How Republicans turned economics into a vote-winner

The United States is bingeing on discussions over what went wrong for the Democrats in this week’s presidential election and one theme has, correctly, dominated: most voters were angry about economic issues, which outweighed any concerns they might have had about US President-elect Donald Trump’s criminality.

The efforts of US Vice-President Kamala Harris’ campaign to point out how strong the US economy is after four years of Joe Biden’s presidency – and how it is the envy of a world in which economies like the European Union and China are just treading water, if not slowing – backfired.

The US Federal Reserve might have tamed inflation but prices remain much higher than they were when Trump was last in office, making it more difficult for Americans to make ends meet regardless of how well the country’s factories are doing. To many voters, highlighting national economic health felt like rubbing salt in a wound.

Democrats are now scratching their heads about how Trump’s pledges to slap tariffs on nearly all imports, which risk undoing the Fed’s accomplishment and sending prices soaring again, did not seem to dent his popularity.

They’re not taking the full context into account. We need to consider the extent to which higher prices were linked with an influx of illegal border crossings, the ever-present rhetoric about other countries stealing American jobs – China first and foremost – and gender-neutral bathrooms.

The effectiveness of the Biden administration’s efforts to address that is a completely different discussion, but the linkages were objectively faulty at best and downright deception at their worst.