021 as the product of their individual efforts, while blaming higher prices on a wider social or government-caused failure. Both trends, however, were partially the product of the same larger forces on the economy. Many liberal economists have pointed to Fed research suggesting a large gap between voters’ positive perceptions of their personal financial circumstances and their negative perceptions of the country’s economic circumstances – a gap they say can only be explained by what they are being told on social media and in the press.

“People rate their own economic circumstances better than the country’s – and that’s because of what they’re being told by the media,” said Dean Baker, a White House economic ally and economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a center-left economic think tank. “You know my complaints about the media – I think the coverage has been invariably terrible.”

But more centrist and conservative economists have argued that voters had legitimate frustrations with the Biden economy, and that cheerleading its successes risked colliding with those frustrations. Even though inflation is lower now than it was in 2022, Census data found that median household income is now lower than it was in 2019, according to Jason Furman, a Harvard economist who worked in the Obama administration and has at times been critical of Biden’s response to price increases. Furman also pointed out that the poverty, mortgage and unemployment rates are also higher than they were before covid.

“Everything is moving in the right direction, but it’s not there yet,” Furman said. “People got into a very deep hole, and they’re not all the way out of it yet.”

In Wilmington, North Carolina, Amber Torres, 49, said she was faring better when Trump was president. Things were cheaper then, and early covid-related stimulus checks helped cover food and rent. These days, she pays $850 a month to sublet an apartment without running water.

“I like Trump because he keeps it real, and he’s closer to being like me than any other politician,” she said. “Plus, I’ve never seen a president give out money like that. That’s what we need right now, those checks.”

Trump voters interviewed in Missouri, Oklahoma and Arkansas frequently cited the rising cost of basic goods such as eggs – up to $3.80 a carton in September, up from $2 in August, 2023, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics – as driving their decision, but the rising cost of little luxuries that make life seem worth living rankled them, too.

Sally Harris, 77, a retired lab tech from Lee’s Summit, Missouri, said she was in Aldi the other day, and her favorite chocolate peanut butter cookies that were once 99 cents are now $2.09.

There’s no doubt, she said, that “costs are rising,” which leaves her struggling on her fixed income. She ultimately cast her vote for Trump because in her view he will be better for the economy, although, she said, choosing him seemed like “the lesser of two evils.”

Melissa Merritt, 45, in event sales, and John Merritt, 46, a bartender, of Lee’s Summit, were dealing with a one-two punch – both lost their jobs just days before they headed to the polls. John Merritt had worked at one of the eight Kansas City-area Applebee’s that closed overnight because their franchise group had filed for bankruptcy. The couple is also struggling with $30,000 in tax debt, Melissa Merritt said, leaving the couple in a state of “extreme financial distress.”

“During the whole Trump administration, we flourished,” Melissa Merritt said. “When Biden and Harris got into office, everything went downhill.”

Regardless of the cause, the exit polls provided substantial evidence that those voters weren’t the only ones frustrated.

For instance, roughly 70 percent of Hispanic voters nationally rated the economy as either “not so good” or “poor,” and roughly 40 percent said the economy was a top-tier issue. A slim majority of Hispanic voters supported Trump, according to exit polls. Hispanic voters who said the economy was their top issue preferred Trump by a roughly 2-to-1 margin over Harris, the exit polls showed.

Harris repeatedly emphasized she understood that the economy needed improvement, often promising to make lowering prices her top priority. She backed a populist plan to ban price gouging in food and grocery prices. She endorsed more technocratic ideas for expanding the housing supply in a bid to lower rents and home prices. She hammered Trump’s sweeping tariff plans as a “national sales tax.”

On Election Day, none of it appeared sufficient for voters concerned about their pocketbooks.

“It’s the reason why Harris lost: She never addressed inflation in a way that gave her credibility on other issues,” said Frank Luntz, a pollster. “She had every reason to beat him – he had 90 felonies; two impeachment convictions. And he still came back.”

Nathan Scott, an insurance agent in Columbus, Ohio, said he was shocked by the election’s outcome. Although high prices have curbed some of his family’s spending – he recently bought a used SUV instead of a new one, for example – he’s making far more money than ever. This year he’s on track to bring in about $300,000, triple what he earned in 2021.

“So many people are saying they’re worse off than they were, and I just don’t get it,” said Scott, who spoke on the condition that he be identified by his first and middle names because he fears losing business from Trump supporters. “Sure, are things more expensive than I want them to be? Absolutely. But objectively I’m making hundreds of thousands of dollars more than I did the last time Trump was president. I truly don’t understand how this is what people want.”