“It’s The Economy, Stupid!”
“It’s the economy, stupid,” said James Carville in 1992 when describing Bill Clinton’s winning economic message.
In 2024, Donald Trump was able to convince a small majority of Americans that he had a winning economic appeal, despite the Biden administration’s four-year recovery from the depths of the COVID-induced economic downturn in 2020 and 2021. What was Trump’s economic appeal, how did it shape the election, and how he has delivered in the last ten months?
Trump promised in his 2024 campaign that his economic plans would lead to growth in the economy, while Kamala Harris’s economic message was based more on decreasing income inequality among the lowest-paid segments in this country. The historic inflation rate was a major factor in the 2024 election – the price increases that had occurred in 2021 and 2022, even though price inflation in 2023 and 2024 was more moderate. Many voters preferred Trump because he was a businessman who supposedly understood how to make the economy grow.
Trump’s economic program fell into five categories:
- reducing inflation
- including reducing the prices of groceries
- making the 2017 tax cuts permanent
- providing tax relief to the middle class
- increasing tariffs to increase manufacturing jobs in the United States
By nearly a two-to-one margin, voters said in exit polls that the economy was worse than it had been four years earlier. One in four voters, including 41% of Black voters and 43% of Latino voters, said the economy was the primary reason for their vote. And Harris received 7.1 million fewer votes in 2020 than Biden received in 2020, particularly in major urban counties.
The economy is now failing for ordinary hard-working citizens. The percentage of long-term job seekers is now 26% of the total number of unemployed workers. Delinquency rates for automobile loans are at a 15-year high. The delinquency rates for office loans are at a rate approaching the peak in 2008, just before the Great Recession. The most recent official inflation rate was at 3.0%, close to the annual high. Many analysts expect that tariff rates will result in further increases in inflation, as exporters and importers reach a limit in the amount of price increases they can absorb.
The opposite is true for the upper reaches of the economy. The stock market is at close to a record high. Sales of luxury goods – principally eyewear, fashion, leather goods, watches and jewelry – in this country will increase by 3.6% this year. The sales of luxury homes increased by 15.2% compared to one year ago.
This is already affecting Trump’s approval numbers. According to realclearpolitics.com, a conservative-leaning website, Trump is now 13.4% under water in voter appraisals of his economic performance, and 25.3% under water concerning inflation. Those polls show that 61.0% of voters disapprove and only 35.7% approve of his handling of inflation. That trend is persistent over time and has gotten worse in recent months, with some recent polls showing 36% and even 42% disapproval numbers about inflation.
These economic and poll trends do not include voter disapproval of Trump’s anti-worker initiatives, from his attempts to reverse trends in decreasing inequality under the rubric of anti-DEI initiatives, to his efforts to deport millions of immigrants, to his efforts to roll back Department of Labor regulations, to his attacks on the federal workforce.
The mid-term elections are one year away. If Trump’s economic- and inflation-based approval ratings continue to decline, Democrats could regain control of the U.S. House and possibly the Senate – if they have a positive message for America’s workers. Democrats cannot just assume that an anti-Trump message will be enough.
Whether their critique is the one made by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson in “Abundance,” or some other approach, Democrats need to overcome voters’ overall belief that Republicans are better than Democrats in growing the economy or in combatting income and wealth inequality. Otherwise, Democratic voters will stay home in 2026, just as they did in 2024, and Trump will win by default.
