There’s a pretty simple way to explain most of what happened in the 2024 presidential election.
Joe Biden was elected in 2020 as voters rejected the incumbent president, Donald Trump. But thanks
in large part to price surges that followed the coronavirus pandemic, Biden’s approval rating plunged. He was so poorly positioned for reelection that he abandoned his bid, with his vice president, Kamala Harris, earning the nomination instead. It wasn’t enough, and the electorate
swung from the left back to the right, in Trump’s direction. He won the narrowest popular-vote victory in the past two decades.
The pattern among Republicans, though, was much sharper. During the Trump administration, Republicans were much more likely to say their economic positions had improved — and under Biden, far more likely to say it had worsened. Since 2022, more than half of Republicans have said their economic situations have declined over the past year.
But suddenly, over the last month, that’s shifted. You can see it at the very far right of the graph above, that downward shift in “worse off financially” and the upward shift in “about the same.” Among Democrats, views of how they fare now relative to a year ago haven’t changed much in the past month. Among Republicans, though, there’s been a 16-point drop in the percentage saying that they were doing worse a year ago.
Is that because something happened in early November 2023 that changed the economic status of Republicans? Ha ha, no. It is unquestionably because, in early November 2024, Donald Trump won the election.
Inheritance is good work when you can get it.
