Republicans might be feeling worse than Democrats, but Democrats aren’t feeling great either, notes John Sides, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University. Indeed, Biden’s presidential-approval ratings are more tightly correlated with consumer confidence than Trump’s or Obama’s, in part because of Democrats’ dissatisfaction with how things are going. The chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Delta and Omicron coronavirus waves, the sputtering of the Democrats’ election-reform and social-infrastructure bills, and, perhaps most of all, the false assurance that inflation would be “temporary”—all of those factors led Democrats and moderates to turn on Biden. “There’s no way for Biden, and Democrats generally, to offer a counternarrative that’s going to be as attractive as the bad news,” Sides told me. “It’s been very hard for Democrats to feel optimistic.”

Why should anyone feel optimistic? To state the obvious, there’s a war in Europe and a pandemic here at home. Democracy is fraying and the climate crisis continues unabated. The news, whether relayed by nonpartisan, hard-left, or hard-right sources, has been unremittingly negative of late. “Ask anyone with an IQ whether this is a good world to be in,” Diane Swonk, a macroeconomist at Grant Thornton, an accounting and advisory firm, told me. “Context matters.” Financial issues have become less important to voters: Just one in five people considers economic problems the most important problems facing the country, down from four in five during the Obama years…

Twenty bucks more on groceries, a hundred more on rent, a thousand more for a used car. Such price increases add up, and hit low-income families much, much harder than high-income ones. Bigger shares of poor families’ budgets go to necessities, and it is easier for the wealthy to trade down or comparison shop. (Switching out Whole Foods for Safeway is simple; switching out Family Dollar for anything cheaper is close to impossible.) “What we’ve got is a hot economy where people are getting burned,” Swonk said.