How the Popular Economic Notions are not Good Predictors for Voting Patterns and Election Outcomes

• The US GDP growth was strong and the strongest amongst developed economies .
• The US consumption numbers were mildly strong , but not weak definitely
• The US inflation has come down from the peak of post Covid 9% + to just around 2%+
• US wage growth was moderately up
• US Labour market was powerful, with nearly 2 job openings for every job seeker
• And the Economy was rated as the Top Concern by Voters.

Given this backdrop, it was expected that Bidenomics and its Heir Apparent , VP Harris , would give a tough fight to the Republicans .

Harris ended with around 68 million+ votes in all.

Trump won with 72 million+ votes in all.

In 2020, Joe Biden has got 81 million+ votes.

We will know what all went wrong, but one key message is that aggregate economic figures dont work for Voters.

1. Voters vote on their own experience and to predict that segmented, granular data is needed.
2. The private capex number was not rising, meaning privately employed Voters were not so sure of continued employment
3. Consumption was strong in the wealthiest segments of the US Consumer, but the bottom three deciles were challenged
4. Employment numbers masked a huge cohort of people who just dropped out permanently from looking for employment after unsuccessfully trying for many months post the big Covid era job losses.
5. Strong Labour markets in aggregate hid the fact that huge job gains were happening in government and agency jobs and these were not spread across the economy . 
6. The tighter Regulations of the Obama era, post GFC pendulum swing against businesses are still constraining major sectors and small business owners.
7. What was hidden under the Inflation curve from 2% to 9% to back to near 2% was the inflation adjusted wages. These went up a huge 7% in Trump 1.0. In Biden's term, this DECLINED by 0.5% and at the time of high inflation , is DECLINED 3.8%.
8. People on the ground, in the farming communities, in the suburbs, were just not seeing the high fiscal deficit induced economic growth's benefits.

Given this is a social media post, academic economists will attack it as "over simplification".

But the substantive fact is , this explains the Voter behaviour and the Election Outcome.

When the top 3 concerns of Voters were the Economy, Inflation and Immigration, any successful campaign by an incumbent/ Heir Apparent of the incumbent needed to address Real World issues.

There is a chance that economists missed reading this. 

The Markets read it better, as evidenced by the huge traction of  and the returns from the so called " Trump Trade".

Prediction markets with all their concomitant defects, got it right while the pollsters did not get it right, yet again.

Believe in the Common Sense Sagacity of the Markets .