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.