Let's take a closer look now at this disconnect between what are solid economic numbers and the way many people say they feel about this economy.

Voters said they were upset about the cost of living, and that helped elect Donald Trump to a second term.

Our economics correspondent Paul Salman reports now from Ohio on how many Americans see this in the wake of the election.

Outside a Kroger and Delhye Township, Ohio, where almost 70% of voters went for Donald Trump.

How's the economy for you? It's horrible.

It's bad enough for a lot of people. I think everyone could be doing a little bit better right now.

In exit polls, more than six in ten voters rated the economy as not so good or poor. Sixty-nine percent of them cast their vote for Trump. That's despite slowing inflation, solid growth,

and low unemployment, says Columbia's Adam twos. It's really the most dramatically successful

recovery. The United States has possibly ever seen from the kind of shock that we saw in 2020. But it doesn't translate down to a simple experience of well-being for very large numbers of people. The economy currently is not working for me and my family. Single mother Esther Wells voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, Trump in 2020.

This year, she says, the economy kept her with Trump.

Some of the rhetoric that came out to black people and minorities,

this is your chance to vote for the first black woman.

And to me, it was like, that is not my number one issue.

How are you going to make things better for my family?

It was about affordability of food, of gas, of heating, energy.

Like Wells, many Americans are comparing the cost of living to what it was four years ago and blaming inflation.

Technically, inflation is the rate of price change over time,

and that annual rate has slowed. But they're looking at the long-term climb.

Inflation is when things are too expensive, or inflation is when I can no longer afford anything.

That's what people reported to Harvard Stephanie Stunceva,

in surveys she conducted about inflation.

That their wages are just not keeping up with prices.

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