Are you better off today than you were four years ago?

Well, it's about time. Given the stakes that are on the line in this presidential election, you'd think that Rasmussen Reports would have gotten around to asking people about this by now. To be clear, they've touched on the subject in the past, but it's always been couched in other "nuances" and convoluted messages, seemingly intended to cloud the waters and make the choices that America is faced with more complicated. But this week they just came out and asked. We're referring to the question that Ronald Reagan posed to America during his run for the White House against Jimmy Carter in 1980. Are you better off today than you were four years ago? This time the answer seems almost entirely unambiguous.

By a 16-point margin, most voters answer “no” to a question famously asked by Ronald Reagan in 1980: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 40% of Likely U.S. Voters say they are better off than they were four years ago, while 56% say they’re not better off...

The survey of 1,050 U.S. Likely Voters was conducted on October 1-3, 2024 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 2 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rassen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC.

This isn't just a question. This is The Question. It's the question behind which all other questions should (in theory, anyway) fall by the wayside like leaves dropping off of the trees in an October breeze. One of the primary candidates has had four long, frequently painful years to run her experiments on the American economy and society in general. In a rare bonus, the other candidate was similarly given four years prior to that to do the same. So is your life better off today than it was when Donald Trump left office?

The margin wasn't even close. Only 40% said their lives were better in January of 2021. (I assume most of them have jobs with the DNC in some fashion or another.) Fully 56% said their lives were not better. How is that not the end of the election right there? The Biden-Harris administration has failed at one of the most fundamental roles assumed by an elected government. So how is it that we're still here arguing over margins in swing states or the meaning behind this or that candidate's remarks made during a hard-hitting podcast interview with an out-of-work rapper? 

One possible explanation is that the Harris campaign has been forced to get very creative with its messaging and the mainstream, legacy media has eagerly played along to help keep them in the running. The general theme seems to have been, "yes, things have been pretty bad while we've been in office, but if you put that guy back in charge things are really going to start going to hell in a handbasket."

But that can't be it, can it? It simply can't be that simple. We can't be living with an electorate containing a persuadable margin large enough to throw off a national race by such a margin based on nothing beyond nefarious warnings of an opponent who is going to undergo some sort of Frankenstein Monster conversion once he's returned to power. That would be insane. Of course, this is 2024 we're talking about and stranger things have happened. It's still rather frightening to consider the possibilities, however.