Democrats are deservedly disheartened at the drubbing voters administered in the 2024 elections. Americans didn’t just restore Donald Trump to the White House, they also gave Republicans control of both houses of Congress and exiled the Democratic Party to the political wilderness.
Trumpism rules, it seems. But there could be another trend at work that will boomerang back on to Trump, eventually: Americans may be chronically gloomy about stagnating living standards and bound to take it out on whoever is in charge.
For three elections in a row, voters have bounced the incumbent party from the White House. Trump upset Hillary Clinton in 2016 in what was partly a vote against the slow-growing Barack Obama economy. Joe Biden beat Trump in 2020 amid widespread dissatisfaction with Trump’s handling of the COVID pandemic.
The 2024 election was a referendum on the policies of Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, who replaced Biden atop the Democratic ticket in August. The outcome: thumbs down, especially on economic issues.
The incumbent party normally has a decisive advantage in presidential elections, whether the president is running for another term or passing the torch to a successor. Unless there's a recession, the incumbent party typically wins. Yet there was no recession in 2016, when voters replaced the incumbent Democrat with a Republican. There was a short recession in 2020, but it ended seven months before Election Day, when voters ejected Trump. And despite high inflation, there’s been no recession under Biden. The power of incumbency simply isn’t what it used to be.
Inflation was clearly ruinous for Biden and Harris, but so was their inability to fix intractable problems that go back decades. In a recent Harvard CAPS/Harris poll, the economy ranked as the top issue for 2024 voters and 58% rated the economy as “weak.” Of people who cast a ballot, 76% said they voted for change.
Trump was the change candidate because he’s been on the sidelines for the past four years — and there were no other choices. So will Trump bring the change Americans want? On some issues — notably immigration — he could, because the president has the authority to set policy in a way that will make a difference. But there’s a good chance many of the problems vexing voters in 2024 will be just as nettlesome in 2028, when Trump will be the incumbent promoting his own vice president, JD Vance, as the future of Trumpism.
President Joe Biden meets with President-elect Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House, Wednesday, Nov. 13, 2024, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci) ·ASSOCIATED PRESS
America has become a wrong-track country. For the last 20 years, more than half of all Americans have been unhappy with the direction of the country, according to Gallup. There was an uptick in satisfaction under Trump, but that crashed amid COVID. The broader trend is stark: Not once during the last 20 years has satisfaction approached the peaks of the 1990s, when Bill Clinton was president, or the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan served two terms.
The most likely explanation for this national gloom is worsening wealth and income inequality, with well-educated workers in dynamic areas getting ahead and undereducated workers in stagnant parts of the country falling behind. Wealth for college graduates has grown by 356% since 2000, according to Federal Reserve data. Wealth for Americans with just a high school degree has grown by just 100% during the same time frame. The portion of wealth held by college grads has grown from 60% to 74% since 2000. For high-school grads, it has dropped from 17% to 9%.
There’s nothing wrong with well-educated people in the right places getting wealthier. But there’s a lot wrong with lesser-educated people who make up the majority of the US population getting poorer. Trump appeals to that demographic when he rails against companies shipping jobs overseas and migrants working for less pay than Americans might.
In the 2024 election, 43% of voters had a college degree, while 57% did not. Less-educated Americans are decisive in national elections. They’re the ones demanding change, in the form of paychecks that stretch further and improving living standards. But there’s no simple cure for a tech-based service economy that has left millions of workers behind.
Trump’s plan to slap new tariffs on imports and deport millions of undocumented migrants won’t do anything to restore the sort of high-paying manufacturing jobs millions of Americans relied on 50 years ago. Automation, artificial intelligence, and agile supply chains provide the efficiency big companies crave. They don’t want to hire more Americans to do manual labor for higher pay, and Trump can’t browbeat them into doing so.
Some cities and states have programs to match employers with local schools that train the types of workers they need, which helps young people develop the skills that will help them get ahead. Trump hasn’t proposed anything like that. Instead, he falls back on lazy, supply-side orthodoxy: Cut taxes and regulations and turn businesses loose to grow and prosper. Developments of the last 40 years show that this enriches the shareholder class, with little trickling down to workers.
If anything, Trump could put upward pressure on prices, just as inflation seems to be abating, by deporting migrants who work on farms and at processing plants and making imported products more expensive through higher tariffs. Trump hasn’t proposed anything to lower housing costs, and interest rates are already drifting upward in anticipation of slightly higher inflation and a lot more deficit spending under Trump. If that happens, rent and groceries could take a bigger bite out of the typical paycheck four years from now.
Biden’s record as president holds cautionary notes for Trump and other future presidents. Biden actually got measurable results that ought to boost blue-collar fortunes. He signed laws funding infrastructure buildout, semiconductor manufacturing, and green energy investment, which will subsidize employment in those fields years into the future. Some provisions of those laws require employers getting subsidies to hire unionized workers. The economy, meanwhile, has added 685,000 manufacturing jobs since Biden took office, twice the number under Trump before COVID hit and unemployment soared.
None of that impressed voters in 2024, and Trump could have just as much difficulty moving the needle during the next four years. And in 2028, the Trumpist candidate will be the incumbent trying to sell voters on more of the same.
