Quote (Goomshill @ Jun 5 2024 08:32am)
People vote on the state of the country in the immediate recent time surrounding an election. They don't vote on responsibility or causality or arguments over who dealt it. We're getting just to the edge of close enough to be able to say this will be the biggest issue. Presidents have lived and died by their economies whatever little control they had over it. Trump's booming economy would have won him reelection handily if Covid hadn't blindsided him, and Biden's stagflation may cost him the throne as it did Carter. Economists can invent lies bout transitory inflation or corrections and pundits can accurately but irrelevantly point out the QE money hose sprayed under the past four presidents. All that matters for Biden is the bottom line and boy is it rock bottom
Yeah agree.
On the smorgasbord of issues people usually will say they care about, nothing matters more than issues that are actually felt on a personal level. The top 20% will vote based on ideological things but large swaths of the remaining 80% will project their current realities as key issues. The mom that does the weekly shopping and has seen 30-40% rise in their bill is going to rank that way higher relative to nebulous issues of climate change, racism, whatever. She won't care if this inflation is because something that happened 4 years ago, it's the here and now who's responsible.
I think Biden's problem is he can potentially lose a significant amount of the lower-middle class of Latinos and Blacks because this is such a felt issue. I wouldn't be surprised if Trump not only wins the popular vote but does so historically well with the Latino segment.