But, but, that's all well and good, but gas cost me less 5 years ago, and grocery prices were so much lower too! Plus, The Border!

I've said this from time to time, but voters don't just care about policies. They care about priorities.

One commentator I saw said that Democrats' weakness in the polls can be explained in three words:

Eggs cost more.

And there's perhaps some amount of truth to that. But I think that it's a little more.

Democrats are having a much harder time not just because "eggs cost more." It's because during the rise of inflation, Democrats didn't seem to care. The Biden Administration really wanted to get Build Back Better passed. That was their priority at the time. And acknowledging that inflation was rising, or prioritizing fighting inflation, would have hindered that effort. Because most mainstream economists would have advised that a multi-trillion bill at a time when unemployment had already dropped back below four percent would be inflationary. Especially since some part of the high inflation being experienced at that time was due to the prior big spending package from a year earlier:

vox.com - Biden american rescue plan inflation

So they minimized inflation concerns (Team Transitory!). There was no blue ribbon panel on inflation, no Inflation Czar appointed, no "Whip Inflation Now!" retro campaign. Nothing to signal to the public that the Democrats were listening that people were upset about inflation. Certainly no "whole of government" effort to stop it. They renamed the bill to the "Inflation Reduction Act," but didn't change the substance of it in any material way.

It was one of the top priorities of Americans. The Democrats did not act as if it was one of their top priorities. The Democrats acted as though they weren't listening to what the voters were concerned about (well, except for Joe Manchin, and Hakeem Jeffries should send him a fruit basket or something). And so the Democrats lost the trust of the voters on the economy.

I think a similar dynamic played out on the border as well. Americans were consistently telling pollsters they were worried about the volume of unlawful crossers, but the Democrats never really made it a priority to do anything about it at the time. They came around later on, when the political costs were very apparent - but I think they already had lost the issue.

So it's not just that voters don't like Prices and The Border. They don't like that the Democrats didn't listen to the fact that voters were really upset about Prices and The Border.