General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe 2016 election was not about the economy and the 2020 election won't be either
Despite massive media-driven attempts to gaslight us about this, people did not turn to Trump out of economic worries. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won voters who listed "jobs" or "the economy" as their chief concern by 12 points. This was the same amount by which she won voters from the poorest half of the population (household income of $50K or less). The economic cohort Trump won most strongly was people in households making between $75K and $100K.
The problem was there just weren't enough voters who were concerned about the economy, because the economy was pretty good, and it's even better now. Barring a downturn, there will be even fewer economy voters next year.
What happens when voters don't have huge economic anxiety? They start worrying about stupid shit. Trump won voters who listed "immigration" as their chief concern by 30 points.
There's an interesting graph Pew sometimes does when they ask voters what their top concern is. They allow free-form answers and then group them into subjects. They then divide a square representing all the voters into a bunch of rectangles representing the issues they care most about. So, if half the respondents said "crime" and the other half said "jobs", they're draw a line down the center of the square and you'd have two equal sized rectangles. The interesting thing is that when you go back historically, Presidential elections with one big rectangle a ton of small rectangles are won by Democrats: Presidential elections with a bunch of more or less evenly sized rectangles are won by Republicans. When there's not a specific overwhelming problem to solve, voters don't mind letting Republicans do stupid shit.
Here's the bad news: there is not currently a specific overwhelming problem to solve. In 2016 Trump said everything was terrible and we needed radical change, and like idiots we ran with that framing ourselves and managed to hand him a "change" election with 4% unemployment. He's not going to do that again, and he's not going to run with our framing like we did with his.
The simple fact is this is as good as the economy has been in any living Americans' memory (yes, better than even the gilded 1950s), and it's going to be hard to convince voters otherwise (and the voters who are not enjoying the benefits of this economy, again, already back us by double digits).
applegrove
(118,006 posts)are retiring an mass. But why oh why are wages not going up as the markets roar and unemployment goes down? GOP does not want it that is why.
Recursion
(56,582 posts)The problem is, it was concentrated at the bottom of the income scale. All those states and cities that upped the minimum wage really had an impact, but it's only being seen by the poor, and the poor don't vote.
(Which brings up the weird fact that a large number of people voted both for Trump and for an increase in their state's minimum wage, which is just bizarre to me.)
tirebiter
(2,520 posts)There is inflation. Bought gas recently?
Recursion
(56,582 posts)Where it's gone up has been from tariff idiocy, but that still hasn't caused a price shock anywhere in particular.
leftstreet
(36,076 posts)Young people especially - housing eats up most of the paycheck
If both parties would focus on recruiting non and never voters, an economic message would work
But they won't do that. They'll spend millions on proper messaging to woo the last 10 voters in the country