What do you think about inflation? Like, really?
Most Americans think inflation is too high. But different people ponder inflation in different ways, and these quirks of human psychology could end up determining the outcome of this year’s presidential election.
Inflation is obviously a huge voter concern. The annual inflation rate peaked at 9% in 2022 and has steadily fallen back to 2.4%, which is close to normal. But prices are up a cumulative 20% since President Joe Biden took office, while incomes are up just 18.1%. During the Biden presidency, the typical worker has fallen slightly behind.
When Donald Trump was president, the total rise in prices in October of his fourth year was just 7.6%. Incomes during the same time frame rose 13.5%. So the typical worker was getting ahead. That’s the most concise way of explaining why some voters think the economy was better under Trump.
This matters now because voters have to decide whether they’d be better off during the next four years under Trump or under Vice President Kamala Harris, who by association carries the baggage of Biden’s inflation surge. And it could all turn on how small numbers of swing voters in seven swing states contemplate inflation.
Read more: Trump vs. Harris: 4 ways the next president could impact your bank accounts
Forecasting firm Oxford Economics runs an election model based on economic conditions in each state and patterns in past elections. A stable and growing economy, as we have now, is normally bullish for the incumbent party, in this case Kamala Harris’s Democrats. But inflation is a bent cog that jams the election machinery.
Oxford accounts for inflation in two ways. One is a “sticker-shock” model in which voters still feel stung by the cumulative increase in prices during the last three years. In this model, Trump wins six of the seven swing states — Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Nevada — while Harris only wins one, Michigan. Trump wins the presidency with 297 electoral votes.
The other model is based on the “misery index,” or the sum of the unemployment and inflation rates. The current misery index, 6.5, is low by historical standards because the current rates of inflation (2.4%) and unemployment (4.1%) are both in the green zone. The misery index has averaged 9.2 since 1948 and 8.3 since 2000. At the same point in Trump’s presidency, the misery index was 8. So by this measure, the Biden economy is doing slightly better than Trump’s one month before the election.
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