We asked people what policies would be most helpful to them, and we rank order then.

And cash was up there, but it wasn't one of the top few, but it was all things about, like, making other things affordable, like making healthcare affordable, making education affordable, bringing down the cost of housing.

They wanted to be able to make it on their own.

Like people fundamentally want to be able to make their ends meet.

You know, they don't want a handout and they want to be able to make it on their own.

Hello and welcome to Why Is This Happening with me, your host, Chris Hayes.

Well, I think like a lot of people, I've been consuming, voraciously consuming, all sorts of, you know, articles, reporting, data, polling, takes as I process the election.

One of the questions I keep coming back to,

and I think has kind of become a kind of central fixation for me, is just how much material conditions matter, basically to sort of simplify, like, is it the case that there's a fairly

simple story to tell about the last few years, which is that particularly from basically

the spring of 2021, which is that particularly from basically the spring of

2021, which was like after three different rounds of COVID stimulus and checks. And before

inflation took over, people were at essentially an all-time high in personal disposable income.

And then they just plummeted in real terms after that in the combination

of the cessation of checks and the rise of inflation. So people just got poorer in real terms

over the course of basically 2021 and 2023. And then the trend kind of reversed. Inflation started

to subside. Wages caught up. The economy grew and people were sort of back on the pre-COVID

trend, but the experience they'd had was this sort of experience of falling in a just clear dollars and

cents, material sense, and that that basically explains people saying the economy sucked and

voting for change. So that's one story. There's another story where if you aggregate together all the macroeconomic

variables and you align them with consumer sentiment, you find that they diverge in a way that they

haven't diverged in the past, which is to say the same basket of macroeconomic variables that did a

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