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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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