By now we are all familiar with the refrain that inflation cost Democrats the election. Critical accounts blame Joe Biden for driving prices higher with federal spending, while sympathetic treatments note a worldwide trend of inflation toppling governments around the world.
Neither assessment is quite right. Voters did indeed reject Kamala Harris over frustration with the Biden economy, but voters across the world are throwing out incumbents due to outrage over a very broad array of economic conditions. In Japan, inflation barely raised its head after the pandemic, and yet the reigning conservative government just took its biggest electoral hit in decades as its economy slips in and out of recession. The German economy hasn’t grown since the pandemic, and voters appear ready to oust the ruling center-left coalition as soon as they can. The U.K. is on its fourth prime minister since the pandemic and seems eager for a fifth.
The point here is not that the Biden administration was powerless to fight inflation—merely that every economic path out of the pandemic appears to have been durably unpopular. Much of the postmortem analysis of Biden’s economic performance amounts to a kind of wonked-up wishcasting: appeals