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The last few months have been filled with great news, according to US economists. Inflation is a hair’s breadth from pre-pandemic levels, unemployment is close to a 50-year low. The stock market keeps hitting record highs. The Federal Reserve cut interest rates last month, the first time since 2020. Some economists have gone so far as to say that the economy we’re living in is one of the best seen in decades.And yet, as the US heads to the polls, many Americans believe the economy stinks. It’s a disconnect that could ultimately decide who takes the White House.Paul Spehar, 62, a maintenance technician based in Daytona Beach, Florida, has seen reports that the economy is doing well but has only seen his savings chip away. His car insurance tripled over the last three years, and he had to take on $2,000 in debt to pay for the copay of a recent surgery. When Spehar retires, he will have to rely solely on Social Security.“The system doesn’t work for people like me,” Spehar said.It’s a common sentiment. In a Harris Poll conducted exclusively for the Guardian in September, nearly 50% of Americans believed that the country is experiencing a recession. Over 60% believed that inflation is increasing, and 50% believed that unemployment is increasing too. Even those who may know what the economists are saying don’t feel great: 73% said it’s hard to feel good about any positive economic news when they feel financially squeezed each month.As election day draws closer, and voters consistently say that the economy is their number one issue, the stakes of understanding why voters feel so blue has never been higher. So why do economists and everyday Americans seem to live in two different realities? The answer may come down to how they view inflation.For economists, inflation is a “nominal thing”, said Stefanie Stantcheva, an economist at Harvard. In other words, for economists, inflation is a measure – an important measure, especially for the Federal Reserve, which is tasked with adjusting monetary to control inflation. But for everyday Americans, inflation is a lived experience.“[Lived experiences] teach us a lot, and they show us that people are suffering a lot from inflation, perhaps more than the baseline numbers say,” Stantcheva said. “I think it’s very important to not just look at that number and say ‘Oh, but this is what CPI [the consumer price index, a broad measure of inflation] says.’… People have a different experience from that, and those experiences should be taken seriously.”That “nominal” number elicits feelings of anger, fear, anxiety and stress – along with a sense of inequality and injustice, when people are asked open-ended questions about how inflation makes them feel, said Stantcheva.People “think that wages are not keeping pace with prices at all, and so their standards of living are eroding,” Stantcheva said. “Inflation affects us as consumers, as workers, as asset holders, and also emotionally. And we see that lots of people, especially lower-income ones.”Inflation peaked in the summer of 2022 at 9.1% – the highest it had been since the early ’80s. It would take over two years for inflation to get back to levels under 3%. The Federal Reserve started ratcheting up interest rates, making the cost of borrowing money more expensive, to tackle rising prices. It has worked, but for many, the economic data and the reality of lived experiences have diverged.For economists, it seems likely that the Federal Reserve pulled off what they call a “soft-landing” – a rare feat where inflation goes down, but the unemployment rate remains relatively low. The opposite, a “hard-landing” – which many economists had forecast – would have meant that unemployment would go up as inflation goes down, triggering a recession.But for many Americans, this is anything but a soft-landing.Inflation coming down doesn’t mean prices have come down, which would be deflation, something economic theory says would actually be a bad sign for the economy. So prices have and will remain elevated. Food prices, for example, went up 25% between 2019 and 2023, according to the US Department of Agriculture.The impact of higher interest rates has also taken time to ripple through the economy, so in addition to inflation, Americans are also still getting hit with high interest rates. As prices increased, so did the cost of buying a home, getting a loan for a car and the rates on credit card bills.What economists call a soft-landing “is diametrically opposed to ordinary Americans, who see themselves in the middle of turbulence”, said John Gerzema, CEO of Harris Poll.While economists – and the Biden administration – celebrate low unemployment, it’s harder for everyday Americans to appreciate the good news even if they still have their jobs.“Unemployment is highly personal when it happens to you,” Gerzema said. But for most people, unemployment is not a big factor in their lives. “But inflation is personal and persistent. Every week it’s changing your benchmark.”MaryKate, 25, who requested she be identified by only her first name for fear of professional repercussions, said that she is still living at home with her parents because rent has been too expensive. When she graduated from college in 2021, it took her a year to find a full-time job with benefits, and saving up to move out has been hard. She recently got financing for a new car, which she uses to commute to work.“I didn’t intend to be at home for this long,” MaryKate said. “It’s hindering my personal growth.”MaryKate said she thinks about how her parents were able to move up from the lower middle-class to a middle-class during their life, and doesn’t feel like the mobility they experienced is possible for her.“At least in my family, that was kind of always the thought, that the next generation does better than the previous one,” she said. “I don’t know if that’s necessarily going to be the case for me.”It’s a sentiment that many Americans share. In the September Harris/Guardian poll, 42% of Americans said they are not financially better off today than their parents were at their age.The one thing that Donald Trump and Kamala Harris seem to agree on is that inflation has hurt Americans, and they are acting accordingly. It’s why Trump proposed ending taxes on tips at a rally in Las Vegas and Harris has shifted her emphasis away from Bidenomics – investing in infrastructure, boosting the US chip industry – to putting housing costs and crackdowns on price gouging at the center of her economic proposals.Gerzema says these kinds of policies are “personally relevant appeals” that focus on the granular “pixels” of the economy, not the overall picture. Purchasing power, personal sentiment on job security, student loans, the price of gas – are all pixels that make up the picture of a person’s individual economy.“I think the pixels just become so incredibly important because when you look at those, you really start to understand a different picture,” Gerzema said.Both presidential candidates seem to understand that much of the election hinges on these emotions. This week, voters will choose who they think has understood them best. More

Experts seem to agree the US economy has been on the upswing in 2024. A wave of new jobs, robust consumer spending, lower interest rates, falling inflation, impressive levels of business investment and record Wall Street highs has made the US economy “the envy of the world”.But many Americans appear to feel very little of that.Jim White, 62, an aquaculture specialist from North Carolina, said he has “given up [on] going out”.“I’ll never own a home. A new car is unthinkable,” he said. “The economy is slowly making the rich richer. Everyone else is sinking.”White is among dozens of people from all over the US who shared with the Guardian how they feel about the economy.While some expressed general optimism about stabilizing levels of inflation and reported doing well economically, scores said inflation continued to be financially crippling, with their incomes not even remotely keeping up with soaring costs for housing, food, childcare, insurance, healthcare, fuel, subscriptions and entertainment.Few seemed impressed by months of positive headlines about slowing inflation: “It’s not as if prices have come down, they’ve just stopped rising as obscenely as before,” as one woman in her 70s from Arizona, who still works part-time, put it. “Am I supposed to be happy about that?”“It’s more manageable, but prices are still too high for our wages compared to pre-pandemic,” said a 36-year-old woman from Salt Lake City who works as a research associate.Even those who felt the economy was doing very well complained of the exorbitantly high cost of living.The economy, 40-year-old Roxanne Oesch from Missouri said, felt “remarkably strong”.“Good jobs are available, interest rates are down and will come down further, and inflation has flattened out. It seems like there is a lot of good news.”But simultaneously, she added, “most people still cannot enjoy the same level of financial security they had pre-pandemic”.Alongside various young people who expressed dismay about their economic outlook were dozens of pensioners and people surviving on social security, for whom the new lower interest rates are bad news. “Interest on savings is dropping, [which is] challenging for retirees on fixed incomes,” said retired 71-year-old Paul Ames from Bellport, New York.“The US is doing a lot better than other developed economies. Gas is still way cheaper than Europe,” said Toni, a retired woman from North Florida, who was among various respondents who felt very positive about the economy because they held stock market investments that had been making healthy gains in recent months.“Things are good. The stock market has done well this year. Inflation isn’t having much impact.”“It’s great,” said 69-year-old Timothy Crowley, from Honolulu. “Investment income rising. This is the best economy on earth.”Respondents from places including New York City, Miami and Milwaukee pointed to rising levels of homelessness in their communities and felt that the US economic trickle-down model was broken.Views on who was responsible for America’s economic shortcomings were split: while some blamed the Biden administration for triggering soaring levels of inflation and rising asset prices through unprecedented interventions to keep the economy afloat during the pandemic, others blamed the previous Trump administration and the larger structural economic system propped up by Wall Street and the Republicans.Alex, a married father of two in his mid-30s from rural North Carolina, said he retrained as a welder during the pandemic, thanks to financial government assistance, but he quickly felt exploited in his new line of work.“I welded in two factories, each making millions in profits every year, and never made it off of government assistance, including food stamps and Medicaid. I’m back in school now and succumbing to the student loan vampires, to try and make it work,” he said.Alex said he has turned his back on Republicans, partly because of his economic concerns.Recent eye-wateringly high levels of inflation “were 25-percent caused by circa 15 years of quantitative easing, and 75-percent [caused] by corporate greed. I have completely abandoned the Republican party because they just refuse to rein in these economic monsters”.White, the aquaculture specialist from North Carolina, also said that he became a swing voter because of the economy.He will “vote a straight blue ticket until they turn their backs on Trump and the religious authoritarians”, White said. “I’m retiring this year and believe Trump’s tax breaks for the rich have already endangered my social security. He’s also a threat to my healthcare.”Among the respondents who expressed high levels of hopelessness were various college-educated people with established professional careers, such as architects, lawyers, engineers and medics, who said they were worried about financial insecurity, had recently been priced out of their longstanding communities or had been unable to save for retirement.“It’s horrific,” said 34-year-old Julia, a marketing professional from Washington. “It shouldn’t cost this much for basic necessities. I can’t do anything but work and go to the gym now,” she said, a remark that was echoed by many. “No social life, no plans, no savings.”“‘The US economy’ is not a meaningful or useful concept for most Americans,” said Karena Youtz, 54, a bookkeeper from Idaho. “Inflation is horrible. Around 40% of people in Idaho were fully employed and still unable to afford the cost of living here in 2019. I have no idea what that figure is now, but it’s probably much higher.”Melissa, retired, from northern California, who is disabled, reported struggling to get by on her social security payments.“Everything is too expensive, my rent keeps rising faster than my social security benefits and food prices are too high. Medical services in my rural area are far too few and far too substandard,” Melissa said.“The economy is doing fine and dandy. It’s the citizens of this country that are suffering.” More