The economic vibes are very bad for Republicans

Why economic pessimism and social immobility may create a new era of anti-incumbent elections

Dear members,

There have been a lot of 2024 retrospectives and postmortems published recently, but few really focus on the role of economic conditions in setting the Democratic Party up for failure from the start. The more big-picture data we get on the election, the more it’s obvious that Biden was unpopular, and Harris lost, in large part due to low economic sentiment — and not because the economy was crashing concurrently, but because voters had already decided to vote against them based on earlier conditions (high inflation in 2022-2023).

But is that new? One of the most prominent recent trends in American politics is a feeling that normal people are falling behind while corporations and the wealthy get ahead. That was the motivating sentiment behind Bernie Sanders’ campaigns in 2016 and 2020, and Trump’s in 2016 and especially 2024.

In today’s newsletter, I push the data back to 2008 and look at how economic sentiment is persistently sharply negative along multiple dimensions, not just the usual questions, and how people feel the system is rigged against them. This is still true today in 2025.

My theory: In today’s political climate, incumbency isn’t an advantage; it’s a curse. Voters don’t reward stability because the status quo is bad for them. Instead, they punish whoever’s in charge.

As we saw in 2024, that dynamic can single-handedly doom incumbents.

After two decades of bad economic evaluations, are parties doomed to serving single terms as president? Is the 2026/2028 cake already cooked?

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A bad economy early can shape perceptions of a whole presidential term