Why voters prioritize inflation over other issues

The unprecedented criminal trial of a former and possibly future president may have ended in the press with a bang. But in the polls, Donald Trump’s criminal conviction of 34 counts related to hush money payments has landed with a thud.

Despite a media-constructed narrative that President Joe Biden was on the cusp of a comeback, the general election needle barely moved throughout the Republican’s trial in Manhattan. In the first general election poll conducted entirely after a jury found Trump guilty of falsifying business records, Morning Consult found that the Democrat lost ground. Whereas Biden led Trump by 1 point in Morning Consult’s pre-verdict poll, Trump now leads Biden by 1 point.

The reason? Even though voters report the Manhattan case against Trump as one of the largest news stories of the year, no significant portion of the electorate seems to care about this Trump trial or any of Trump’s trials. Most of the electorate doesn’t seem to care about anything other than the economy, and even when it comes to the economy, voters mean they care about the worst inflationary crisis in 40 years more than anything else.

More than 3 in 5 voters polled by Pew said inflation is a “very big problem,” more than any other problem plaguing the country, with nearly half of all Democrats and 4 in 5 Republicans agreeing. Meanwhile, the majority of both halves of the electorate rate their financial situations “poor” or “only fair,” and half of all voters polled by Financial Times-Michigan Ross School of Business blamed Biden’s economic policies specifically for the state of the economy.

Biden’s deflections that unemployment remains low and the stock market is strong aren’t working, if only because they don’t reflect the reality of what is harming voters on a day-to-day basis. A CookPoliticalReport swing-state voters survey found that a 54% majority reported that cost of living is the best way to measure an economy’s strength, compared to just 13% who cited low unemployment and 6% who said the stock market.

In our aging society with a labor shortage that is fueling inflation, it is price instability that robs voters of the real values of their paychecks. They can tell every single time they compare the price of a gallon of gas or loaf of bread from the beginning of Biden’s presidency to now. (According to the consumer price index, their prices have increased by 48% and 29%, respectively.)

Nobody is angrier at this price instability than the generation most removed from the last time we saw inflation incinerate the value of paychecks. A Harvard Institute of Politics poll found that most voters aged 18 to 29 consider inflation our top pressing matter, with two-thirds of young black voters saying inflation is more important than healthcare, jobs, democracy, climate change, and the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.

Price instability, of course, is the x-factor that explains why Trump is polling better against Biden now than he ever has polled in a general election in either 2020 or 2016. Unlike in 2016, when the possibility of the Trump presidency was an unknown quantity, or in 2020, when a Biden presidency was still untested, we’ve now lived roughly three years in Trump’s America and three years in Biden’s. While the sheer scope of the invasion at the southern border and overseas conflagrations may be objectively worse metrics on Biden’s presidential scorecard, the soaring cost of, say, car insurance is a more salient issue for ordinary workers than the war in Ukraine or the Rio Grande homeless shelters overran with migrants.

As the Washington Examiner has illustrated countless times, inflation under Biden has resulted in a 5% decrease in the average weekly paycheck and a 19% increase in overall prices to date.

In no issue does Trump hold a larger lead over Biden than the economy: Fox News has him up 13 points over Biden for economic performance, Quinnipiac up 12, and Marquette up a whopping 21 points.

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Both Trump and Biden oversaw low unemployment rates, likely a structural consequence of both the birth rate and legal immigration rates falling far too low, and solid stock markets, though Biden’s performance has been almost entirely fueled by the Magnificent Seven overcompensating for the rest of the S&P 493 falling mostly flat. But inflation averaged below the Federal Reserve’s maximum 2% target throughout Trump’s presidency, while under Biden, it has averaged nearly three times that amount.

For all the bombast of payouts to porn stars and wars overseas, this election is coming down to which president made the public poorer. With a difference this stark, even the personal foibles of Trump are being overlooked.