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.
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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.
