Are Republicans paying attention?
Donald Trump and the Republican Party won the 2024 general election on three issues: (1) the general discontent with the Biden-era economy, inflation, and high interest rates; (2) the sense that Democrats were too Woke and hard left on immigration, trans issues, and DEI; (3) and the widespread belief that Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and their allies in the Democratic Party had ignored and obfuscated Biden’s obvious frailties and then swapped a senile old man at the last minute for an incompetent apparatchik.
It was, of course, a recipe for success in November 2024 — but if you look closely, the 2024 election should have cautioned Republicans about over-reading their mandate.
The result in the House was razor thin: Republicans actually lost a seat on net, after winning the popular vote by just 2.6 percent. They began the 119th Congress in January 2025 with a mere five-seat majority.
Trump swept all seven swing states and the popular vote, as he constantly reminds us. That is a significant accomplishment. And it was, in my view, the most remarkable political comeback in American history.
But Trump won with just a plurality of the total vote (49.8 percent) and with a margin of just 1.5 points over Harris. Trump’s 2024 win wasn’t anything like George H. W. Bush’s 7.8-point win in 1988. It wasn’t even Barack Obama’s 7.2-point win in 2008.
Over the prism of a dozen years, one could very easily read the results of the last three presidential elections as a function of the American people firing the incumbent party and turning to the opposition party in a desperate attempt to get the economy moving again.
In 2016, the American people took a flier on Trump — a man who sold himself as a world-class businessman and negotiator — to extricate the country from the sluggish growth of the post-financial crisis Obama years.
In 2020, the American people, exhausted by the chaos, turmoil, and pain of the pandemic year, gave Joe Biden a chance at a “return to normalcy.”
In 2024, the American people, frustrated by Biden-era inflation, fired the Democrats and gave Trump a chance at bringing back the economic conditions of 2017–2019.
After his victory in the New York City mayoral race, there will be an avalanche of attention on Zohran Mamdani and his Bernie Sanders-inflected “democratic socialism.” But are young Americans truly turning to socialism? Will we see AOC romp to the Democratic nomination in three years? Perhaps. There is certainly a rising popularity and energy around those kinds of politics.
But the better way to understand what happened in New York (and elsewhere in purple and even red states) is that Americans — whether they consider themselves Democratic, Republican, or independent — are once again frustrated by the state of the economy, and they’re taking it out on incumbents. Americans feel poorer — because inflation in the post-pandemic era remains stubbornly high (something like 50 percent higher than the 2 percent target set by the Fed as an acceptable standard) while their incomes have not kept pace.
What’s more, Donald Trump — via his “Liberation Day” tariffs — has taken political ownership of this economy. It’s possible, perhaps even likely, that Trump could have blamed the current state of the economy and stubbornly high prices on the still unpopular Joe Biden. After all, very few Americans thought Biden left the American economy in great shape, and there are still good memories around the economy of the pre-pandemic Trump years. That’s why they fired Biden/Harris and hired Trump! But every American knows that Trump’s tariffs released uncontrollable forces into markets already spooked by potential Artificial Intelligence-induced changes, already encumbered by high interest rates, and already inching towards the tail end of the business cycle.
If the economy were booming, Trump wouldn’t be so unpopular. As of today, the RealClearPolitics average has him at –11 approval, 43.4 to 54.4. As recently as March (shortly before Liberation Day), Trump could boast of a positive approval rating.
The issue of affordability — high prices, high interest rates, inflation, sluggish wage growth — will be everything next year. If Republicans don’t figure out a way to address that priority, no amount of complaining about Zohran Mamdani and the rise of socialism is going to save them.
Correction: George H. W. Bush, not Ronald Reagan, won the 1988 election with a 7.8 point margin. Reagan, however, won in ’84 with an 18 point margin.