Like everyone who follows this stuff, I’m a bit awe-struck by the polling shift since Vice President Kamala Harris replaced President Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket. We still don’t know what will happen on Election Day; Harris could easily lose, despite her improved poll numbers. But if she wins, one way to think about what happened will be to say that Republicans were trying to replay the wrong election.
You see, G.O.P. messaging has been quite explicitly modeled on Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign, when he asked, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” Applying this approach in 2024 has always been problematic, depending as it does on voters forgetting what 2020, with its soaring unemployment and mass deaths, was really like. But it’s now looking as if this election may bear more resemblance to 1984, when Reagan won a landslide victory with the theme “Morning in America.”
Before you dismiss this comparison, consider the actual state of America in 1984, which was a lot more problematic than the legend — carefully cultivated by conservatives over the years — would have it. In November of that year, the unemployment rate was 7.2 percent, compared with 4.3 percent now; inflation was just over 4 percent, compared with the current 2.9 percent. The homicide rate was much higher than the rate today.
But unemployment and inflation had come down from their peaks a few years earlier, and many Americans felt that the nation was emerging from the despondency that gripped it in 1980. In retrospect, the celebration was premature: The 1980s were a time of soaring inequality and deindustrialization, and Bill Clinton won in 1992 basically by running against the Reagan-George H.W. Bush economic legacy. But the hollowness of “Morning in America” wouldn’t become apparent until much later.
The parallel with current politics is that the state of America in 2024 isn’t just objectively very good, particularly when compared with other wealthy nations; it has also been improving rapidly along multiple dimensions. The percentage of prime-age Americans employed is at a 23-year high. Inflation is down by about two-thirds from its peak in 2022. Violent crime, which rose significantly during Donald Trump’s last year in office, has been falling fast.
Yet voters didn’t seem to be feeling the good news, and until recently Trump seemed to be running a successful campaign centered on false claims that crime is “through the roof” and that we may be in “the throes of a depression.” Oh, and that the price of bacon has quadrupled.
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