No. of Recommendations: 1
Do voters "hate" inflation, per se? I would say not, so long as the money keeps flowing in to them to more than make up for the price rises.
You'd think so, but Chait's argument is that this is mistaken. That Biden gambled on this being true, and it turned out to be incorrect.
It appears that people think that high inflation means something is going wrong. Maybe their own incomes are rising, too - but that just means that they're managing to outmaneuver a bad economic environment. In a "good" economy, they'd still be getting that extra income - and inflation wouldn't be rising as much.
For any level of real income growth, there just may be an "animal spirits" type preference for the low inflation/low income growth scenario than the high inflation/high income growth version. Which makes some sense, actually - because the latter scenario makes it harder to protect against negative events (a job loss) through savings; if the treadmill is running at a higher speed, it hurts more if you fall off.
Trump is not popular. But Biden is really not popular. Less popular than Trump. Voters really disliked Biden as a candidate in 2024 - and that wasn't because he was a brown-skinned female. Democrats held onto the idea that they disliked him because he was old, or because of the hit he took with the Afghanistan withdrawal, which is when his popularity tanked, so that switching him out would help. Voters certainly told pollsters they didn't like Biden's age, so that's certainly correct. But they also very much told pollsters they didn't like where the economy was. So they didn't want more of the same. They're not digging into macroeconomics of the two parties' proposals - they used the heuristic of what happened during each party's last term running the government. Trump imposed tariffs and harassed immigrants, and inflation didn't go up; Biden pushed through a lot of big spending bills, and inflation went up a lot. So they're choosing the former and not the latter.
