Understanding What ‘Inflation’ Really Means in Electoral Terms

In the middle years of the Biden administration there was an idea that right-wing dominance of the media ecosystem, or simply social media breaking people’s brains, had blinded people to the fact that inflation was actually coming down fast. Indeed, by the time the 2024 election came around, inflation had come down dramatically and was close to what economists consider optimal — between 2% and 4%. (For all the ribbing economists took about predicting the COVID inflation would be “transitory” by any historical metric, it was.) Yet most people refused to believe that inflation had, in fact, been subdued. And “affordability” continues to be the political buzzword of the day going into the 2026 midterm elections. But this always struck me as a basic failure of analysis, imagining that the public at large and economists mean the same thing by inflation. They don’t. That should be obvious. And it probably is obvious to most of us. But a lot of us, including myself for at least part of the time, failed to draw out the proper conclusions.