When US voters re-elected former president Donald Trump, the result appeared to contradict the theory that democratic electorates punish governments for failure and reward them for success.
That model had certainly seemed to work in 2020, when Joe Biden won the election. Biden’s inheritance from Trump included a failure to tackle the pandemic effectively. Only 4% of Americans were vaccinated although vaccines were only starting to be distributed as he left office. As Trump looked for re-election in 2020, he was also handling a struggling economy with 10 million unemployed (6.4%) and millions more having left the workforce.
Federal debt was at its highest level since 1945, and the country had a budget deficit of US$2.3 trillion (£1.8 trillion). Murders were surging in major cities and there were more illegal crossings of the Mexican border than before Trump took office and pledged to stop these.
Trump’s poor record during his first term in the White House certainly helps explain his eventual defeat in 2020. In contrast, over Biden’s four years the US economy added 15.7 million jobs and the unemployment rate fell to 4.1% (it went as high as 14.8% during the height of the pandemic). But the Democrats were not rewarded for that.
This top-line success, however, masked some more mixed results. Most pertinently, inflation surged in Biden’s first year. Consumer prices rose over his term by 19%, with gasoline prices up by 46%. This resulted in a drop in real weekly earnings for the average American of 2.3%.
Americans worried about inflation and also misperceived it as much higher than it........