Here's an interesting chart from the Financial Times that shows how well governing parties have done in elections through the years:
The point of this chart is supposed to be that, for the first time ever, governing parties have lost every single election so far in 2024. People all over the globe wanted to throw the bums out, and they did. Kamala Harris was just an unfortunate victim of an unstoppable force.
Fair enough. But something else caught my eye. Take a look at the Great Depression of the 1930s. Governing parties were about 50-50. For the next fifty years, nothing. Then look at the big recession of the early '80s. It didn't have a huge effect, but governing parties clearly lost more than they won.
But the recession of the early '90s? Big effect. The Great Recession of 2008-09? An even bigger effect. And 2024 is the biggest effect of all.
What this seems to show is that in the past voters didn't especially punish governing parties for the state of the economy. But for the past 30 years they have. This is a small sample size, but still intriguing. If bad economies have spelled doom for governing parties only recently, why the change?
Ok, but we aren’t in a recession now. As you’ve noted, things are pretty good. Why include this election?
Right. Rumors of a recession were sorely mistaken.
But the belief in a "bad economy" was still prevalent, and the misinformed views about the economy and other issues were what separated Trump voters from Harris voters.
Evidence here: https://x.com/DeanBaker13/status/1854752514090189261
The problem is the Information System. It's a funhouse mirror where up is down and right is wrong and the woman who laughs is unacceptable and the senile old man performing simulated oral sex with a microphone on stage is chosen as savior of this hellhole that The Economist calls "the envy of the world."
Finding rational real-world reasons why the election went the way it did is madness. The simpler explanation: people believed the lies. Many of them wanted to.
👍👍👍👍👍
Those polls were all skewed by lying sack of shit Republicans. None of them had bad...ok, maybe the working class racists GOPers did...Polls on the economy in general, not necessarily Bakers referenced above (have not read that one yet)
Can we say, "It wasn't the economy, stupid"?
I really think it wasn't the economy. It was an international conspiracy of authoritarians to undermine public confidence in institutions in Western countries. Meanwhile, those institutions had too much confidence in themselves.
That has certainly been underway in the US (“Government isn’t the solution to the problem, government is the problem”) and the UK, where economists who predicted an economic hit from Brexit were discounted. My newest crackpot hypothesis is that, when you foment distrust of institutions, many people will instead put their trust in demagogues.
That's some pretty sensible crackpottery.
Possibly because that troublemaker Keynes convinced politicians that governments could do things to counter negative economic developments, which was a novel idea 90 years ago. That subsequently morphed into today's superstitious belief that the US President controls "the economy".
Gee, imagine how the incumbent would have been crushed if the economy was bad!
Its really not the economy primarily, when it can be explained more readily by tribalism, misogyny and Trump just lying his way back with no correction by the MAGA Republican Party.
Well, misogyny doesn’t account for Italy.
Bill Clinton saying “It’s the economy, stupid.”
The amplification effect of social media? When all you hear is doom and gloom you naturally look for someone to blame. People also become more partisan than they would be otherwise when all the news they get is from places like Fox News/lets just say CNN, Facebook and Xitter. The inability for the majority of Americans to recognize when they're being manipulated probably adds to it.
This. The internet age makes it much easier to amplify discontent among voters.
2024 truly went through the looking glass in the US because the GOP basically abandoned any attempt to even engage with economic reality- they just said up is down in the US and it worked.
Officially sanctioned lying is extremely difficult to counter in a democracy; Hannah Arendt is rolling in her grave.
Officially sanctioned lying is extremely difficult to counter in a democracy.
Let that one sink in for a bit.
+1. You can't get much more official than the POTUS!
My guess is that the electorates in the 1930s were very different-looking in most countries compared to what we have today. The US was not a multiracial democracy; black people in the South were denied the franchise almost entirely by Jim Crow, and I suspect black voting rates in states where they could vote might not have been super high, although I'm finding it hard to turn up voter breakdowns by race from those elections online. Machine politics still mattered a lot.
European elections, I suspect, also looked very very different - Weimar Germany or Interwar Britain were changing an awful lot over this period. The UK had only just extended the franchise to women the year before the 1929 stock market crash.
Yes, I came here to say this. I would think that, in general, those who are most affected by poor economies have more impact on electoral outcomes in recent decades than they did in the past.
It is also possible that the effects of global downturns varied more among countries in the past, if countries were less economically interdependent.
Well you know, it might have to do with the growth of the internet and social media, changing how people are "informed".
+1000
I can dig that.
I'm afraid it's exactly this. We've raised a generation of people that are basically disconnected from objective reality. The "do your own research" crowd is now of voting age, and since elections are nothing more than vibes and entertainment, they're finally engaged in politics. This can't end well.
People who say do your own research have no idea what that word means. Usually they only do a Google search, browse sites that conform to their ideological beliefs and reinforce what they already believe. That's not research.
They don't even do that. They just passively consume whatever info they want and then declare that doing that was research rather than being actively manipulated.
+1
The people who say do your own research are incapable of writing the canonical five-paragraph essay. On any subject.
We used to have recessions or depressions about every 20 years, more or less, in the bad old hard-currency days-- Panics of 1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, 1893, 1907, that signaled economic slides of varying lengths and depths, plus other recessions and depressions that didn't start with bank runs, as in 1913-14 and 1920-21. Mostly this wasn't laid at the government's feet, but thought to be more like a natural phenomenon or a Rothschild machination, depending on your inclinations.
In that hard-money era they did talk about government responsibility for near-term economic performance but the language was different. In the US in the 1890s it was about whether to stick strictly to gold-based currency or also to add silver to circulating currency, which would be inflationary-- good for debtors-- and expansionary, a solution to the depression of 1893-97. That was William Jennings Bryan's major 1896 platform and the point of his "Cross of Gold" standard stump speech. Bryan lost but the Klondike gold strikes did the same thing by expanding the gold supply.
We went off the gold standard in 1933 but it took JFK's open references to troublemaker Keynes (ht kenalovell) to begin to link short-term economic conditions and specific government actions in the current way.
And for cementing this, you don't want to underestimate Samuelson's influence! Generations of intro Macro used his text starting sometime in the 60s, iirc.
This looks more like a pre-determined conclusion in search of support than a conclusion drawn from the data.
The association looks pretty tenuous for all 3 highlighted boxes. Large outliers drive the first 2 and the lack of an impact in 2022 and 2023 should make us question the conclusion about 2024.
Is it possible voters as a whole have just gotten dumber? Or at least make their decisions more viscerally than in the past? You’d think that when bad economic times happen folks would say, this party handled that crisis well, or this party handled this crisis poorly and then they’d vote accordingly. That just doesn’t seem to be the case anymore.
I have heard enough stupid nonsense coming from what used to be intelligent people that I ponder whether COVID has knocked a few IQ points off of part of the population.
I would want proof of this to actually believe it, but what I'm witnessing is striking.
I don’t think Covid-19 made people less intelligent. Fear and anxiety can make people believe things they ordinarily wouldn't. Behave in ways they ordinarily wouldn't. Fear and anxiety brings out the worst in people.
The internet and social media with its algorithms that target pppeople to make sure this stuff gets emphasized. There are also now more think tanks and groups dedicated to the effort. really, it's not much different than the effort to convince people crime is increasing. Due to all of these efforts lots of people believe inflation is still increasing and you cant afford bacon.
Steve
It looks to me that since 1960, incumbents have fared worse *across the board*. Could it be that voters have impossible expectations and are just less content now?
Retribution politics. People desire or want to blame someone even if blame isn't warranted. I guess you can say it's a form of revenge or payback.
Recent US and European elections haven’t just been about the ‘out’ party replacing the ‘in’, but about the rise of right-wing, ethnonationalist movements and parties, strongly opposed to immigration.
Let's specifically compare Biden with Reagan.
From December 1980 to September 1984 of Reagan's first term prices, that is the CPI, increased by 20.8%. Over the same interval in Biden's term the CPI increased by 20.1%.
By the end of Reagan's first term GDP was good, but it was not trickling down. Real wages for production workers decreased by 1.6%. Real wages continued down through his second term as well. The very bad but short recession early in Reagan's term, with unemployment over 10%, had ended but unemployment was still higher at the end, 7.3% versus 7.2% at the beginning. In Biden's term unemployment decreased from 6.7% to 4.1%.
The numbers show clearly that workers were objectively worse off by the end of Reagan's first term, having endured a loss of purchasing power and almost four years of very high unemployment. Why was this "Morning in America" in 1984, leading to a Reagan landslide, while Biden-Harris supposedly lost because of economic performance which was actually better?
Real economics can be important, but only if other things - in the case of Trump's elections, bigotry - are not major issues. Republicans' strategy for the last 50+ years has been to distract from real economics with bigotry. Lies magnified by the media have become more important than reality.
Again, I predict that by the time Trump has been in office for a short while before there could be any real economic changes polls will show the the supposed inflationary and overall economic pain will have magically disappeared, at least for Trump voters. This is a safe prediction because such a huge change in economic attitude has happened the last few times the Presidency has changed party. Will the media pundits notice this time?
Uhh, the Great Depression kicked Hoover to the curb and put Roosevelt into office. And we're not counting that? I'm not sure how to read this post.
A really bad economic downturn will generally result in party control change, whatever the ideologies. In the Depression FDR won, but so did Hitler. Things were similar in many countries in the Great Recession. Obama won because of the 2008 crash, not because America suddenly converted to racial equality.
But there was no downturn at all in Biden's term - most things improved. Inflation was high, but no higher than in Reagan's first term (see my other comment). The supposed decisive economic pain was phony and will probably disappear when Trump takes office - not when he actually causes economic improvement, which may never happen.
Pundits generalize too much about these things, and seldom consider all the relevant evidence.
+1
The irony of this question being posed immediately after the preceding post shouldn't be lost on you.
What's changed is probably social media misinforming people on a scale previously not imagined.
> If bad economies have spelled doom for governing parties only recently, why the change?
Our understanding of economics changed. It wasn't until the response to the 30s depression that it was shown that fiscal policy has an effect. The 80s recession was seen as proof that monetary policy can have an effect.
And the low turnout by Harris supporters was not a judgement on the economy. GDP growth is robust, unemployment is low, inflation is low... Most likely, Harris supporters stayed home because she moved to the right giving low information voters little to choose between.