Donald Trump’s clear victory in yesterday’s presidential election certainly seemed to prove the old maxim that perception is reality. Exit polls of 10 battleground states showed that 68% of those surveyed said the economy was “not so good” (35%) or “poor” (33%). Of the third (32%) who identified the economy as the issue that mattered most in their presidential vote, a staggering 80 percent of them voted for Donald Trump. Yet even with today’s high interest rates and prices which have plateaued after the steep inflation of 2022 and early 2023, the U.S. economy by most measures is much stronger now than when President Trump left the White House on January 20, 2021.

To put the Biden-Harris economic performance into historical perspective, it’s helpful to compare it to the “Morning in America” Ronald Reagan proudly proclaimed during his reelection bid in 1984. Burdened with a “Misery Index” nearly double what it is today and an unemployment rate of 7.5% virtually unchanged from Jimmy Carter’s last days in office, President Reagan nevertheless garnered 59% of the popular vote in carrying 49 states to a 525-13 Electoral College landslide over Democrat Walter Mondale (D-MN).

Now, it is certainly true that the American economy was struggling when President Carter sought a second term in the fall of 1980. (The hostage crisis in Iran certainly didn’t help matters for the Democrat.) A period of “stagflation” brought the previously unusual combination of high unemployment (7.5% as voters went to the polls in November 1980) and high inflation (a jaw-dropping 12.8%). But once Reagan assumed office in January 1981, things got worse before they started to get better. Intent on breaking the back of inflation, Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker pushed the federal funds effective rate to a stratospheric 19.1% by June 1981. (By comparison, that figure was 4.83% last month.) The result was that the United States plunged into recession from July 1981 to November 1982. The unemployment rate spiraled to 10.8% by November 1982. It’s no wonder The Gipper’s party lost 26 House seats in those midterms.

That said, by the time Reagan faced off against Mondale in the fall of 1984, the U.S. economy had begun to improve. The recession was over. As Americans headed to the polls that November, the inflation rate had been brought down to 4.3%. But the jobless rate remained at 7.4%. The effective federal funds rate was still at 10% at the end of October 1984 and the average 30-year fixed mortgage rate stood at a mind-numbing 14.1%. To be sure, these numbers represented progress but were far from rosy compared to America’s recent past (and certainly its present of 4.1% unemployment, 2.4% inflation and 6.7% for a 30-year mortgage).

Nevertheless, in September 1984, the Reagan campaign unveiled “Prouder, Better, Stronger,” one of the most successful political TV spots of all time. A friendly narrator warmly voiced over gauzy images of American scenes:

It’s morning again in America. Today more men and women will go to work than ever before in our country’s history. With interest rates at about half the record highs of 1980, nearly two thousand families today will buy new homes, more than at any time in the past four years. This afternoon 6,500 young men and women will be married, and with inflation at less than half of what it was just four years ago, they can look forward with confidence to the future. It’s morning again in America, and under the leadership of President Reagan, our country is prouder and stronger and better. Why would we ever want to return to where we were less than four short years ago? [Emphasis mine.]

Forty years later, the Biden-Harris administration could fairly make similar or even bolder claims.

Donald Trump, after all, inherited an economic boom from Barack Obama. Even as he decried what he called “American carnage” during his January 20, 2017 inaugural address, the U.S. economy had created 13 million jobs over the previous 8 years. But the shrinking deficits under Obama became a thing of the past under Trump, even before his mismanagement of the COVID pandemic led to 14% unemployment by the middle of 2020. By November 2020, the unemployment rate still hovered at 6.9%, a full two points higher than when Trump defeated Hillary Clinton. By the time Trump left office in January 2021, he had lost 2.7 million jobs and joblessness was at 6.4%. Meanwhile, the death toll from COVID was 24,930 as Americans went to the polls. In November, that figure more than doubled to 53,250, before reaching 98,175 in December and 105,566 in January 2021. (Thanks to the COVID denialism and anti-vaccine posture of Trump and his MAGA allies, the U.S. COVID death rate far exceeded most other leading economies. And by late 2022, the death rate was higher for white Americans than black.)

By most measures, there is very little doubt that Americans worse off under President Donald Trump in November 2020 than they had been four years earlier. And on Election Day 2024, the U.S. economy was clearly stronger than it was Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump by 7 million votes.

But you’d never guess looking at the results of the exit polls.

In 2020, exit polls showed that half of American voters thought the economy was “not so good” (31%) or “poor” (19%). The voters were split 49-49 as to whether Joe Biden or Donald Trump would be better at managing the economy. When it came to issue priorities, voters rated the economy (35%) as the single most important factor. Despite the actual American carnage under Donald Trump, 83% of these “econ voters” nevertheless chose supported Trump’s reelection.

Four years later, the economic reality on Election Day 2024 was reversed. Even with the high inflation that mostly subsided the previous year, most economic measures showed that the Biden economy was better than the one he inherited from Donald Trump. Over 16 million jobs had been added, the unemployment rate was much lower (4.1% compared to 6.4% in January 2021), workforce participation returning to pre-pandemic levels, real median household income was up, and stock markets were at record highs. As the Center for American Progress documented, wages are at an all-time high, with the biggest gains going to the lowest five income deciles. Still, some 68% of respondents in the exit polls conducted in 10 battleground states claimed the economy was not so good or poor. Voters preferred Trump over Vice President Kamala Harris by 52% to 46%. And nearly a third of voters (32%) cited the economy as the most important issue influencing their choice of a candidate for President. Like four years earlier, 80% of these voters backed Donald Trump.

The question is why.

To be sure, inflation played a key role. Though year-over-year inflation rates have returned to the roughly the same level (2.4%) as when Trump left office (2.2%), stubbornly high food and housing prices have persisted. That was clear from yesterday’s exit polling, which showed that inflation had caused voters’ families some (53%) or severe (22%) hardship. Nevertheless, even with the rebound in consumer confidence, the University of Michigan survey found that confidence was lower in October 2024 (70.5) than in October 2020 (81.8), October 2016 (87.2) and even during Reagan’s reelection in October 1984 (96.3). Polling on the direction of the country—a good predictor of a White House flip in the past--on average shows a 36-point negative gap for Joe Biden. During the 1984 race, Ronald Reagan had only a one-point DOC deficit. Gallup’s survey of satisfaction with how things are going in the U.S. found much the same dynamic. The October 2024 figure (26%) was little different than October 2020 (28%) or October 2016 (28%).

So, what’s changed? In a nutshell, the media environment. There was no Fox News in 1984 and certainly no social media. Whereas Americans of all political stripes got their news from three national networks, radio and a handful of national papers, the media landscape has changed completely. Now, Americans can self-select their sources of information. And according to the Pew Research Center, Republicans are not only consistently choosing Fox News as a primary source of news, they are rapidly abandoning national media altogether and instead turning to social media. (Republicans who said that had “some trust” in national news organizations dropped from 70% in 2016 to just 40% now.) While liberals tend to consume and trust a wide variety of news sources, conservative strongly distrust all but a small number of outlets.

That political polarization matters. The impenetrable bubble of right-wing media not only guarantees negative conservative perceptions of Democratic officeholders, but sets the national terms of debate. And that dynamic plays an outsized role in why unhappy voters declared yesterday a dark night for a U.S. economy that is actually much better than “morning in America.”