Trump boasts the U.S. has ‘the greatest economy actually ever’—human nature suggests this is precisely the wrong message for voters
“I inherited a mess,” President Trump told a crowd of supporters in Georgia last Thursday, referring to the U.S. economy. The Democrats “caused the affordability problem, and we’ve fixed it!” he bragged. Two days earlier on Business, he had made an even more grand claim: “I think we have the greatest economy actually ever in history.”
When a president speaks like that 37 weeks before the mid-term elections, it means one thing: The economy is the number one issue, and it’s a problem for the incumbent party because a large number of voters don’t believe the economy is doing well at all. The reason this is a problem is clear. History shows it never works to tell unhappy voters that they actually live in a wonderful economy, and research indicates that humans are hard-wired to believe what they feel rather than what someone else tells them. Voters aren’t going to change their minds.
By the numbers, the U.S. economy may not be the greatest ever, but it certainly isn’t bad. Last year , which is more than most economists expected. The , and wages have grown, though not spectacularly.
That’s reality, but what counts in politics is how voters feel, and most don’t feel content. Consumer sentiment is about 20% below what it was when Trump was inaugurated, according to on that metric. Not everyone is gloomy. “Sentiment surged for consumers with the largest stock portfolios,” says Michigan consumer survey director Joanne Hsu, but “it stagnated and remained at dismal levels” for the far more people without stocks.
Obvious question: If the economy is at least okay, why do millions of Americans think it’s terrible? The answer is that our brains are not hard-wired to think like economists. We are hard-wired for survival, so we pay far more attention to bad news, and remember it much longer, than good news. For example, the high levels of inflation in the early 1980s traumatized consumers for years. By mid-1985, inflation had dropped from its peak of 14.8% in 1980 to just 3.8%, yet Gallup polling showed that some 20 million adults considered inflation “the most important problem facing the U.S.”
That wasn’t a fluke. Researchers have found that we’ll pay twice as much to avoid a bad outcome as we’ll pay to get a good outcome that is quantitatively the same. The possibility of a bad outcome looms larger in our minds, which is why we remember bad outcomes longer. Last year, the prices of beef, dairy, coffee, shoes, clothing—basic needs—rose by double-digit percentages, and voters are likely to remember that pain regardless of where prices go next or how much GDP might increase. By contrast, consider how we feel about the costs of certain other basic needs for many people: gasoline and propane. Those prices declined last year. Ask your friends if they knew that.
As a potential preview of this year’s elections, consider President George H.W. Bush’s 1992 reelection campaign. A brief, mild recession occurred during his term and ended 19 months before Election Day. When the campaign season arrived, he told voters the economy was booming, and he was correct. His opponent, Bill Clinton, famously told voters, “I feel your pain,” and he won. He spoke to the most powerful part of the human brain.
Of course, Trump isn’t on the ballot this year, and there was no recession last year. Much will happen before Nov. 3. But experience suggests that a strategy of telling voters the U.S. economy is the greatest in history, when their hard-wired brains tell them otherwise, will be a difficult path to keeping control of Congress.