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this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2024
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In some polls I've seen before the election, the top item for people -- this is in general, not a specific demographic -- who said that they would vote for Trump was the economy.
But you can break that down more than "economy". "Economy" can mean a lot of things. How the stock market is doing. Unemployment. Inflation.
And when people were asked about that, in the polling data I saw, prices were the top concern.
I commented well before the election and pointed out that inflation is extremely unpopular with publics. In a study -- and this is an old one, but apparently a well known one -- that looked at the public in Germany, the US, and Brazil, the public -- and particularly in Germany and the US -- said that they'd rather have a recession than inflation. That is significant, because in contrast, the mainstream economic position is that it's preferable for a country to have inflation than a recession.
I also listened to some interviews of people voting Trump, and a lot of people said "I was better-off under Trump than Biden".
My guess is that you can probably chalk a considerable amount of this up to:
Not understanding that inflationary policies weren't simply adopted in isolation, but to avoid a recession resulting from COVID-19.
Not knowing that it's normally considered that inflationary policy is preferable to a recession.
Not knowing that the Trump administration also adopted inflationary policy.
I also remember reading some stuff going well back saying that in general, people tend to credit the President pretty directly for whatever the present state of the economy is. If there are issues, they put it at the feet of the President, and if it's going well, they put it at the feet of the President...even if the President didn't have much to do with it (or if it was actually policies from a prior administration that took time to have effect). So to some extent, the politics of being the President always, not just in a situation with a fair bit of inflation as we had stemming from COVID-19, have to do with that voter attribution to the President of the short-term state of the economy.
I'd also add that political organizations know this and will -- not always honestly -- aim to exacerbate that take.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2024/sep/08/donald-trump/fact-checking-donald-trump-on-the-scale-and-causes/
So if one wants to avoid the executive being unreasonably penalized for -- or taking credit for -- the economic state of affairs, then there's probably a hard communication problem that hasn't been solved for decades and decades that needs to happen.
I think it's a lot like tech support. End users don't care about the details. They just want to hear: I see your problem, and here's how quickly I'm going to fix it.
There are lots of people out there who think that inflation means how much prices have risen in some recent period of their memory. If something that cost $3 in 2018 is now $6 and you tell them inflation is at 2%, they will be completely bewildered as to how this can be true. There are also tons of people who don’t understand why deflation is bad or undesirable. If you can’t tell who is lying to you because you have no idea how the economy works, you’re just going to choose the one you remember as being better.