The New Yorker:

Many analysts are predicting an election-year upturn, but they aren’t accounting for the President’s ability to cause more chaos.

By John Cassidy

In a prime-time address from the Oval Office last week, Donald Trump said, “We are poised for an economic boom the likes of which the world has never seen.” This was the sort of bloviating that has convinced many voters he’s hopelessly out of touch, but it did raise the question of how the economy is likely to perform in 2026, a midterm-election year. Given the data fog that the government shutdown created, the old joke applies more than ever: it’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future. But some things seem reasonably clear.

Right now, the economy is working in the Democrats’ favor. Concerns about affordability have refused to abate: the latest weekly poll by YouGov/The Economist indicates that Americans still consider “inflation/prices” to be the most important policy issue, and just a third of them approve of how Trump is handling it. Meanwhile, it looks like G.D.P. growth for 2025 will come in at about two per cent—one percentage point lower than it was in the last two years of the Biden Administration—and the unemployment rate is ticking up. When Joe Biden left office, it was four per cent; now it is 4.6 per cent.

Go to link