Why is Donald Trump continuing to poll so strongly with voters?bingo bonga
As unpalatable as a second Trump term would be, many pundits who tackle this question have ignored a striking fact: The typical household’s living standard improved during the three Trump years before the pandemic. Under President Biden, Americans have (at best) struggled to keep even with inflation.
Mr. Trump’s huge personal negatives — his meanspirited personality, his toadying to dictators and shunning of American allies and his unpardonable effort to steal an election — should more than offset his economic record. The old saw that Mussolini got the trains to run on time should not be understood as an endorsement.
But it is one thing to loathe Mr. Trump and hope for his defeat. It is another to wish away his successes or, as has become common, to ascribe his popularity to voter prejudices or weaknesses of character. The leitmotif in such arguments is that blue voters are rational political actors voting on merit while Trump is appealing primarily, if not exclusively, to irrational semi-citizens devoid of even self-interested calculation.
That might be. But it can’t be ignored that they might also have experienced the pointed rise, after adjusting for inflation, in the median household income — how the typical family lives — before the pandemic: 10.5 percent from 2016 to 2019. And inequality contracted noticeably. Thus, the 2020 Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances on (roughly) the Trump era: “In grouping families by wealth, families at the top of the distribution experienced a sharp decline in average income (following particularly outsized gains over the 2010-16 period), whereas families in the lower and middle portions of the wealth distribution all saw modest gains.”
This is not to say that Mr. Trump’s policies caused inequality to fall (a complicated question) or were responsible for most of the economy’s improvement. While his tax cuts were a stimulant, his tariffs on imported steel, a signature policy, probably cost the country more jobs in manufacturing than it gained in steel, at great expense to American consumers.
And modern economies are not puppets dancing to a president’s string; they are susceptible to many influences beyond the control of one official, even those of an Oval Office bully. Moreover, Mr. Trump inherited a strong tailwind; real median household income rose by almost 12 percent during the second term of his predecessor Barack Obama. Mr. Trump was fortunate.
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