Gallup: Majority of Americans say they are ‘worse off’ than four years ago

CV NEWS FEED // With less than three weeks until the 2024 presidential election, a majority of Americans feel they are worse off now than they were four years ago, according to a Gallup poll released Friday.

The percentage of Americans who now feel they are worse off than four years earlier is greater than the percentage of voters who said the same in 1992, when sitting President George H.W. Bush lost reelection by a wide margin.

During mid-to-late September, Gallup asked American voters, “Would you say you and your family are better off now than you were four years ago, or are you worse off now?”

Fifty-two percent of respondents answered that they were “not better off.” A much smaller 39% said they were “better off,” and 9% described their situation as being the “same.”

A partisan breakdown of the results suggests that the minority of voters who said they were “better off” compared to 2020 when Republican nominee Donald Trump was president overwhelmingly identified with the Democratic Party.

Just shy of three-quarters (72%) of Democrats who responded to the poll said they were “better off.” Seven percent of Republican respondents answered the same way.

Only 35% of independent voters surveyed said they were “better off” – a percentage four points lower than the national average.

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The question, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” has become a common barometer for predicting the country’s general mood in the runup to presidential elections, since it was popularized by Ronald Reagan during his successful 1980 campaign. 

Gallup has asked voters to denote whether or not they were “better off” for four previous election cycles: 1992, 2004, 2012, and 2020.

Gallup Deputy Director Mary Claire Evans wrote that the “2024 response is most similar to 1992 among presidential election years in which Gallup has asked the question.”

In 1992, 46% of respondents said they were not better off, 38% said they were better off, and 15% reported their situation to be the same.

In that cycle, Democratic nominee then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton had defeated Bush, the incumbent, to become the nation’s 42nd president. Clinton had run as a political outsider.

Bush received only 37.4% of the popular vote in a three-way race. Nearly one in five voters backed third-place independent candidate Ross Perot. 

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In 1984, 2004, and 2012 – all election cycles in which the incumbent president won reelection – more respondents to Gallup’s poll said they were better off than said they were worse off. In none of these election cycles was the percentage of voters who said they were better off over 50%.

The only time a majority of voters told Gallup they were better off was in September 2020 – when 55% answered the question affirmatively, compared to only 33% who said they were not better off.

In that year’s election cycle, Trump, then the incumbent president, was also the Republican nominee. However, he still lost reelection to his Democratic opponent Joe Biden.

Evans offered an explanation for voters’ diametrically opposed responses to the “better off” question in 2020 and 2024:

The higher-than-usual percentage of U.S. adults who say they are worse off this year is largely owing to Republicans’ much greater likelihood to say this than opponents of the incumbent president’s party had been in prior election years. Likewise, the higher-than-usual percentage of “better off” responses in 2020, when Donald Trump was in office, was attributable to Republicans’ much greater likelihood to give that response than supporters of the incumbent president’s party did in prior election years.

On Friday, CatholicVote reported that economists EJ Antoni and Peter St Onge determined “that after adjusting government statistics to more accurately measure inflation, it became clear that the country has been in a recession for the past two years under the Biden-Harris administration.”

In their study, the economists noted that their conclusion is “in stark contrast to the establishment narrative that the US economy is enjoying robust growth that for some reason the public is incapable of perceiving.”