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Eh? Do American voters really have no attention span, they forget about inflation that happened a couple years ago?
Biden and Kamala should've just done proper economic management and they could easily win. Don't talk about building/repairing infrastructure, build it or at least seem to be building it. Lower the price of energy and make people feel richer. Make them be richer.
Don't let in millions of people through the Southern Border either.
But they couldn't do that because the structure of US governance means the govt struggles to do anything correctly, plus the nature of Democratic policy and staffers means they can't focus on easy wins or implement them if it means compromising on climate, DEI, mass immigration and so on... DEI is how Kamala got into power at all.
Voters can have a long memory for things that actually happened, and a shorter memory for campaign messages. Conventional wisdom among both professional politicians and academic political scientists is that voters look back 1-2 years, but not a full term, when evaluating incumbents' record on the economy (and, presumably, other real issues like crime).
One interesting and afaik formerly unstudied possibility that emerged from the 2024 election is that voter anger about inflation can persist a lot longer than voter anger about other bad economic outcomes (in particular, temporary high unemployment) because "prices are higher than I think they should be" is something voters feel in the present even if the inflation has stopped.
Part of the point Cummings was making about the Brexit campaign is that the nature of paid online advertising allows you to back-load your campaign into the last week in a way which was impossible with a campaign involving a lot of activist effort, and difficult with paid MSM advertising because the media is already saturated with political ads the week before the election.
Indeed, more studies are necessary to explore scenarios like "people see with their own eyes that they can now afford less than they used to", which flabbergasted the academic political scientists. Why aren't they satisfied with the rate of decline of their purchasing power slowing down? It is difficult to tell, but probably has something to do with right-wing propaganda.
I mean that the claim "voters respond to price levels, not to inflation rates" is a claim that could be empirically tested using the standard methods of political science research, and has not been.
The voters who swung hardest against Biden in 2024 were working class non-white voters - roughly the group who were most likely to see their incomes keep up with Bidenflation. Historically, voters were pissed off with inflation even when wages were rising faster than prices economy-wide, which is why Nixon felt the need to promise to "Whip Inflation Now". The "voters punish incumbents for inflation" effect appears to be distinct from the "voters punish incumbents for falling living standards" effect. Conventional wisdom among both politicians and political scientists (backed by empirical research which you may or may not believe) is that the electorate as a whole evaluates "falling living standards" based on the first derivative over the 1-2 years before the election. (Voters who personally suffer a large drop in living standards will sometimes turn against the party that was in government at the time for the rest of their lives - one of the advantages Reform have over the Conservatives in the UK is that voters in the North of England don't blame them for Thatcher). It is therefore a surprise if voters evaluate "inflation" based on the price level.
Reaction to inflation is less "a carton of eggs continues to be 0.1% of the monthly food budget tacked to X% of the total budget tacked to my current income, and so the increase in price is irrelevant to my increased income" and more "holy shit eggs $10 a carton and not $2.50." Much of that was bird flu culling, not inflation, so prices have come back down... but some of it was inflation, so they're still higher than a lot of people locked onto as "the reasonable price of eggs." And since the culling was happening at the same time as the inflation, it gets conflated in the brain for a lot of people.
Orange juice shrinkflation annoys me more, though, and I would suspect that plays a role too. "I'm visibly getting less for my money" is more instinctive than a budget calculation.
When the fuck did Oreo packages get so small?
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I don't know if this is a wise way to investigate hypotheses in political science. Even in psychology, medicine, and biology, where metrics are much easier to measure, and conditions are much more controlled, study replication rates are dismal. If you want to measure something this aggregated with no controls, godspeed.
What do you think you're proving with that?
Let's take an analogy, like the ol' race vs crime that comes up here. When you look for things like "crime by income and race" you get things like this that, for some mysterious reason, talk about the correlations of wage gaps and crime, and it's not until you go to advanced internet racists that you see a straightforward presentation of the relevant data. Same thing is happening with your proposed relationship with Bidenflation and increasing wages. And this is before you start taking into account things like "there was more than one issue that swung the election.
Politicians communicate to voters is not the same way that economists communicate with each other. You can't bring up an old campaign slogan to prove that ackshully the voters were angry about about (the wrong) line go up. Again, you'd have to show that the people he was targeting did actually see the wage increase, and even if they did, that does absolutely nothing to address the issue we're discussing. Is it really so hard to believe that "I can't afford as much stuff as I used to" would be a compelling electoral issue?
I will again point out that you have absolutely no controls in this attempt to measure correlations.
If, and only if, you are having Managerialism injected directly into your veins. Like how in Jesus' name do you expect people to forget "I used to be able to afford a lot more with the same salary > 2 years ago"?
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Avoiding inflation was structurally impossible when Biden entered office, at best he could’ve kicked the can down the road a bit, but not enough to save his regime. He still would’ve gone senile, had a migrant crisis, etc.
He didn't have to have the migrant crisis; he could have done what Trump has done. Nor did he need to fight for Build Back Better.
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I don't know how well-supported this is (and it's obviously impossible to conduct double blind laboratory studies on election phenomena) but one of the things Dominic Cummings advocated for with the Brexit campaign was to save their money for a massive ad blitz in the week leading up to the vote. The logic is that the effect of an ad mostly wears off after a few days. You only need people to agree with you on the day of the election, so the best time to buy ads is right before.
They won, and AFAICT the British people really did support Brexit on election day and not a moment longer, so it's hard to argue with the results.
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