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The economy I think was the huge sticking point. You can't have everyone in your party saying "the economy is good, it's growing better than ever, look at all t
by class3shock 2y ago
The economy I think was the huge sticking point. You can't have everyone in your party saying "the economy is good, it's growing better than ever, look at all the jobs, etc." while literally no average person is seeing that. They are so out of touch that they think if finance/econ majors on tv say the economy is doing good than it's doing good.
Compared to pre-pandemic
- Housing prices have shot up incredibly
- Loan interest rates are two or three times higher
- Every day goods are higher
- Car prices are higher
- Insurance is higher
- Utilities are higher
And that would be fine, prices go up over time after all, but all of that is on the back of pay, that for most people, has not gone up anywhere close to enough to cover all of that, if it's gone up at all.
- y7 2y agoI guess, from a Western-European perspective, the problem is that with the choice of Democrats and Republicans you get the choice between right-wing and ultra right-wing. Having right-wing politics that funnel money from the poor to the rich, or the tenants to the landlords, is in the interest of the financial backers of both parties. Messaging-wise, the Democrats have always been "more honest" (low bar, it's hard to be more dishonest/convoluted than Trump anyway), so maybe that's why Trump seems to come out ahead there.
- arethuza 2y agoReminds me of the quote by Gore Vidal: "There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat."
- wwweston 2y agoI'm not sure I understand the criticism. This is bad? People like property rights. Progressives like them. Conservatives like them. Economies like them. Meanwhile there are substantial differences between the two wings, what services and programs they think government should provide, how problem solving should be approached.
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- penjelly 2y agonormally I'd agree about Trump's honesty, but in the debate and subsequent Harris interviews I saw a lot more deflection, misdirection, lies/mistruthes and non-answers than I did from trump. Sure trump says some wild things which are often only 50% ish true. But kamala would openly call things lies that were verifiable fact, those are lies too, and she lied a lot.
- intended 2y agoI dont want to get into a flame war, 50% is a generous number, since many times he isn’t speaking full intelligible sentences. Trump gets a pass on absolutely outrageous things, which he creates by the second. I feel that he is so bad, and so incessant with his content creation., that he causes an integer overflow in the audience. At that point, he is once again assessed with an average rubric. I feel that his success here suggests that this is a strategy that will succeed globally, and that many political candidates are going to be emulating his “style”.
- thunky 2y agoAll politicians lie. They're only ever called out by the "other side".
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- AlgorithmicTime 2y ago[dead]
- class3shock 2y agoYou're touching on one of the struggles for many left leaning voters and why the democratic party struggles with enthusiasm and to win. To many on the left, the party markets itself as "the least bad option" and thus "the only choice". Anyone in sales would tell you that is not the best pitch.
- dfxm12 2y agoI get where you're coming and the Dems' greatest sin is probably pulling the rug under progressive candidates in primaries of some elections, but at some point you gotta look at the things Biden/Harris did for all Americans as president and consider if it passes the threshold from "least bad option" to, dare I say, "good, but obviously not perfect option". Things like increasing the threshold for overtime pay, an anti-redlining mortgage lending framework, pushing the HHS to reschedule cannabis to schedule III, actually showing up on a picket line, etc.
- class3shock 2y agoI agree with all of that but I'm not the voting block that should be seeing that and voting democrat but not. To those people it will never matter how many incremental gains the dems push through. They only see the big things not attempted or failed, that the party is once again running a uninspiring insider, that they are being told who they have to vote for because there is no other option, and that having done that last time not much in their day to day lives has improved. I don't care about that but the people that do make or break the democratic party. Unfortunately the democrats seem incapable of learning that if you don't appeal to those people, they will lose.
- no_wizard 2y agoAnd Trumps proposed tariffs will only accelerate price increases[0] It’s clear it has support from rank and file republicans as well, it is more than feasible that if republicans win the house too we will see tariffs in short order [0]: https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/trumps-new-tariff-proposal-could-cost-americans-78-bln-annual-spending-nrf-study-2024-11-04/ https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/trumps-new-tariff-proposa...
- mastax 2y agoThe president has huge amounts of executive authority over tariffs. I don’t know where the boundaries are but I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw huge tariff increases in the first hundred days.
- greentxt 2y agoRight. You would want to do it immediately so that initial hits to economy can be claimed as belonging to Biden. And then you can cut the tarrifs and make things improve.
- vundercind 2y agoNah, he’ll make the Fed a political appointment and goose the economy that way, already seemed pretty annoyed that he didn’t have direct control of it last time and seemed to partially blame that for his loss. His voters will ignore the resulting inflation, say it’s awesome, and you won’t be able to convince them otherwise maybe until the really bad crash on the other side.
- MisterBastahrd 2y agoEven worse, he'll throw gasoline everywhere just like he did last time and throw the match right before he leaves the room. Fuel prices and the Afghanistan withdrawal were both done specifically with that in mind.
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- gruez 2y ago>And that would be fine, prices go up over time after all, but all of that is on the back of pay, that for most people, has not gone up anywhere close to enough to cover all of that, if it's gone up at all. BLS data shows real (ie. inflation adjusted) wages has gone up since the pandemic. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
- AnimalMuppet 2y agoThe data may show that. The people don't feel that. (Many of them don't see it in their budgets, either.)
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- croes 2y agoYou don’t feel earth rotation either but it still exists. You can’t argue about feelings
- psychoslave 2y agoPeople definitely can feel the impact of earth rotation on a daily basis. They literally would not even have the notion of a day without it actually. https://sciencenotes.org/what-would-happen-if-the-earth-stopped-rotating/ https://sciencenotes.org/what-would-happen-if-the-earth-stop...
- croes 2y agoYou can measure the effects but people don’t feel it, just ask flat earthers
- pupppet 2y ago[flagged]
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- jghn 2y ago> You can't have everyone in your party saying "the economy is good, it's growing better than ever, look at all the jobs, etc." while literally no average person is seeing that. Isn't that literally what happened in his first term? Remember "I built the greatest economy the world has ever seen"? These claims were backed fully and completely by the stock market and not the rank & file. And this is the same situation we find ourselves in now. All these years later we're still in a situation where "the economy" is going gangbusters, but the average person feels left out.
- astine 2y agoYes, that's true, but the problem is that these past four years have been bad for everybody, so they remember the Trump years as being better than they actually were.
- jghn 2y ago> these past four years have been bad for everybody They've been pretty good for some people.
- enraged_camel 2y agoYeah, if you're a high earner living the urban/suburban life you've probably done really well. The problem is that rural turnout was off the charts last night, which what handed Trump the popular vote - something that has not happened with a Republican candidate since 2004.
- chrisBob 2y agoMy theory is that legal sports betting makes the economy seem artificially worse for a lot of people. It has had a measurable impact on bankruptcy rates, and is causing a lot of self-inflicted financial stress. Trump's main platform is that your problems aren't your fault, and I think that resonates well with people struggling because they are throwing out their disposable income every month.
- camdenreslink 2y agoWhen looking at some profiles of celebrating Trump supporters on Reddit, basically 100% had a large number of posts in sports betting topics, or Wall Street/day trading topics. An interesting demographic overlap there.
- jonhohle 2y agoI’ve never bet on sports but watched my grocery bill skyrocket. A few years ago I posted year-over-year grocery prices and in aggregate the bill was 50% over the course of 12-months. Since then we’ve seen insurance and utilities skyrocket, creature comforts like streaming services are all up. CPI may say one thing, but my checkbook feels much worse. Disposable income has all gone to sustain a reduced quality of life.
- nradov 2y agoDoes that really impact a lot of people? The total size of the legal sports betting industry is $11B, which is only about 0.04% of US GDP. https://www.espn.com/espn/betting/story/_/id/39563784/sports-betting-industry-posts-record-11b-2023-revenue https://www.espn.com/espn/betting/story/_/id/39563784/sports...
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- throwaway13337 2y agoThis is an interesting phenomanon. The median purchase power is increasing but people feel poor. Things with limited supply are becoming more unaffordable because the rich are much richer than they were before. So if housing is limited and is seen as an investment vehicle, it becomes unaffordable. The same goes for health care. There is a limit supply of medical care. Some people can afford much more than others which compounds the issue. Americans (and most of the collective West) can afford all things that are not in limited supply - food, clothing, gadgets, transportation, etc. This is amazing in the context of history. The weirdest thing is that both health care and housing do not need to be limited supply. It's completely artifical. We make bad governing decisions that force it to be so. Our problems are not economic but social/organizational ones. Relatedly, I was quite surprised when recently I realized that the median (adjusted for PPP) disposable income in America was the highest in the OECD (except Luxembourg): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income This means that the average american really really is financially better off than anywhere else in the world. I'd say that their quality of life isn't - they die much earlier than the rest of OECD, for example. But they are definitely the richest. And not just the richest american but the average american.
- oporo 2y agoIt takes $600k now to have the buying power of $200k in the 80s The economy is 100% intentionally managed to protect the prior generations story mode way of thinking
- no_wizard 2y agoFrankly, if wage gains kept pace with productivity gains it’d be a very different and vastly better economic story for the average American. The reality is the recent blip of wage gains didn't make up ground on the last 40 years of stagnation, and it shows signs of slowing in any case, and Americans are feeling that
- bryanlarsen 2y agoIronically wage gains have outpaced inflation in the last 4 years, but that's such a minor effect compared to the lost ground over the previous 40 years that it's not noticeable.
- gwurk 2y agoThat would make it a left/right thing. As a European: there is no left in america, there is a liberal right and a conservative right. The economy is good in america, but that just means that the amount of "resources" in the country is increasing, but, if "average joe" benefits from that or not is a question of how those resources are distributed. Left/Right is about economy. Being on the right means that you find it more important that the total pool of resources is increasing. Being on the left means that you care more about how the resources are distributed. What happened here is IMHO that the conservatives did the populist thing, they claimed that regular people would get more resources if they won, while still claiming that they would distribute less resources away from wealthy people. They are not wrong in saying that the economy is good, it is just that since there is no left in american politics, it seems like some people have forgotten the other perspective, since redistribution of wealth have been almost an insult in america for so long. Yet, last time he was president, trump managed to send everyone a check, signed by himself, but paid for by taxes, without being called an evil communist. I listened to a radia program where poor americans where interviewed, and that was the thing that they remembered about trump, he sent them a check. So, in conclusion, there is a large group of poor americans, that associate the guy that wants to remove taxes for rich people with what I (according to the above definition) consider to be left wing politics.
- burntalmonds 2y agoI don't buy it. There's a reality distortion field at work here. If Trump had been in office he would he would have been touting the economy as the greatest in history. And 'average people' would have 'seen that' despite not 'seeing it'.
- light_hue_1 2y agoI don't vote for Trump. I don't know anyone aside from some crazy family members who like him. I'm in an extreme blue state that was called when only a few percent of the vote was in. I don't even know anyone who listens to Trump's speeches or sees this ads. Every single person I know feels this economy is terrible. Of every age. From new graduates, to senior people. Even the most extreme Obama or Bernie people feel like things are going very badly. Everyone on campus was consistently outraged when Biden would gloat about his economy. It's not Trump. I have no idea what his message even is. This is an own goal. Democrats believed the total bullshit that economists spew about how good things are. When people actually feel how terrible they are.
- vundercind 2y agoBecoming the refuge-party for fleeing Republican neoliberals (joining the existing Democratic ones) is really gonna cripple the party when the party that popularized (among the political set—voters never liked it) that damn world-view is abandoning it.
- lokar 2y agoAnd trump voters, not understanding inflation, think he will bring down prices.
- usaar333 2y agoI'm in the Bay - am I the only person that thinks the economy is going great? My wages are up since Biden started. My rent, my biggest expense, has held the same. NW up a lot from stock market gains. There seems to be a lot of inflation with food ,restaurants and domestic work, but isn't lower wage people getting higher wages a good thing?
- l33t7332273 2y ago> while literally no average person is seeing that I mean, frankly as a Gen Z man I don’t understand this at all. I’m doing a lot better than I was 4 years ago. Finished school, got a good job, etc.
- lokar 2y agoI was about to retire early, with the risk to the ACA I’m not sure.
- wbl 2y agoPay went up a ton too for low income people.
- no_wizard 2y agoBut still haven’t matched productivity gains since the 1970s[0] Everyone likes to point this out like it somehow made up for all the wage stagnation of the last 40 years and it most definitely did not. Not to mention these wage gains are slowing fast. [0]: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/19/heres-how-labor-dynamism-aff https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/19/heres-how-labor-dynamism-aff....
- jandrese 2y agoI agree "It's the economy stupid". Where the Democrats went wrong is they looked at the economic figures for stuff like corporate profit margins and the stock market and said "look how good the economy is!" when those profit margins are high because they've jacked prices and regular consumers are feeling the squeeze. Unfortunately there's little a President can do about that. Corporate consolidation was largely complete before they even took office and monopolistic behavior is to be expected. The pandemic supply chain disruptions gave companies cover to increase their margins and that's what they did.
- pants2 2y agoTheodore Roosevelt was well known for monopoly-busting. It is something the president can influence and the U.S. has a dozen major monopolies that should have been busted long ago.
- dfxm12 2y ago"the economy is good, it's growing better than ever, look at all the jobs, etc." while literally no average person is seeing that. I think I'm an average person. Car prices came down and I was finally able to buy a sedan. Unemployment seems low. Eggs are expensive, sure, but on the other hand, my brand of yogurt always seems to be on sale and oatmeal prices are flat, so it's kind of a wash there. The economy seems pretty fine to me. Certainly, there have been no threats to shut down the government (like in '18-'19), which did do a number on my retirement plan at the time...
- miltonlost 2y agoAnd that inflation was caused largely by pre-Biden Trump policies of giving tax-breaks to billionaires and allowing blatant corporate greed. Inflation is not a quick phenomenon. It has lags. It has stickiness. People don't know this because they don't take any economics. And, more importantly, today's inflation is by large firms exerting their market control and monopolistic tendencies. How many grocery companies are there and in their region? Kroger is trying to buy out Albertsons to completely dominate the midwest, to lower quality and increase prices like all monopolists. What needs to be done is anti-trust enforcement which Biden has attempted. But none of this is known by 90% of the country and 0% of Trump voters.
- endemic 2y agoYeah, Kroger's behavior is infuriating. I've stopped shopping there; fortunately I have choices.
- Jeff_Brown 2y agoYou left out wages.