Since everyone else has given their two cents on the cause of Harris’ defeat, I guess I will weigh in with my two cents. This comes with the warning; I am an economist, so everything looks like a nail to me.

First, there is one point that should be front and center in every discussion of the election results. Harris won overwhelmingly among more informed voters who follow the news closely. She got clobbered among less informed voters, people who, by their self-description, say they follow the news little or not at all.

This is important because it is not plausible that a big factor in Harris defeat could have been positions she took long ago, like when she was running for president in 2019. Whether those positions helped her or hurt her, the fact is that Harris almost certainly won by a large margin by people who were aware of her 2019 presidential campaign.

Rather, insofar as issues mattered in a very close election (Trump’s popular vote margin was less than Hilary Clinton’s in 2016), it had to be issues that the least informed voters could be aware of. This is where the price of eggs, or more generally the cost of living comes in.

The cost of living did rise rapidly under the Biden-Harris administration. We know this was almost entirely due to the pandemic, since almost every other country had similar inflation. It isn’t plausible to argue that France, Germany, and Australia all had high inflation because of Biden’s recovery package.

But that is not what the public saw or heard. The public heard Donald Trump endlessly harping on high grocery prices and that he would bring them down. The media (I mean the NYT and CNN, not Fox and OANN) largely went along with this line, rarely pointing out that it was pandemic inflation, as opposed to Biden inflation.

We were told the public blames Biden for inflation not the pandemic. This really meant that it was the media that blamed Biden.They didn’t report on inflation from the pandemic as being “pandemic inflation” in the same way they felt the need to always refer to the withdrawal from Afghanistan as the “disastrous withdrawal” from Afghanistan.

In effect, since Trump and the Republicans’ charges went largely unanswered, and even reinforced by the media, the vast majority of the public believed them. Biden certainly deserves much blame on this account since his physical and mental state left him unprepared to make the aggressive defense of his policies that was needed.

I will also add a point that should be obvious but has confused many of our elite pundits. It’s true that the people who voted for Trump in large numbers do not follow the major media outlets, but this does not mean their views were not affected by what the NYT, NPR, and the rest report.

Contrary to what these pundits seem to believe, people do not live in hermetically sealed worlds. Even if people get their news from TikTok influencers or what their friend rants about over a beer, it’s likely that their sources views were in some ways affected by what appears in the major media outlets.

If these outlets were regularly reporting on “pandemic inflation” and highlighting the many successes of the Biden administration (half-century lows in unemployment, record rates of new business formation, fastest real wage growth at the bottom since the 60s), some of this would have percolated through to the least informed voters.

Instead, they were invariably hyping the negative. For example, last summer the New York Times told readers about a “two-tiered” economy highlighting a low-wage worker whose pay had not kept pace with prices, even as the piece itself acknowledged this person was atypical. The pay of most low-wage workers had substantially outpaced prices.

The NYT also told readers that recent college grads couldn’t find jobs. This was at a time when the unemployment rate for recent grads was near a 20-year low. And the NYT, CNN, and the rest repeatedly highlighted the claim that young people were giving up on ever being able to own a home. They were doing this even when homeownership rates among the young were above their pre-pandemic peak.

My argument is that this bad news about the economy became part of the message that millions of least informed voters had in their heads when they cast their votes in November. To be clear, I don’t mean this was the only factor.

Many of these people heard Trump’s rants about DEI, and they noticed that the Democratic candidate was a Black woman. That surely mattered. I’m sure the devastation in Gaza also bothered many voters and likely discouraged many young people from voting. But if we’re looking for a single factor that had a large impact of many low-informed voters, I would argue that inflation topped the list.

Again, I would point to Trump’s fixation on grocery prices. I am not one to defer to Trump’s genius, but he does have a successful political track record. If he felt it was important to talk about grocery prices, it is reasonable to believe that he had good polling data indicating that this would resonate with voters.

I’ll also add as an aside my Twitter experience. I would frequently post notes on Elon’s site about good economic news, such as low unemployment, rising real wages, or slowing inflation. These posts would invariably provoke a rash of responses about how everyone had to work three jobs and still couldn’t pay for their rent or groceries.

After the election, the starving masses disappeared from Twitter. To be clear, I know tens of millions of people are really struggling, so I am not mocking them at all. The point is just that they were not on Twitter in 2019, and they are not there now. Obviously, someone working with Musk felt it was politically useful to have a bot army constantly trash the economy on his site.

Of course, Trump and Musk can be wrong about what matters to voters, but I would take their insights seriously. They both felt that inflation was a very big deal. I think they were right.

Lessons for the Battle to Save Democracy

Trump is engaged in an unprecedented attack on our democracy, ignoring all sorts of laws and the Constitution itself. I would never tell people not to confront this head on in every way we can. This is absolutely necessary, but I would also talk about the price of eggs.

Trump promised people that he would lower the price of groceries beginning on day one. While we know he has been busy making plans to take over Canada, Greenland, and Gaza, and sending Elon into our personal banking and medical records, we haven’t heard much about his plans to lower prices.

Of course, Trump has no such plans. The claim that he would bring down prices was always a lie. And not only is he not bringing down prices, the cost of some items, such as coffee and eggs, is going through the roof.

This seems a great point to drive home. There may be many people who don’t know about the Constitutional issues or take seriously Trump’s plans for his resort in Gaza, but they do see skyrocketing egg prices at the supermarket and the egg surcharge they pay at Waffle House.

And, for what it’s worth, Elon Musk seems to agree with my political assessment. My posts on Twitter in the last couple of months had been getting very little engagement, however my posts on egg prices have led to a flock of outraged responses. Obviously, the site has some sort of algorithm designed to trigger responses to this sort of complaint about Trump.

I will add that I know the criticism is not entirely fair. The jump in egg prices was due to an outbreak of Avian flu that occurred before Trump took office, although how he deals with the outbreak going forward is on him.

But this is very similar to the story of the pandemic and Biden. The media kept telling us that people don’t blame the pandemic for inflation, they blame Biden. If Biden can be nailed for inflation caused by the pandemic, we should be able to nail Trump for soaring egg prices caused by Avian flu. After all, people don’t see Avian flu, they see high egg prices.

Again, we have to hit Trump head on for his law-breaking and its consequences. But for my money, I’m listening to what Elon Musk is telling us. I’m going to talk about egg prices.