The Collapse of Economic Confidence & Affordability Is Fueling Socialism

During the 2024 presidential campaign, pollster Scott Rasmussen predicted that voters would pick their preferred candidate based on how they perceived their personal finances. 

Needless to say, it didn't go well for Kamala Harris. 

Four years of rising prices and record-high inflation doomed the Democrat ticket--even though Joe Biden wasn't on the ballot. Harris didn't help herself when she flubbed a softball question from Sunny Hostin and couldn't come up with anything she'd do differently from Biden. Voters responded by handing President Donald Trump a commanding victory.

At the time, only 24% of voters said their personal finances were improving, according to RMG Research's polling for the Napolitan Institute. Conversely, 41% said their personal finances were getting worse. 

"People's perception of whether their personal finances are improving is the single most important indicator of how they will vote," Rasmussen told me last year, shortly before Election Day.

Fast forward to 2025 and it's now Trump who is facing his own challenges on the economy, which remains the single most important issue on the minds of Americans. Rasmussen asked the question again last week and found that just 26% of respondents think their personal finances are improving compared to 39% who say they're getting worse.

Americans haven't been this pessimistic since they elected Trump to clean up the Biden-Harris mess.

If these poll numbers aren't already a warning sign for Trump and Republicans in Congress, they need to recognize the threat. The window will quickly close on the GOP's governing agenda, putting their political prospects in peril ahead of next year's midterms. 

Democrats are already salivating at the prospect of turning Trump's economic advantage into a liability. Look no further than last week's elections in New Jersey and Virginia, where Democrats Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger used voters' economic anxiety against their Republican rivals--and won decisive victories as a result. The outcome was even worse for Republicans in the Virginia House of Delegates, where Democrats will have at least 64 of the 100 seats in January.

Even more alarming, New York City voters elected an unabashed socialist who promised to make affordability the centerpiece of his agenda as mayor. When have socialists ever made anything affordable? It didn't matter.

In response to Zohran Mamdani's win, Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy warned his fellow Republicans to take notice. 

"Our side needs to focus on affordability," Ramaswamy said in a viral social media video. "Make the American dream affordable. Bring down costs--electric costs, grocery costs, health care costs and housing costs--and lay out how we're going to do it."

Rasmussen attributed some of voters' economic anxiety to the government shutdown, which began Oct. 1 and is nearing an end this week.

"This is a stunning collapse in confidence, coming as more and more people feel the impact of the government shutdown," Rasmussen told The Daily Signal. "We have been tracking this measure of economic confidence for years because it is the most important political indicator for any election cycle. People were very pessimistic throughout the Biden era, but pessimism began to decline as soon as Trump won the election. Now, all of those gains have been wiped out and voters are just as pessimistic about their finances as they were on the even of the 2024 election."

Trump, to his credit, has turned his attention to the economy in recent days. But he'll need more than the president's bully pulpit to convince Americans that things are improving. Another poll from the Napolitan Institute this week found voter sentiment heading in the wrong direction with 39% believing we're already in a recession.

Originally published at The Daily Signal