Trump — “It’s the economy, stupid!”

Special Note: Please listen to my interview with Brian Callanan of the Seattle Channel on his podcast Seattle News, Views, and Brews. I describe why Donald Trump won the election and what we can expect from his second presidential term.

Bill Clinton’s strategist, Jim Carville, coined the quip “It’s the economy, stupid!” to explain his successful strategy for winning the 1992 U.S. presidential election against incumbent George H. W. Although Carville advised Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, he apparently didn’t share that advice with Harris.

In Harris’s defense, as one pundit explained, any incumbent president, and by extension, the Vice President, would have been blamed for the hammering our economy suffered by Covid’s tailwind. Inflation was a scourge that hurt Harris as it did for two previous presidents, Ford and Carter, who lost after serving one term due to significant inflation.

Multiple polls before the election ranked the economy as the top issue, and Trump received a higher approval rate for managing the economy than Biden. However, these views were based on perceptions, and the data often didn’t support them.

For instance, small businesses have grown by over 50% since Trump’s administration. Biden’s regulations on large corporations allowed smaller businesses to survive. This…