SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Maybe the major lesson you might take from this week's election is that people don't like to pay more for everyday expenses. When inflation takes off, the politicians in power often pay for it. NPR's Scott Horsley reports.
SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: People have lots of reasons for voting the way they do - immigration, the culture wars. But undoubtedly, one of the biggest drivers for voters backing Donald Trump was inflation.
THERESA WOLFE: It affects my budget and everyone I know because we're paying more for groceries. It's - actually, it's shocking.
HORSLEY: That's Theresa Wolfe, who lives in St. Petersburg, Florida. We first spoke a few months ago, and she told me how unhappy she was about the high cost of living, not just groceries but rent and insurance, too. So I called her back this week to hear how she's feeling after the election.
WOLFE: I have to tell you my first reaction was relief.
HORSLEY: Trump and other Republicans hammered on inflation throughout the campaign, and that message hit a nerve.
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DONALD TRUMP: We're going to make America wealthy again, and we're going to make America affordable again. We have to get the prices down.
HORSLEY: A survey by The Associated Press found high prices were the number one concern for about half of all Trump voters. And that's not a surprise. Maziar Minovi, who heads the Eurasia Group, has studied dozens of elections going back decades and found whenever there's a sustained period of high inflation, voters are twice as likely to lose faith in the people running the government.
MAZIAR MINOVI: When there is an inflationary shock across the world, the risk of the incumbents getting kicked out - no matter what party or persuasion they are - goes up a lot.
HORSLEY: And Vice President Harris was saddled with that incumbent label. The most recent bout of high inflation has toppled governments around the world, from Italy and Argentina to Pakistan and the U.K.
ERNIE TEDESCHI: People were just pissed off, and they voted incumbents out.
HORSLEY: Ernie Tedeschi is an economist who served in the Biden administration and is now with the Yale Budget Lab. The worldwide inflation spike was primarily driven by the aftershocks of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. But policymakers in the U.S. may have amplified the price pressure by pumping trillions of dollars into the economy. That started during the Trump administration and continued under President Biden when Democrats in Congress passed the $1.9 trillion American rescue plan. Speaking on CNBC early in 2021, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen urged lawmakers to go big.
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JANET YELLEN: I think the price of doing too little is much higher than the price of doing something big. We think that the benefits will far outweigh the costs in the longer run.
HORSLEY: That thinking was informed in part by the sluggish recovery after the great financial crisis when Democrats felt the government hadn't done enough to boost the economy. And there was a payoff this time for going big. Employers added millions of jobs. Unemployment fell to its lowest level in decades and the U.S. economy bounced back faster than most other countries. Still, in the minds of many Americans, those gains were outweighed by the soaring cost of living. Tedeschi acknowledges you can't eat GDP.
TEDESCHI: We as economists have to be humble that those sorts of measures don't speak to normal people and that normal people have other measures that speak to their well-being.
HORSLEY: Maybe he says people would have preferred a more sluggish recovery so long as it came with lower prices. After all, Barack Obama handily won reelection in 2012, even though the unemployment rate was still 7.7%. Trump hasn't offered a real prescription to lower prices other than increased oil drilling, and economists say some of his proposals - like sweeping tariffs and mass deportation - would likely make inflation worse. Nevertheless, millions of voters like Theresa Wolfe were frustrated enough to take a chance.
WOLFE: The facts are if inflation was where it should be and food prices had come down and rents are under control, honestly, I don't think there's any way that Trump would have been reelected.
HORSLEY: Scott Horsley, NPR News, Washington. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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