Americans Voted to Make the American Economy Great Again
The American people re-elected Donald Trump in great part out of a rejection of the economy forged by the policies of Joe Biden and the Democratic Party and a desire for a revival of the prosperity of the former president’s first term.
The exit polling makes it very clear that this was an economy election, as Breitbart Business Digest has been consistently arguing for over a year. Sixty-three percent of voters said the economy was either “poor” or “not so good,” according to the exit polling from Fox News in partnership with the Associated Press. Of the 40 percent who described the economy as “not so good,” Trump won 59 percent of the vote. Of the 24 percent who said the economy was “poor,” Trump won 84 percent of the vote. (The numbers don’t quite add up due to rounding.)
An old rule of thumb in American politics is that candidates should avoid getting on the wrong side of any issue in which 60 percent of Americans agree. Kamala Harris and the Democrats were decidedly on the wrong side, frequently claiming that economic conditions were benign or even amazing. “An economy with an unemployment rate of 4 percent and a per-person GDP of $85,000 does not have to be made great again; it is great,” the Economist opined.
Harris won the voters who agreed. Seventy-nine percent of voters who viewed the economy as “excellent” voted for Harris, as did 83 percent of those who said the economy is “good.” The trouble is that this view—despite endorsements from all over the establishment financial media, economists, and other Democrats—was out of the mainstream of American opinion. Just seven percent of voters said the economy was excellent, and 30 percent said it was good.
Americans Decisively Rejected the Biden-Harris Economy
Historically, it is very hard for an incumbent party candidate to win when voters take such a dim view of the economy. Harris did her best to try to convince voters that she represented change rather than a continuation of the Biden administration’s unpopular economic policies. And there’s some evidence that she succeeded in convincing many voters that she would govern differently—despite a paucity of policy ideas that would have marked a departure.
But that was insufficient. Americans still did not trust Harris to be a better steward of the national economy. Forty-one percent said they thought she would handle the economy better, compared to 50 percent who said Trump would be better, the Fox News exit polling found.
This was particularly important in this election because so many Americans viewed the economy as their top issue. Thirty-nine percent of voters said the economy was the most important issue in this election—and Trump won 60 percent of their votes. Immigration, which is partly an economic issue, was the runner up, with 20 percent of voters saying it was the most important. Eighty-eight percent of those voters chose Trump.
Many journalists and economists vastly underestimated the value voters put on price stability. This is likely because it has been so long since this was a major political issue that it did not show up in their models—mental or formal—of voter behavior. They assumed that voters would care more about the unemployment rate, essentially a form of pundit nostalgia for the economic challenges of the Obama era. But voters now assume we can have the full-employment economy achieved under Trump for the first time in a generation, and so this is no longer salient.
It Was the Inflation, Stupid
The Fox News poll asked voters how concerned they were over the price of health care. This has usually been a strong point for Democrats. Not this time. Of the 54 percent of voters who said they were “very concerned” over health care prices, Trump got 54 percent of the vote, and Harris got 44 percent. Harris did best with those who said they were not very concerned or not at all concerned.
Forty-eight percent of voters said they were very concerned about the price of gasoline. Trump got 66 percent of their vote. Sixty-seven percent said they were very concerned over the cost of food and groceries. Trump got 60 percent of their vote—despite Harris’ promises to use price controls (which she misleading described as price gouging laws) to bring down the price of groceries. Harris got 80 percent of the vote of those who said they were not very or not at all concerned with food prices.
A gas pump displays current fuel prices and a sticker of President Joe Biden at a gas station in Arlington, Virginia, on March 16, 2022. (SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)
Housing costs have been a major headache for many Americans. A 51 percent majority said they were very concerned, and 56 percent voted for Trump. Apparently, Harris’s promises of tens of thousands of taxpayer-funded homebuyer subsidies was not very popular.
The polling on tariffs is striking. Harris must have repeated her line about tariffs being a national sales tax thousands of times over the past few months. But voter opinion on the issue was split evenly. Fifty percent opposed, and 49 percent supported “increasing taxes on goods imported to the U.S. from other countries,” according to the Fox News poll. Trump won 71 percent of the tariff supporters—and 28 percent of the tariff opponents.
The presidential election, in other words, was in significant part an economic referendum in which voters chose Trump and his economic policies. They voted for less inflation, more economic nationalism, and an economy they could feel great about again. That’s the mandate Trump will carry with him into the White House in January.
