Paper: Inflation and the 2024 US Presidential Election
David Steinberg, Daniel McDowell, and Erdem Aytac have a paper out that’s getting some media play entitled “The Impact of Inflation on Support for Kamala Harris in the 2024 Presidential Election.”
Read the whole paper with the data set for yourself here, but an excerpt:
When the final autopsy of the Harris-Walz campaign is written, inflation is certain to be atop the list of reasons explaining the Democratic ticket’s defeat. Indeed, since the final votes were cast, rising prices have been characterized as being “politically toxic”, “radioactive”, and identified as the reason for a slew of post-pandemic incumbent losses around the world.18 Yet, while it is clear that inflation is unpopular with voters, most of the evidence linking it to electoral outcomes is far from definitive because previous studies are unable to rule out the possibility that inflation perceptions are reflections of political evaluations rather than the cause of those evaluations. To ameliorate this challenge, our study relies on an experimental design—specifically, a questionorder survey experiment that subtly primes some respondents to self-report on price increases prior to offering their evaluations of the incumbent government.
We find that priming voters on inflation significantly and substantively reduces approval of the Biden-Harris administration and lowers confidence in the Democratic Party leadership’s ability to manage the economy. When we condition our results on partisan identity, we get an even more granular understanding of how inflation shaped the views of the 2024 electorate. Interestingly, our treatment does not diminish Republican voters’ evaluations of the government, likely reflecting the fact that this group already thought poorly of Biden-Harris. On the other hand, we find that the inflation treatment effect is concentrated among Independents and, in particular, Democratic voters. This finding is notable given that a Harris’ victory largely hinged on whether she could sway Independents to her side while also turning out Democrats in large numbers. In light of these results, it is reasonable to conclude that inflation played a critical role
in the Harris-Walz defeat by tarnishing the ticket’s reputation among Independent voters and dampening enthusiasm among the Democratic Party faithful.
So just like almost every other government in power in 2021, if anything Harris lost more narrowly than others. Trump is down to a plurality victory and the House barely budged.Report
Finally, an academic treatment of the thing that was obvious to everyone but partisan true believers.Report
Every developed country in the world experienced inflation and every incumbent party took it in the shorts, whether they were to blame, or whether inflation had been tamed by the time of the election. While there may have been reasons to think we might buck the trend, and it was much closer here than elsewhere, memory ultimately won out over present reality.Report
Yeah, and that’s something to keep in mind for postmortems. Not that it’s an excuse for complacency- improvement should always be sought, but it should temper the recriminations a bit.Report
Inflation was not just something that happened naturally, completely outside the Democrats’ control. See e.g. https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/americans-hate-inflation-more-than :
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There have been several attempts to quantify just how much pandemic-related fiscal policy contributed to the inflation that was already happening. The Wall Street Journal has what looks like a fair assessment:
Fiscal stimulus, approved by both Trump and Biden, accounted for about 3 percentage points of the rise in inflation through 2021, according to the San Francisco Fed. A separate analysis by the bank’s economists estimated the ARP boosted inflation, excluding food and energy items, by 0.3 percentage point a year in 2021 and 2022.Report
I assume you got this from Kevin Drum, who plucked it out of that article to crow about the low number. The original SF Fed analysis that was pulled in for the WSJ article was written in March 2021 and is titled “Why Is U.S. Inflation Higher than in Other Countries?”.
I’m not an economist and I’m sure that there are any number of models out there with different conclusions, and different assessments of impact; but “very little impact” is already different from “no impact and the US did better than a lot of the world”. You’re obviously starting from the question “how can I most plausibly minimize Biden’s responsibility” instead of “what’s the best explanation for the data”. But as I say, it’s not my field so I’ll settle for at least pushing y’all off your original stance a bit.Report
Was the conclusion incorrect? Were the numbers reported incorrect? Do you have different numbers?Report
Are you seriously so ignorant that you think there’s exactly one correct economic analysis?Report
No. But one beats zero. Unless there’s something wrong with the one.
So how much do you think pandemic fiscal policy added to existing inflationary pressures?Report
LOL. The Noah Smith article I linked has five studies, I’m sure there are many more — who knew, it turns out a lot of people actually study this kind of stuff professionally, and statistical models can produce different results depending on different assumptions and methodologies. I’m not one of these people though, so I don’t have my own personal numbers to share with you. You’re welcome to believe whatever makes you happy.Report
Biden owns it because at the end of the day he was in charge, and now the party has paid the price.
However I don’t think it’s quite the ‘lol so obvious’ analysis people are making it out to be. Keep in mind Summers et al. all got the aftermath of 2008 totally and disastrously wrong and Biden as VP had a front row seat to it. The result of Obama deferring to them was a lost decade of an under stimulated economy where a lot of people struggled and that laid the groundwork for the right and left populist movements and political assumptions that continue to plague us. In that context it makes sense that Bident went in with a high anchor on the ARRA, which he probably rightly assumed would be negotiated down by a Senate that has changed hands plus Manchin. However, instead of that happening, Trump causes the GOP to tank the GA special Senate elections. The bill is then somewhat shockingly passed as is.
Does this somehow relieve the Biden admin of responsibility? Of course not. But it wasn’t this self evidently terrible decision in the moment either, and none of it happened in a vacuum or without a high degree of uncertainty.Report
Not to mention it remains an open question if it was even a bad policy as policy. Obviously the politics weren’t good (people hate inflation) but the payoff of that brief bout of inflation was that the economy roared back to full employment very quickly, inflation was then subsequently beat down and a soft landing achieved.
Though it can’t be ignored that the political result is that Joe ended up handing Trump a fishing golden economy on a silver platter. All a Trump with two brain cells would need to do is switch from talking it down to talking it up and the media idiots would be penning “Trumpian golden age for the economy” stories all through 2025 just like they did from 2016-2020.Report
I think that a good chunk could have been avoided with an response to complaints of “I feel your pain and this sucks, but it’s a softer landing than those poor bastards in Europe!” rather than one of “no you’re not, look at this chart”.
Too many officials said “look at this chart” and here we are.Report
It’s a plausible theory in isolation. If I saw a lot of other inflation impacted administrations escaping electoral doom that way I’d find that persuasive but all kinds of messaging and responses were wheeled out the world over and the slaughter of inflation incumbent administrations, left and right, this message and that, was pretty much total.Report
The only reason that I didn’t think that Kamala was doomed going into election day itself was that one Iowa poll.
(Hey, wait a minute…)
But I still believe that a skilled communicator could have communicated with more skill than Kamala did.Report
I’d say Kamala was ok. She wasn’t amazing but she was definitely better than Biden would have been. A lot of of the complaints about her are really about her adhering to the strategy she and her campaign chose which, in hindsight, was wrong but was far from unreasonable. One reason I don’t think Kamala was terrible is that while Dems lost ground nation wide (inflation etc) they lost less ground in places Kamala campaigned actively. That suggests she wasn’t bad, just not extraordinary.
I, very regretfully as a moderate, lay most of the blame at Joe’s feet. We don’t know when exactly his decline went over the line from right wing bull to reality but he and his inner circle have some idea of that. His decision to run again was obviously wrong. Heck, the outcome is so bad that I wonder, on darker days, if his decision to run in 2020 was wrong. Could only Joe have whupped Bernie and then Trump? Captain Hindsight says maybe not.Report
I think we’re in multiple things can be true at once territory. Biden had what I would judge as the most invisible presidency I can remember. I found it refreshing at first after years of the Trump psychodrama and I doubt it was only D voters that felt that way.
Over the long haul though the total failure to make a case for himself and his administration couldn’t possibly have helped him or Harris. None of that precludes the possibility that the fundamentals were so arrayed against incumbents that chances of any Democrat winning were slim.Report
A charming faith in the power of speechifying. Aristotle had a few things to say about what it takes to put a point across, and it takes a lot more than that.Report
I think it’s more that I think that the Democratic Party can run faster if it isn’t wearing a hobbling device.Report
Those Green Lanterns won’t light themselves!!Report
“Kamala ran a *PERFECT* campaign!”
“She didn’t go on Joe Rogan because her staffers said that they’d be offended.”
“THAT’S THE GREEN LANTERN THEORY OF POLITICS!!!!”Report
When you set the terms of both sides of the argument, you’re guaranteed to win.Report
There are additional ways to guarantee a win:
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of WarReport
Not really. As was demonstrated by numerous posts and this one, parties in charge of government in 2021 were getting pounded in elections. This has been true regardless of the ideological lien of the government.
If anything, Harris/Democrats loss is a lot more narrow than that of other incumbent parties.
I don’t think it is a wild overstatement to state that doing everything right does not necessarily mean victory. It might just mean coming in a close second instead of a distant second.
But people find this unsatisfying and will fire up every cognitive defense they can to not recognize it.
“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”-Samuel BeckettReport
“It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose.” – Jean-Luc Picard.Report
Edward Bennett Williams, probably the greatest trial lawyer of the generation before mine, said that, assuming minimal competence on both sides (not a trivial assumption, sadly), 40% of all cases that go to trial can’t be won, 40% of them can’t be lost, and in only 20% of them does the comparative skill of the lawyer make a difference
This is somewhat over-simplified. A manslaughter conviction usually counts as a prosecution win and a defense loss, but if the odds of a murder conviction were strong enough, it could be the opposite. A $500,000 verdict for a plaintiff usually counts as a win for the plaintiff and a loss for the defendant, but if the last settlement demand was for $2,000,000, it could be the opposite. And the comparative skill of the lawyers might have made the difference.
That quibble aside, however, the general point holds.Report
I’ve actually looked at the studies, two of which were the San Francisco Fed studies cited in the WSJ article, and they all converge on similar numbers. (Smith himself doesn’t venture a number.) Or do you read them differently?Report
Point of order – Biden couldn’t spend funds that Congress didn’t appropriate.Report
In Switzerland and several East Asian economies, inflation peaked around 3%. Inflation for most European countries was linked due to a shared currency and central bank, so it’s not surprising that it happened in a lot of European countries.
9% inflation was not inevitable, and as I’ve pointed out here a couple times before, macroeconomic data clearly show that about 10-12 percentage points of cumulative inflation between 2021 and 2024 is attributable to excess growth in nominal consumer spending, which can’t be pinned on supply-side factors. There was just too much growth in nominal spending power for real production of goods and services to keep up.Report
Yes and? How is that a bad thing coming out of a once a century pandemic?Report