We’re still sifting through all the reasons that the 2024 presidential cycle turned out the way it did, but there’s clearly one factor that proved more potent than just about any other: costs. Groceries, housing, transport, recreation—everything that’s far more expensive now than it was before the pandemic recovery continued to weigh on the minds of voters of all demographics as they went to the polls. The roaring stock market, cooling inflation gauges, and positive employment metrics didn’t matter. The vibes of the so-called vibecession were very real.
It’s not hard to see why voters, time and time again, indicated that the economy was their top issue. U.S. consumers have experienced serious whiplash over the past four years, with a severe COVID recession in 2020 and inflation jumping to 5 percent the following year during a supply-chain crunch. By 2022, as the pandemic continued to ravage normal life in the U.S., Russia began its invasion of Ukraine, further pushing all-around inflation to about 8 percent—the highest level seen in the U.S. since 1981.
This has spurred a reckoning with the Biden administration’s aggressive post-COVID economic policy, which by all accounts engineered a remarkable comeback from pandemic-era hits to the economy. There were no further recessions, despite the panic from the financial press, and the labor market even came close to full employment. Yet the surge in prices was a worldwide phenomenon, with climate and war shocks adding to market woes everywhere. So much still felt unaffordable and out of reach for many Americans, even down to formerly cheap everyday goods. High interest rates, pumped up to slow down inflation, did not help with the massive debt burden that weighs on too many American families, from credit cards to mortgages to health care. Whatever the appropriate classification for this economic situation, inflation has become the catchall buzzword for a malaise as definitive and deadly now as it was early in Joe Biden’s term. To quote Isabella Weber, who helped mainstream the idea of corporate price hikes as an inflationary force: “Unemployment weakens governments. Inflation kills them.”
A quick glance back through American political history may seem to bear that out.
Nixon-era wartime inflation killed Gerald Ford post-Watergate, and “stagflation” killed his successor, Jimmy Carter. But then Ronald Reagan, who oversaw the “Volcker shock” from a Federal Reserve that escalated interest rates and threw the nation into recession in order to end high levels of inflation, was rewarded with a landslide reelection. Barack Obama’s purposefully slow-and-steady stimulus did not hurt his reelection bid in 2012, even as employment rates and general living standards continued to lag in the wake of the Great Recession.
Did Biden do the wrong thing on an electoral level, then, to pour billions of dollars into the U.S. economy through a corpus of massive legislation—the American Rescue Plan, an infrastructure bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS Act—and make sure people got back on their feet, instead of remaining jobless? Did a worldwide “cost-of-living crisis” trump the benefits of a working economy? Did none of it matter anyway, in light of the sheer disinformation that informed countless voters’ choices at the polls?
It’s complicated, according to Claudia Sahm, a former Federal Reserve economist, who told Slate that on paper the Biden administration made all the right moves to combat inflation. It’s dropped drastically over the past two years—it’s been about 2 percent through 2024—yet voters are still unhappy with the economy. However, there’s a silver lining: wage growth. Since September 2023, wage growth has outpaced inflation, while unemployment has also remained low. That’s a recipe for success.
“The good way to deal with inflation is to have people’s wages catch up,” Sahm explained. “We have seen inflation really start to slow down in the second half of 2023, and we had a strong labor market through much of the recovery.” Despite the Biden administration overseeing this positive trend, huge swaths of voters seemed to be looking for pre-pandemic prices that were last overseen by Donald Trump. According to Sahm, that’s unlikely to ever happen.
“A lot of people have this feeling, ‘Well, until prices go down, I’m not going to be happy.’ And you really want to be careful what you wish for,” Sahm said. “The only time prices go down in a broad way is during the Great Depression. We don’t want that.”
It comes down to consumer psychology: It takes time to get comfortable with higher price tags when you remember a time not so long ago when you didn’t have to pay so much for certain items or services. When this happens, Sahm notes that both people and the government point fingers for inflation. “The Fed blames them because they’re buying so much stuff and creating demand, but consumers want to blame someone so they’re going to blame either the government or businesses,” she said.
“Eviction rates, the number of families that report being unable to find food to eat, the number of children uninsured—all of that is higher than it was during most of Trump’s first term.”
Other analysts argue that even though Biden’s spending may have earned undue blame, he actually didn’t continue offering post-COVID economic boosts to consumers once the immediate emergency receded—and that’s what helped fuel the greater discontent. As Center for International Policy senior fellow Stephen Semler has noted, Biden ditched his campaign to permanently enshrine the COVID era’s popular and effective safety-net provisions (the child tax credit, eviction moratoria, widened SNAP eligibility, direct payments) and adopted a deficit-hawkish “fiscal responsibility” tone following the Ukraine invasion and its subsequent price shocks. Centrist Democrats like Joe Manchin also crippled efforts by Biden and his legislative allies to pour more support into child care and elder care programs, while increased taxes on wealthier Americans died on the vine. That doesn’t even get into the policy planks—like an increased minimum wage—that Dems were likewise unable to address, thanks in part to internal obstruction.
As such, a lot of helpful programs were either scrapped entirely or implemented and then suddenly pulled back in the middle of Biden’s term, with no explanation. That had an effect not measured by typical indicators, as John Jay College associate economics professor J.W. Mason told Slate. “Eviction rates, the number of families that report being unable to find food to eat, the number of children uninsured—all of that is higher than it was during most of Trump’s first term,” said Mason. “They’re not inflation, but it’s not surprising that people would combine those things in their minds.”
Indeed, it’s undeniable that youth poverty skyrocketed after the child tax credit lapsed, that spending on social programs declined throughout Biden’s term, and that (according to exit polls) lower-income earners who would have felt all this most acutely tended to break for Trump, while high-income earners backed Harris.
Another underrated indicator that sticks with Americans: higher interest, on debt and loans of all stripes. “For most of us, interest payments are part of the cost of living, but interest payments are not counted in the conventional inflation measures,” Mason explained. “In the 1970s, inflation included mortgage interest. They don’t calculate it that way anymore. If you calculate the CPI using a consistent definition, COVID inflation was actually about as high as ’70s inflation, although it did not go on for as long.”
While running her presidential campaign, Vice President Kamala Harris was unable to separate herself from Biden’s economic policies and all the negative consumer sentiment that came with them. Harris tried campaigning on a policy that would have given first-time homebuyers $25,000 in down-payment support while also incentivizing localities to build more affordable housing, but those proposals simply did not land with enough voters. She did suggest a crackdown on corporate price-gouging, but was mostly dissuaded from touting such corporate-oversight policy planks by her brother-in-law, who took leave from his job as an Uber executive to advise her campaign.
What else can explain the bad vibes? Misinformation, according to Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute and former chief economist at the Department of Labor under the Obama administration. She explained that when Americans were asked to reflect on their financial situation, on average people would say they were better off today than they were in 2019. But when asked the same question about the broader U.S. economy, without hesitation they would say no. “That gap, in my mind, that’s misinformation,” Shierholz told Slate. “People have perfect information over what’s going on in their own lives, but as far as what’s going on in the broader economy, they just take what they’re hearing.”
Misinformation is a pervasive issue that is rampant in the digital ecosystem, enabled by social media which seamlessly spread falsehoods instantly with few to no checks in place to counter false narratives. Take the current president-elect, who falsely claimed a “whistleblower” forced the Labor Department to put out a revised jobs number in August that counted about 818,000 fewer jobs than initially reported. This is simply untrue, as the Labor Department regularly puts out revised data once all quarterly employment numbers are collected. Nevertheless, Trump broadcast this lie to thousands of supporters in attendance at his rally, which many times were also broadcast across TV and cut into bite-sized clips for social media, usually unaccompanied by any form of fact-checking.
This is just a drop in the bucket compared to the onslaught of misinformation peddled by others, particularly within the conservative media circuit. Fox News, the most-watched cable news network for the past two decades, regularly broadcasts misleading and oftentimes blatantly false information. Earlier this year, Primetime host Jesse Watters called “the entire Biden administration a mirage” because “we’re paying more for everything, but they tell us inflation’s down.” Inflation is down, compared to 2022 and 2021, despite Watters attempting to accuse the Biden administration of deceiving Americans.
It’s also worth noting that Fox News was sued for peddling unchecked lies about voting machine company Dominion in the aftermath of the 2020 election. The network agreed to an eleventh-hour settlement for $787.5 million.
Combine this with the fact that inflation has always been a tricky issue for politicians to talk about since there aren’t a whole lot of institutional tools to control the price of goods, and it creates a recipe for disaster.
“I will bet my house that in February, a whole lot of Trump supporters will say, ‘Oh the economy is good now!’ ” Shierholz said (and indeed, it’s already happening). “That makes me wonder if there is a way that any president can really effectively communicate the message of how much inflation can be controlled internally and how much of it is just outside factors that are not under a White House’s control.”
If there’s one lesson to be learned here, it’s that no single development can be blamed for how voters felt about the Biden economy—and that they in turn found various things to blame from Biden’s government. Joe Biden did the right thing. But, if anything, he didn’t do enough: to keep his landmark welfare expansion going, pay attention to all the everyday concerns that also mattered, address those worries, or counter the easy misunderstanding and misinformation that rose up in that void.
Whatever “normal” was in the pre-pandemic world, we’re not going back to that.
