Why did President Donald Trump beat VP Kamala Harris in the recent presidential campaign?
Everyone has their favorite reason: inflation, immigration, angry people wanting change, Fox news and right-wing media control, or voter suppression. However, if you asked the voters directly, the biggest reason voters gave was the economy. Many voters said they were angry about the economy and inflation. There were also Trump grievance voters who would complain about the economy, no matter what. But the truth is: that voters have little understanding about how the economy works. By modern standards, the US economy is performing at record levels.
So what’s really going on?
When pollsters ask about the economy, most people interpret the question in a more general way: “How are you doing?” They may not understand the economy but they know money. They know how they feel about their own personal financial situation. Many people report feeling financially pressed and economically insecure. They feel their own economic circumstances are getting worse. And so they answer that the economy is bad or not working for them.
VP Harris’s loss gives us a chance to talk about how the US economy has failed working people in the US. Working people, poor people, and Black people have not benefited from the growing economy for a long time, starting with the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Economic progress has stalled.
Trump ran and won on economic insecurity. People are worried and they are not getting ahead. Voters believe President Trump could better handle the economy and improve their lives. However, Trump, who has no long-term program to help working people, focused that anger on social wedge issues like immigration, and got elected. He has no plan to address economic insecurity.
Economists have a term for economic insecurity: Precarity. Precarity or precariousness represents how you feel about your financial position. How secure or vulnerable you are? What would happen if you lost your job or had a surprise medical bill?
Economic insecurity boils down to how positively you view your long-term financial prospects. Can I afford college or a car repair? Will my kids do better than me? Will I have a comfortable retirement? How you view the economy really means, how are you and your family doing financially?
“How’s your money situation? Are you doing okay financially ?”
Voters consistently ranked the economy as the number one issue. But many could not explain in detail what they meant or any specific program that would make their lives better. Instead, the “economy” has come to represent their personal view or perception of their life circumstance and economic future. Voters feel the pain of their lives getting worse and express it through the economy survey questions.
We all know of friends, family members, or colleagues who have had difficulties. So let me share some real facts: one of my relatives is homeless in a West Coast state, where she grew up, and lives in a shelter. We have people close to us that are affected. We have experienced hardship ourselves or know someone who has. But as an economics blog, we have to take a step back and ask what does it all mean?
We want to look at some alternative measures of the economy and how they affect regular people. We want to look at economic insecurity.
The business press is full of reports explaining how well the US national economy is doing (macro-level). But this high-level, “average” analysis hides many problems: stagnant wages, increased rental costs and higher healthcare costs.
Every month we get the unemployment report or the employment situation report from the BLS. Every quater, we get Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and corporate profits, but we rarely get hard economic data on working and poor people. The media does not cover economic issues that the average person pays attention to. They do a poor job of explaining why economic issues are important.
After the loss in the election, everyone is suddenly interested in all the angry, poor, and working people who voted for Trump. This all is a bunch of “too little, too late.” Trump has the right message and Kamala didn’t.
Key Indicators of how people are doing economically
As an economics blog devoted to Black people, we wanted to do a data round-up of all the sources of data on Black people, middle-class people, and poor people.
We want to compile all of the statistics in one place for easy reference. It is also important to distinguish between economic indicators and public opinion surveys.
We will look at what we feel are the five most important measures of economic insecurity such as emergency savings and we will also detail 36 other measures, both short-term and long-term, of economic insecurity.
Note: President Trump narrowly won the presidential popular vote by 1.6%: 49.8% to VP Harris’s vote of 48.4%.
The best measures of Economic Insecurity
In the next series of blog post, we are going to look at the best measures of economic insecurity. What should we look for and how do we measure it? How has it changed over time? How can we quickly see what’s happening with working people’s economic conditions?
We have divided the indicators into three sections: Key indicators, short-term indicators and longer term, broader measures.
But no matter how you look at it, US workers have not been doing well.