Here's the real reason Trump won in 2024, according to economists.
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Daniel de Visé, USA TODAYNovember 5, 2025 at 7:05 AM
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Many observers saw the 2024 election as a triumphal affirmation of Donald Trump’s Republican agenda, and as a sweeping repudiation of the Democrats.
Looking back on that day, Nov. 5, 2024, countless narratives have portrayed a Democratic Party in disarray, leaderless and rudderless, while Trump and the Republicans seized a historic mandate to remake American government.
One year later, a number of economists say the outcome of the 2024 election wasn’t really about partisan politics. For many voters, the defining issue on Election Day was economics – more specifically, inflation: the price of eggs.
“It’s the high inflation, the high cost of living that did them in,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. “It was a very high bar to get over.”
Inflation hit a 40-year peak of 9.1% in the summer of 2022. Prices soared around the world that year, a global inflation crisis fueled by COVID 19-era supply chain shortages and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
By Election Day, consumer prices stood more than 20% higher than in 2020.
Exit polls showed that runaway inflation loomed large in Trump’s victory over Democrat Kamala Harris. In an ABC News poll, more than two-thirds of voters said the economy was in bad shape. In a CBS News poll, three-quarters of voters said inflation was a hardship.
To some extent, inflation doomed the Democrats.
“Inflation was a huge issue in that election,” said Desmond Lachman, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a libertarian thinktank. “It seems that most people were really upset about it.”
Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump takes the stage to address supporters at his rally, at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Florida, U.S., November 6, 2024.Why did Trump win in 2024? Theories abound.
In the year since, pollsters and pundits have hatched many theories to explain Trump’s victory, part of a larger Republican rout that left them in command of all three branches of government: The presidency, both houses of Congress and a conservative Supreme Court.
One theory holds that the Democrats picked bad candidates, starting with an aging President Joe Biden and then swapping in Harris after Biden stepped aside.
Another explanation: Trump built an insurmountable coalition of multi-ethnic, working-class voters, especially men.
And another: The election signaled America was swinging to the right, or that voters had abandoned Harris and the Democrats.
Biden himself told USA TODAY that he could have won the election, had he not chosen to exit the campaign under pressure from his party.
The COVID-19 pandemic set off a global inflation crisis that toppled many world leaders.Pandemic-era inflation toppled dozens of world leaders
Yet, global trends suggest either Biden or Harris would have faced an uphill battle against inflation in 2024.
Between 2020 and 2024, incumbents lost their jobs in 40 of 54 elections held in Western democracies, according to Steven Levitsky, a Harvard political scientist, speaking to the .
One casualty of global inflation was Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister, who left office this year amid rising outrage over the cost of living.
“Inflation resulting from COVID overturned elected leaders in most of the developed nations on the entire planet,” said Joshua Gotbaum, scholar in residence at the nonpartisan Brookings Institution. “The U.S. was not an exception.”
American voters blamed the Democrats for higher prices. Was that fair?
In March 2021, President Biden signed a $1.9 trillion stimulus bill, the American Rescue Plan, directing payments of up to $1,400 to pandemic-weary Americans. The Trump administration had already sent two rounds of stimulus checks in 2020.
Many economists say Biden’s stimulus package made inflation worse.
“The American Rescue Plan was an enormous policy error,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the center-right American Action Forum.
But America’s inflation crisis did not happen in a vacuum.
When USA TODAY polled seven prominent economists last November, most cited the global pandemic, rather than Biden, as the primary cause of rising prices.
US Customs and Border Protection officers make an arrest after pulling a person out of their vehicle outside a Federal Immigration raid at Glass House Farms in Camarillo, California, on July 10, 2025.It wasn't all about the economy in 2024
Inflation wasn’t the only reason the Democrats lost the presidency.
Many accounts have focused on Biden’s decline and 11th-hour exit as pivotal factors in Trump’s victory.
Immigration, too, factored into the Democrats' defeat. Trump vowed to stem the tide of illegal border crossings under Biden and the Democrats.
“I think Trump was elected for two reasons,” Holtz-Eakin said. “Reason number 1 was immigration-slash-border crossing issues, and number 2 was the economy.”
Biden and Harris claimed the 2024 economy was strong. By many measures, it was. The economy was growing. Unemployment was low. The stock market was high.
Nonetheless, most Americans thought the country was on the wrong track. And they blamed the Democrats.
“I think it’s certainly true that Trump benefited politically from the fact that he wasn’t in office when we saw the worst of that inflation,” said Ryan Bourne, an economist at the libertarian Cato Institute.
In 2025, inflation is still on voters' minds
Just as consumer prices helped Trump and the Republicans win the White House in 2024, lingering inflation could hurt the party in 2025.
On the campaign trail, Trump promised to “end inflation.” In a “60 Minutes” interview that aired Nov. 2, Trump said he had fulfilled that pledge: “We have no inflation.”
In fact, annual inflation lingers at 3%, as of September, above the Federal Reserve’s inflation target of 2%.
Consumer prices are now at least 24% higher than they were in early 2020.
And while Trump swept into office amid great expectations for handling the economy, more than 7 in 10 Americans rate today's economy as “poor” or “very poor,” according to a new CNN/SSRS poll.
Most voters, and even some Republicans, blame Trump for rising prices, according to a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll released Nov. 4.
As voters headed to the polls on Nov. 4 in New Jersey, Virginia and other states for local elections, consumer prices loomed large, just as they did on Election Day a year ago.
“We know in New Jersey, for example, that the cost of energy is driving them nuts,” Gotbaum said. “That’s economics.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Why did Trump really win in 2024? We asked economists.
Source: “AOL Money”
