Gallup: Most Americans say they are ‘worse off’ than they were four years ago

CV NEWS FEED // With the 2024 presidential election less than three weeks away, a majority of Americans believe they are worse off now than they were four years ago, according to a Gallup poll released Friday.

The percentage of Americans who now feel they are worse off than they were four years ago is higher than the percentage of voters who said the same in 1992, when incumbent President George H. W. Bush lost re-election by a wide margin.

In mid- to late-September, Gallup asked American voters, “Do you think you and your family are better off now than you were four years ago, or are you worse off now?”

Fifty-two percent of respondents said they “didn’t feel better.” Far fewer, 39%, said they were “better” and 9% described their situation as “same”.

A partisan breakdown of the results shows that the minority of voters who said they were “better off” compared to 2020, when Republican nominee Donald Trump was president, overwhelmingly identified with the Democratic Party.

Just under three-quarters (72%) of Democrats surveyed said they were “better.” Seven percent of Republican respondents said the same.

Just 35% of independent voters surveyed said they were “better off” – a percentage four points lower than the national average.

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Question: “Are you performing better than you were four years ago?” has become a common barometer for predicting the general mood of the country ahead of presidential elections since it was popularized by Ronald Reagan during his successful 1980 campaign.

Gallup asked voters to indicate whether they were “better” in four previous election cycles: 1992, 2004, 2012 and 2020.

Gallup Associate Director Mary Claire Evans wrote that “the 2024 response is most similar to 1992 among presidential election years in which Gallup asked this question.”

In 1992, 46% of respondents said their situation had not improved, 38% said they had gotten better, and 15% said their situation was the same.

In this cycle, the Democratic candidate, then-Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, defeated incumbent President Bush to become the nation’s 42nd president. Clinton ran as a political outsider.

Bush received only 37.4% of the popular vote in a three-way race. Nearly one in five voters backed third-place independent candidate Ross Perot.

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In 1984, 2004 and 2012 (all election cycles in which the incumbent won re-election), more Gallup poll respondents said they were better off than said they were worse off. In none of these election cycles did the percentage of voters who said they were better off exceed 50%.

The only time a majority of voters told Gallup they were better off was in September 2020: 55% answered the question yes, compared to just 33% who said they were not better off.

In that year’s election cycle, Trump, then the incumbent president, was also the Republican nominee. However, he still lost re-election to his Democratic opponent Joe Biden.

Evans offered an explanation for the diametrically opposed responses from voters to the “better off” question in 2020 and 2024:

The higher-than-usual percentage of U.S. adults saying they are worse off this year is largely because Republicans are much more likely to say so than opponents of the incumbent’s party in previous election years. Likewise, the higher-than-usual percentage of “better off” responses in 2020, when Donald Trump was in office, was driven by Republicans being much more likely to give that response than supporters of the incumbent’s party in previous election years.

On Friday, CatholicVote reported that economists EJ Anthony and Peter St. Onge determined “that after adjusting government statistics to more accurately measure inflation, it became clear that the country has been in recession for the past two years under the Biden-Harris administration.” .

In their study, the economists noted that their finding “stands in stark contrast to the establishment view that the U.S. economy is experiencing robust growth that for some reason the public is unable to absorb.”

“Indeed, our results are consistent with the perception of the American public, most of whom believe that we are in a recession,” Anthony and St. Onge added.

Shortly after the publication of Anthony’s study wrote on X (formerly Twitter): “You feel worse today than you did 4 years ago, because you do.”