The

The Hello and welcome to politics theory other. My name is Alex Doherty and my guest today is the

economist and host of the brilliant Macrodose podcast, James Meadway.

In today's episode, we talked about the economics of Donald Trump's election victory,

and why James lays much of the blame for Kamala Harris's defeat at the door of mainstream

economics, and the failure to adopt more unconventional responses to inflation.

We also talked about why Donald Trump did so

well amongst young white men and about what role the Democrats enabling of the Gaza genocide

had in the election results.

Plenty of explanations have been offered for why Kamala Harris lost the election and in surprisingly decisive terms with Donald Trump not only sweeping the swing states, but also possibly the popular vote.

If so, he'd be the first Republican to do so since George W. Bush in 2004.

And the Democrats' defeat may well have had many causes, but it does seem likely that the most significant factor was inflation and how ordinary Americans were actually experiencing

what was being lauded as a very successful economic rebound. Indeed, in October, the

economist was describing the US economy as the envy of the world, and we'd seen all this rather

patronising talk about the vibe session and that there was this

supposedly strange divergence between the headline economic indicators and how people reported

how they actually felt about their economic situation. Do you see inflation as the most important

factor in Trump's victory? And why do you think the economic data so poorly captured how

ordinary people were experiencing life under the

Biden administration, especially after the lapse of the welfare state expansions during the pandemic?

Well, yes, I do. Look, if you're looking at a vote for the Republicans, I mean, it's slightly

complicated by the fact that to a large extent what's happened is that people did not vote for the Democrats, like the Democrats' total vote has sort of fallen across the board.

...