But none of these adjustments would be large enough (in the space of just a few quarters) to matter much in voting models. Moreover, many additional factors affect a polity’s sense of overall well-being: health conditions, crime and safety, the size and scope of government, the quality and reliability of public services, immigration, and foreign affairs all play a role. Expectations, rather than just current conditions, also can influence voting. Here, polls show that Americans are pessimistic about their children’s economic future.
These factors’ relative importance waxes and wanes with economic conditions. Environmental concerns tend to rate highly in periods of prosperity, but less so when economic problems arise. During the 2020 pandemic-induced recession, there was broad support for immense government intervention. Yet by 2021, Americans wanted the government to do less.
All of this is bad news for Biden and the Democrats. Their narrow path to victory in this year’s midterms may depend on whether the Fed can engineer a sharp decline in the inflation rate without much of an increase in unemployment. That would be a rare feat in the history of the Misery Index.
Michael J. Boskin is Professor of Economics at Stanford University and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He was Chairman of George H.W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers from 1989 to 1993, and headed the so-called Boskin Commission, a congressional advisory body that highlighted errors in official U.S. inflation estimates.