Hardship and the 2024 US Presidential Election

 

The scramble is on among the Main Stream Media outlets to explain the factors that led to Donald Trump's victory. There seems to be agreement that the COVID-19 unemployment and the COVID-19 Inflation made the US Economy the main issue. However, my work with John Shefner and Aaron Roland on Hardship leads me to think that single-variable explanations are too limited. So I constructed a Hardship Index (similar to Shefner,  Roland and Pasdirtz, 2015) for the US from 1980-2009 (US_HARD1, see the  graphic above, click to enlarge) and made projections (with prediction intervals) for the period during and after the Trump administration.

The HARD1 index (which explains 70% of the variation in the indicators, see below). reaches a low point right during the Trump I administration (2017-2020, dashed red line in the graphic above) and then begins climbing back up during the Biden Administration (2020-2024) and should keep climbing during the TRUMP II Administration (2025-?). 

The incoming administration will have it's work cut out for it and nothing I have heard, so far, suggests that there are any plans to address hardship. I will update the index again in 2029 to see how the Trump II Administration did.

I should also comment that forces in the World system (similar to those found by Shefner,  Roland and Pasdirtz, 2015 for Mexico in the 1990's) were driving the decline in HARD1 for the US. These forces have now reversed direction and will be difficult for the TRUMP administration to do anything about.

In a future post, I will explain why the HARD1 forecast took a turning point in 2020 and what World System forces explain the longterm trend in HARD1. The primary forces in the WL20 model are found in environmental and world market conditions.

Hardship Index

The following indicators (from Shefner,  Roland and Pasdirtz, 2015) were used to construct the HARD (Hardship) Index. All data were taken from the World Development Indicators (WDI).

In addition to HARD1, two other indexes were constructed, HARD2 (dominated by Unemployment) and HARD3 (dominated by Inflation). Each index explained another 10% (0.841% and  0.933%, respectively) in the indicators. So, indeed, Unemployment and Inflation were important components of US Hardship, but the other indicators also played a role. Whether the US Electorate made a good choice in electing the TRUMP II administration to resolve their issues with hardship will have to wait and be seen over the next four years.

Forecasting Model

The model used to create the Hardship forecast (in the graphic at the start of this post) is a generalization of the Atlanta Federal Reserve's GDPNow Model.