It may be many days before America learns the outcome of the 2024 presidential election in Arizona – but across the rest of the country, it’s all over but the crying. Donald Trump won 301 electoral votes to Kamala Harris’ 226 so far, and Arizona’s 11 wouldn’t be enough to change his decisive win. He also currently holds the popular vote. No doubt fingers are pointing, and blame is flying across the Harris campaign and the Democratic Party in general. Her campaign’s fear and loathing approach clearly fell flat – and spectacularly so – but why? As is the case with most questions of politics, there isn’t just one answer.
It’s the Stupid Economy
Since the “Ragin Cajun” James Carville, one of Bill Clinton’s advisers, first coined the phrase in 1992, folks have been saying, “It’s the economy, stupid,” to explain what should be simple economic concepts. A slight paraphrasing of that might be the best explanation for the current situation: It’s the stupid economy. President Biden boasts of a robust economy well on the road to recovery from the devastatingly irresponsible policies of the Trump administration. But that’s simply not what the facts show. Rather, it’s Biden’s policies that actually drove inflation through the roof – and while prices may be down a bit from their recent highs, they’re nowhere near as low as they were four years ago when Trump left office – even in the height of the initial pandemic panic of 2020.
The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) tracks the national average price of regular-grade gas by month and year going back to September of 1990. If anyone wants to see how any given administration performed at the pump, it’s a handy resource. After a few simple calculations, that data paints a telling portrait of the Biden-Harris administration compared to Trump-Pence.
The national average saw a low of $1.84 and a high of $2.90 per gallon during the first Trump era. The average was $2.48. The national average for a gallon of regular gas was $2.33 in January of 2021. Biden took office toward the end of the month and the price immediately began to climb. It was $2.50 in February, $2.81 in March, $2.85 in April, and $2.98 in May. It broke $3 in June ($3.06) and hasn’t fallen below that mark since – though it did come close to hitting $5 ($4.93) in June 2022. The average for the Biden-Harris administration has so far been $3.45 a gallon, and there are still three months to go before Trump’s back in charge.
Another metric to easily track inflation is the average retail cost of a loaf of white bread. According to Statista, that was $1.36 in 2016 and $1.32 in 2017. The downward trend continued throughout the Trump years until the pandemic struck – but even then it didn’t rise much higher than when he took office. A loaf of bread cost $1.54 in 2020 and $1.53 in 2021. By 2022, the average loaf of white bread had jumped to $1.87, and it was $2.02 for 2023. Pick just about any consumer good and track the same data, and you’ll find a similar if not identical pattern.
Voters Just Didn’t Buy the Fear and Loathing Narrative
Biden blamed the pandemic-era financial woes on Trump, only to end up with worse numbers of his own. Even the voters who didn’t do the research themselves still lived through it – they felt that sickening lightness in their wallets as the cost of simply surviving skyrocketed under the present administration. Harris found herself stuck with an economic record she could neither brag about nor explain away – leaving her little choice but to ignore it in her campaign and focus on something else.
Well, if not the economy, how about abortion? If elected president again, Trump would ban abortion nationwide and women would die because of it! There was just one problem with that narrative: Not enough folks bought it. Trump didn’t institute a full ban in his first term – he didn’t even try. And no matter how much progressives hate the Dobbs decision, in which the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, most folks realized all it did was return the decision to the people in their individual states – and what could be more democratic than that? Indeed, voters who want at least some access to abortion did vote their conscience on the issue, and seven more states now have abortion rights enshrined in their constitutions.
Okay, so the economy isn’t a good look, and Americans just aren’t as shocked or scared about abortion as they were in 2022. So, what else is there to deflect from four years of policy and economic failure without much good to show for it? How about racism, homophobia, and general tyranny?
A simple internet search for “liberal reactions to Trump win” turns up literally hours of complete emotional breakdowns and unhinged rants to satisfy even the most savage desire for schadenfreude. Among those, one will find some LGBTQ folks expressing fear for their lives now that Trump will be president again, a handful of black people who seem to think they’ll wake up after inauguration day actually enslaved, and a whole host of white liberals telling Hispanics who voted for Trump – which, of course, requires legal US citizenship – that it would serve them right if he deported them all. And, naturally, the overarching narrative is that Trump is so power-hungry that if he takes office again, he’ll never leave.
For those who find themselves perhaps wondering how they missed the reinstitution of slavery, the mass deportation of American citizens, and, of course, the Great Gay Genocide of Trump’s first term, don’t worry. You aren’t losing your mind – though it seems a sizable portion of the progressive left has. While some of the most thoroughly brainwashed radicals do seem to believe this narrative, most voters – regardless of political affiliation – recall that none of that happened the first time around.
In fact, they recall that life was generally easier and cheaper under the Trump administration. And that’s why the Democratic Party was simply unable to fearmonger itself into power again. It worked in 2020 because the pandemic was scary, Trump’s rhetoric was spicy, and Biden’s untested unity platform sounded like a refreshing break to many who believed he could really “rescue” the “soul of the nation.” But now they know better. They’ve lived through the “dark winter,” to shamelessly steal yet another rather ironic expression from yet another Democrat, and those asking themselves if they’re better off than they were four years ago find the answer is almost universally “no.” The fear and loathing approach of the Harris campaign didn’t just fail; it backfired spectacularly.
