Making sense of it all: Sure, unemployment is low. And inflation has been decently tamed—to 3.5 percent, per March data. But, it doesn’t feel great to most voters because a) it was via the Federal Reserve hiking interest rates that made it so inflation could be tamed, and b) 3.5 percent still seems high to most people because the average annual rate of inflation was quite low for pretty much all of the ’90s and 2000s (with the exceptions of 2008 and now). In other words: It’s still more expensive to buy basic goods than people are accustomed to, and it’s much more expensive to borrow money than before. This affects people’s behavior (home sales slowed a lot in 2023, for example), and it certainly affects their sentiment.

Also, quite shockingly, voters don’t seem to like being lied to: Biden said inflation was “at 9 percent when I came in, and it’s now down around 3 percent,” in an interview with Yahoo Finance earlier this week (a claim he keeps making!) Actually, inflation was 1.4 percent when Biden took office—a fact any half-wit can easily find by Googling—and it’s the massive increase in government spending (under the guise of COVID-19, during both the Biden and Donald Trump presidencies) that led to the predictable result of high inflation.

So it’s not just that inflation remains highish, or that interest rates are high, but it’s also that the guy in charge keeps trying to act like nobody could’ve possibly predicted or prevented this. That’s not true.

To make matters worse, economic indicators are just kind of broadly all over the place and hard to make sense of. Home and car insurance premiums have surged; car repair prices are higher than they’ve generally been. Wages have risen and stayed high in some industries. But when, say, we’re talking about high wages for mechanics, those costs get passed on to consumers in some form (via higher prices, generally).

It’s all just quite funky right now, and it will be interesting to see whether Biden gets dinged for this at the ballot box (though Trump too shares plenty of blame).