“It’s the economy, stupid,” James Carville, lead strategist for former President Bill Clinton (1992), said. But what does that even mean now? Two competing economic narratives defined the 2024 election, and they, without a doubt, led to last week’s result. In recent months, President Joe Biden has tried to emphasize America’s global economic standing, repeating that “America has the best economy in the world,” highlighting Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth that outpaced other developed nations.
At the same time, President-elect Donald Trump painted an apocalyptic vision, describing “a nation whose economy is collapsing into a cesspool of ruin, whose supply chain is broken, whose stores are not stocked.” Despite Mark Zandi, the chief economist at economic research site Moody’s, declaring the U.S. economy to be “picture perfect,” Trump’s claims, though hyperbolic, weren’t entirely without merit; household prices and inflation were up, and whether it’s true or not, a majority of Americans polled by both I&I/TIPP and Morning Consult-Politico cited that Americans believed Biden’s policies were either “responsible” or “very responsible” for prices rising. Voters’ daily experience of inflated prices and economic uncertainty proved more politically salient than macroeconomic achievements. The economy was the most important issue for voters, and the Democratic Party’s failure to connect and message statistical strength and voters’ lived experience would ultimately shape the election’s outcome.
There has not always been a divergence between economic metrics and public sentiment. It began during the pandemic and proved decisive in the 2024 presidential election, which revealed a fundamental shift in how Americans process and experience economic information. GDP is a fantastic metric for accurately tracking national production, but it cannot capture household-level economic reality. Trump defeated Vice President Kamala Harris despite her being tied to and part of a Biden administration that objectively economically improved by most traditional indicators. Any political consultant in the Democratic Party or Washington, D.C., at large has got to realize that there is a profound disconnect between statistical reality and the lived experience of Americans these past few years.
ABC News/538 demonstrates this phenomenon well through the data used in their model of consumer sentiment. Prior to 2020, actual consumer sentiment was largely tracked with modeled predictions based on and tracked with traditional economic indicators like GDP, but also inflation, interest rates, wages and housing costs. However, the COVID-19 pandemic created a rupture in this relationship — one that really never fully healed. Even as unemployment dropped, wages rose and inflation cooled throughout 2024, public perception remained stubbornly detached from these metrics, to the detriment of Harris and the Democrats.
This persistent gap between traditional economic measurements and voters’ expressed experience is captured starkly in the divergence between the Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index, which showed 8% lower approval than 538’s consumer sentiment model. This reflects a deeper transformation in how the American collective psyche views the economy. The pandemic didn’t just disrupt supply chains and labor markets; it fractured the very framework through which Americans interpret their economic data, passively or not. Where once consumer sentiment tracked predictably with these fundamental economic measures, we should interpret this sustained rupture as suggesting that the traditional symbolic order of GDP growth, “job numbers,” and stock market performance, all “meaning good,” no longer carries the same meaning or authority it once did to voters.
Consider the paradox. By conventional measurements, the Biden-Harris administration presided over a remarkable economic recovery. The United States’ GDP grew 2.5% in 2023, according to the IMF, significantly outpacing other developed economies also dealing with post-COVID inflation, while March 2024 saw private sector job growth of 184,000, the fastest since July 2023. Though inflation had fallen from its 2022 peaks, recent months showed concerning upticks that FED Chair Jerome Powell noted might be “more than just a bump.” Yet despite these objective economic achievements, the gap between modeled and actual consumer sentiment remained stark, suggesting these traditional metrics had lost their predictive resonance with voters’ lived experiences. As Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) noted in his post-election op-ed in the Boston Globe, voters “want to know why the food industry enjoys record-breaking profits, while they can’t afford their grocery bills.”
The election results suggest that Americans en masse have developed a new framework for economic well-being that prioritizes security and stability over growth and potential. This shift reveals the limitations of conventional metrics like GDP, which measure production but ignore the distribution of economic security and the psychological toll of uncertainty. The Biden-Harris administration’s focus on traditional economic achievements, while substantively significant, failed to address this deeper transformation in how Americans experience and evaluate their economic circumstances.
The Trump campaign and Republican opposition to the Biden administration successfully exploited this gap and “Bidenflation” throughout the election cycle, focusing less on challenging the administration’s economic data and more on validating voters’ economic anxiety, causing Democrats to lose their working-class majority for the first time in decades. As Jimmy Williams Jr., president of the Painters Union, observed, “The Democratic Party has continued to fail to prioritize a strong, working-class message that addresses issues that really matter to workers. The party did not make a positive case for why workers should vote for them, only that they were not Donald Trump.” The Trump team understood and seized on the fact that in post-pandemic America, economic messaging directed at voters’ experiences with the economy carried more political weight than good-looking statistics.
This reality demands a more nuanced approach to both economic policy and political communication. While continuing to pursue positive economic indicators, this is a messaging problem for the Democratic Party; its leaders must address the psychological break/dimensions of its country’s economic well-being if it wants to succeed in the next election cycle. The gap between perception and reality shown in consumer sentiment data isn’t just a temporary anomaly — for now, it’s the new normal of American economic life and American politics.
Andrew McDonald, FCRH ’26, is a history and political science major from Sacramento, Calif.
