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Originally Posted by opendoor
It is, but mainly in the way voters interact with it. The stock market being at all time highs and GDP growing quickly doesn't have much direct relevance to the average voter. They think in terms of income and the cost of things, and in those cases the economy hasn't been that great for a number of reasons:
1) Real wages (i.e. adjusted for inflation) have been stagnant under Biden and are currently below where they were pre-pandemic. Whereas in Trump's first 3 years, they increased by about 5% (I've excluded 2020 because real wages got temporarily distorted upwards because of the pandemic). And the effect is even more pronounced in a lot of the swing states.
2) Inflation is still elevated. It's down from where it was, but people are still feeling the fact that the CPI has increased by almost 20% in the last 3 years. For context, the growth in the CPI from 2021 to now is the same as the growth in the CPI from 2008 to 2021.
3) Interest rates have increased extremely quickly, making existing debt cost more to service and has made home ownership much more difficult for first-time buyers than it was even 3-4 years ago.
So sure, there has been a lot of growth in macroeconomic terms, but almost all of it is ending up in the pockets of the rich and people who own capital. Obviously little of that has to do with who was President, and by basically any measure it would have been worse if Trump had gotten re-elected (and much of what we are seeing is after effects of his terrible policies), but that's not how voters think.
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I'm not so sure it's as much grounded in statistical, dinner table, or even real world issues. It's a rhetorical issue just like crime. When looking at polling, most people say they are better off than 4 years ago, but the "economy" is worse. It's simply not grounded in reality, it's grounded in coffee shop conversations and social media memes. Look at public attitudes on crime and they follow a discourse that just isn't grounded in fact.