It’s not the economy, stupid

For almost a decade now, U.S political commentators have been vainly searching for the answer to one question: If the economy is so good, why are people so unhappy (with it and with everything else)?

Implicit in this question is the belief that a “good” economy translates linearly into electoral victories for the party overseeing it. By this logic, Donald Trump should’ve never come close in 2016, should’ve lost badly in 2020, and should’ve again had no chance in 2024.

But it should also have meant defeat for Barack Obama in 2012 and for George W. Bush in both 2004 and 2000. Really, the last president who rode a “strong economy” to victory was Bill Clinton, whose lead strategist James Carville coined the “it’s the economy, stupid” phrase. The theory is trash, but it has a huge hold on the commentariat because it seems like hard science: If numbers good, ergo candidate who was in office while numbers good will also do good.

So these purveyors of the “economy” theory of politics are currently appalled not that Trump won but instead that he did it despite the “roaring” Biden economy: “Just look at the GDP growth! And jobless claims are low due to a tight labor market! Here, study this chart. How could the stupid voters hate this?”

If you were unlucky enough to be on Bluesky before Biden’s disastrous June 2024 debate, you might’ve encountered center-left “wonks”¹ posting “Biden boom” at every bit of decent economic news, trying to create propaganda that would shape perceptions of a “good” economy—as close as they’ll get to admitting that the concept they hold so dear, of an objectively measurable and in this case supposedly good set of indicators completely detached from politics, is actually made up. Indeed, what if there is no “economy” to be “good” in the first place?

Samuel Chambers chronicled the mythology of the “economy” framing in his book There’s No Such Thing as ‘the Economy’, demolishing the idea that there’s some objective domain that can be neatly severed from politics and culture. Instead of some monolithic “economy” that everyone can interpret the same way, there’s just perceptions that span multiple domains of life. I might say I feel bad about “the economy” relative to four years ago because of the ravages of COVID-19, the inability of governments to maintain even the baseline of the pop-up welfare state from then, and the concurrent images of costly newly waged wars worldwide. No chart of changes in inflation showing a recent decline is going to affect that.

Basically, it’s foolish to say voters are wrong to hate what you insist is a “good” “economy,” because life isn’t lived discreetly through charts but instead continuously through intersecting experiences that—shudder the thought—often go outside the strict domains of economics and quantitative political science. Kevin T. Baker summed it up well in a recent post:

Now, in the wake of electoral defeat, center-left think tanks and wonks seem determined to continue to tell voters they’re wrong about their own economic reality. They point to charts and tables showing the strength of the economy, as if statistical aggregates and lossy indicators were, in some sense, more real than lived experience. The rhetorician Kenneth Burke liked to remind his readers every way of seeing is also a way of not seeing, that our frameworks and analytical lenses can obscure certain details even as they highlight others. In this case, an overreliance on quantitative understandings of economic life have led us into a situation where leading figures in the world of professional liberal politics mistook their statistical representations for the territory they were meant to map. Rather than admit that their understanding of economic reality might be incomplete, they’ve decided that voters are unqualified to speak for themselves.