Donald Trump is Joe Biden now

Consumer sentiment among independents hit a new all-time low in November, and the president's numbers on prices are where Biden's were during peak inflation in 2022-23

I was not originally going to post today. A few data projects and other pieces are behind schedule, and I want to give some attention to the business and book I’m trying to get off the ground before next year.

Then I read this piece in the Times about how Trump is trying to take back the affordability issue from the Democrats — and I have some thoughts.

The portion of the article that sparked this post reads:

As Mr. Trump sought to recalibrate his economic messaging after the election, he claimed there was “no inflation,” that gas prices were almost at $2 and grocery prices were “way down.” To illustrate the point, he repeatedly pointed to a report from Walmart showing that the cost of a Thanksgiving meal would be 25 percent less than under President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

“2025 Thanksgiving dinner under Trump is 25% lower than 2024 Thanksgiving dinner under Biden, according to Walmart,” Mr. Trump wrote in a post on Thursday. “My cost are lower than the Democrats on everything, especially oil and gas! So the Democrats ‘affordability’ issue is DEAD! STOP LYING!!!”

Mr. Trump risks being in a similar position as his predecessor, defending his record by pointing to statistics that don’t capture a troubling reality that many Americans are feeling.

This all dovetails nicely with what I’ve been writing about economic voting in 2024 and 2025, and has some lessons for 2026/2028.

This extra post is free to read today, but consider becoming a paid subscriber of Strength In Numbers to support more work like this.

---

Anxiety about “prices” does not just mean inflation

The last portion of the Times excerpt above resonates with me as I have recently found myself among a group of political scientists and elections analysts who have argued that high nominal prices, not just annual change in prices (AKA “inflation”) is what sunk Biden/Democrats in 2024. We are opposed in our stance by a group of mostly hyper-online, well-off #posters who attest that the economy was good in 2024 because the rate of inflation was dropping, Biden just lost because the press killed him with negative rhetoric. I say I think the press plays a role, but voters’ economic anxieties cannot simply be hand waved away when household bills went up 30% during Biden’s presidency.

But as I have pointed out, there is no reason to think that “the economy” as a political issue inherently favors one party over the other. Although conventional wisdom is that Republicans do better on this issue, I think that wisdom has yet to catch up to the actual polling data on this subject and suffers from an acute form of recency bias. Republicans did well on the economy in 2024, pundit rationality goes, therefore Democrats will have trouble on the issue in 2026.

So here’s the real meat of this post: The more you look at the data on the economy today, the more Trump just, frankly, looks screwed on the issue. And this is not the usual political albatross or bad policy proposal blown out of proportion; Trump has set himself up for failure on prices since setting foot in the Oval Office in January.

Perhaps the best way to communicate the scale and potential consequences of the Republicans’ problem on the economy may be the following sentence: Donald Trump is Joe Biden now.

---

Understand politics with data, not spin.

Mainstream coverage of politics is lost in the noise of partisan spin and an understanding of elections found in Government 101, not reality. Here at Strength In Numbers, I explain our world using hard data and statistical analysis. SIN offers paying members exclusive analysis that goes beyond headlines to reveal how voters truly make their decisions — and covers what the media is missing.

Get premium independent, fact-based political journalism with a paid membership to Strength In Numbers today, and get other perks like a private Discord community and access to early releases of new data products.

---

Donald Trump is Joe Biden now

I mean this strictly in the sense that voters now hold Trump as responsible for high prices and low economic mobility (especially for young people) as they held Biden in 2024.

Take the University of Michigan’s Index of Consumer Sentiment, a long-running composite of various survey questions about how American adults feel about the economy today, as our chief example. Well, while we were all digesting the results of last week’s elections, UMich dropped a new ICS estimate on Nov. 7 showing sentiment hitting a new low for Trump’s second term. The ICS fell to 50.4 this month — that’s just 0.4 points higher than the all-time low in the survey, set in June 2022:

This point is worth emphasizing: the Index of Consumer Sentiment is even lower than it was during the 2008 financial crisis.

Also, to head off one potential counterargument, the new low in the ICS is not just due to partisanship. The ICS hit a new new record low among independents in November, and has also fallen among Republicans over the last few months.

Further, the UMich ICS is not the only survey to show new depths of consumer despair today. In YouGov’s weekly tracking poll for The Economist, 62% of independents today say the economy is “getting worse, compared to 16% who say it’s “getting better.” The “getting worse” percentage is higher than at any point during 2023 and 2024, and just shy of the 70% record set in summer 2022:

Using The Economist/YouGov’s data, we can also compare Trump’s job approval rating on handling the economy to Biden’s during the last 2 years of his term. Average monthly values appear in the chart below.

At -33 today, Nov. 10, 2025, Trump’s job approval on the economy has officially met the lowest reading during Joe Biden’s presidency — a -33 average in May 2024. Previously when I made this graph, Trump was “just” at -22, already an impressively steep decline since the start of his presidency.

It’s Trump’s economy now

As the Times piece also notes, a new Washington Post/ABC News/Ipsos poll out last month shows “a majority of Americans say they are spending more on groceries and utilities than they were a year ago, and many blame Mr. Trump.”

I have found the same thing. In our own Strength In Numbers/Verasight survey from September, 53% of voters said Donald Trump’s policies had made the economy worse, compared to 24% who said his policies improved conditions in the U.S. That was also a new low in our tracking.

The fundamental problem for Trump is that he promised prices would fall, but voters are getting the opposite. So long as prices remain elevated from 2021-2022 levels, Trump will appear as breaking his promise on the economy. Of course, bringing prices back down to that level would require massive austerity and deflation, which would be bad for voters in all sorts of other ways. It is in this sense that Trump is screwed: He made big promises on an issue that voters are already skeptical of the president on, and has broken every single one.

This is similar to, but not the same as, the problem Biden/Kamala Harris faced in 2024, when they were touting a recovering economy based on official statistics that disagreed with how voters felt at the time. And, to go back to the Times piece, Trump might be able to claim that Walmart’s pre-made Thanksgiving meal is cheaper than it was in 2023 and that gas is down from 2022, but that message will fall on deaf ears — just like it did in 2024. (The Thanksgiving meal is also shrinkflated by half.)

I have been writing that because of heightened levels of economic anxiety among voters, the U.S. has entered a new era of anti-incumbent elections. Viewed through this lens, Trump and Republicans have few places to go. As friend of the blog Natalie Jackson put it last week, Republicans find themselves where Democrats were a year ago. I wonder if we are entering a new era of one-term presidencies until conditions improve.

Let’s spell this out as simple as we can: Voters are upset about prices and economic mobility. They are going to blame those problems on whichever party is in charge. In 2024, that was Biden and the Democrats. Now, it’s Trump and the Republicans.

A lot of things in U.S. politics are complex, but when it comes to economic anxiety and anti-incumbent sentiment it really is that simple.