If you’re trying to understand the US election outcome, this is the only graph you need:
I’m not saying “anti-incumbency” is everything. There are a lot of forces wrapped up within this graph. My unnuanced take is that that the pandemic hens came home to roost for incumbent parties. Every single bundle of pandemic policies, from the heaviest handed to the most laissez-faire, were characterized by inevitable trade-offs. People don’t like tradeoffs regardless of whether the bill is paid with a year of doubled fatalities, two years of tripled unemployment, or three years of quadrupled inflation. And that’s why I think incumbent parties, be it US Democrats or UK Tories, lost significant ground. If you want to parse it farther, you could argue US Republicans should be disappointed they didn’t win more given how well opposition parties performed elsewhere.
None of that will change the Take Economy, of course. Thousands of pundits, published or barstool, are all describing in exquisite detail exactly the manner in which this election is a referendum on how the Democrats handled exactly the issue they personally happen to care the most about. It doesn’t mean any one of their opinions is narrowly wrong. I’m sure there was a more perfect campaign to be run, if only because there always is and was.
National politics is rarely a referendum and it’s never just the will of the people. It’s a chaotic system. It’s the weather. We forecast the weather. We makes plans. We accomodate, mitigate, and celebrate. And yes, sometimes we just try to survive it. But we can’t control it.
Economist Writing Every Day 
Nice post 🌺🌺
LikeLike