Today, we present a guest post written by Jeffrey Frankel, Harpel Professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and formerly a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. A shorter version was published by Project Syndicate.
September 28, 2025 — As US President Donald Trump goes further and further off the rails in his demolition of long-standing rules and norms, it remains puzzling why so many Americans voted for him and continue to support him. It is especially puzzling why so many lower and middle-income Americans support him, since his policies tend to their economic disadvantage. Cutting federal spending on Medicaid and many other government services while simultaneously extending massive tax cuts for high-income households, does not sound crowd-pleasing populism. But perhaps this is only puzzling to economists.
Twenty years ago, Thomas Frank explored the riddle of why demographic groups that had traditionally voted with the Democrats were switching sides, in a book called What’s the Matter with Kansas? He concluded that culture, not economics, was driving Americans to vote against their interests. That seems even more on-target under Trump than it did at the time.
John Maynard Keynes wrote, “soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil,” in his seminal 1936 work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.
- Three common explanations
Economists rely too heavily on the assumption that voters seek to act in their economic self-interest. So do those political scientists who are of the “rational choice” school.
When the outcome is policy actions that are not in fact in the voters’ interest, the tendency is to draw one of three conclusions: (1) the politicians in the electoral campaign misled voters as to what policies they were going to pursue, or (2) once in office, they tried to carry out their campaign promises, but were blocked politically, or (3) the voters fail to understand the economic implications of the policies.
The starkest instances of the first explanation are when a candidate makes a specific pledge as to what they will do “on Day 1” in office and then doesn’t follow through. In Trump’s case, these tend to be campaign promises that anyone should have been able to tell were not going to be within his power to fulfill, such as bringing consumer prices down or ending the war on Ukraine, on Day 1. But Trump in 2025, more often than not, has done what he promised to do.
The 2nd explanation is often closer to the mark than the public debate allows for: The leader genuinely tries to carry out his promise but is blocked by political opponents. An example would be Barack Obama’s promise to close Guantanamo. This is much less relevant to Trump than to most of his predecessors, however, because the Republicans command a majority in both the Senate and House, and also because he has extended his presidential power far beyond the limits observed by his predecessors.
That would seem to leave the third explanation: the voters fail to understand the economic effects of the policies. Cases of this phenomenon include Trump’s tariffs and efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act. This third approach may be favored by economists: Even if we are reluctant to write off the rationality of the individual — the proposition that people understand how the world works — we are even more reluctant to countenance that we ourselves may fail to understand how the world works. (For a view of many ways that voters tend to misperceive the economics of the policy measures that they vote on, see Bryan Caplan’s book, The Myth of the Rational Voter.)
- The fourth explanation
But there is a fourth possibility, which is too often forgotten. Some people may not be especially motivated to try to vote in their own economic self-interest. Their voting behavior may be driven more by ideas or culture. Voters might realize that Trump will cut off their health benefits and yet be fine with that because they believe in small government and self-reliance as matters of principle. They can even continue to take advantage of the government benefits without committing the sins of hypocrisy, irrationality, or ignorance: It can be rational and ethical to take advantage of a benefit or tax break to which one is politically opposed, so long as that is the existing system. They presumably favor everyone together giving up the benefit at the same time, not themselves alone.
Related to the cultural explanation, voters may support candidates who will not be good for them economically because they also pay attention to other issues, like abortion or foreign policy. Given that a candidate entails a package of positions on many different issues, a voter cannot give expression to how they stand on all issues simply by choosing how to fill one political office. (This proposition essentially leads to Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem.)
What about the consensus that voter behavior in 2024 and other recent elections have been driven by the adage “It’s the economy, stupid”? Even expressing an opinion about the state of the economy may be more an exercise in ideas and culture than in analyzing the economic situation.
- Evidence?
One sort of evidence seems consistent with the hypothesis that voters don’t necessarily stake out the political stance that they think benefits them personally. When responding to polls, there is a striking tendency to bemoan the economy (if the president is of a different political party than the respondent), while rating the prospects of the respondent’s own particular household much more favorably.
A criticism of the general economy is a chance to express one’s political affiliation (perhaps even to take a tiny step toward influencing those who will read the poll result), even while their own circumstances differ from how they describe others’. Paul Krugman has often pointed out the disconnect, especially during the “vibecession” of the Biden years, when Americans would tell pollsters that the economy was terrible, but that they themselves were in good shape. In October 2023, 54 % of adults told the ARC-NORC Poll that their financial situation was good or somewhat good, while 73 % described the national economy as poor. Fed data show that this discrepancy persists.
After all, why do people decide to vote in the first place, given that it takes time, even with mail-in voting? Everyone knows that one individual vote very rarely affects the outcome of the election. The irrationality would be if a voter thought that their vote alone could determine the winner. This longstanding paradox has been studied extensively by political scientists, who sometimes call it the Downs Paradox.
The motive for going to the polls must be something like a desire to be a good citizen, or to set a good example for their children. Or it could be to show the courage of their convictions, or to be able to engage credibly in political discussions with friends, or to express support for their “team,” or to affirm their cultural identity. If any of these motives explain the decision to go to the polling place, they could just as well also explain which way the citizen votes.
It is not inevitable that the dictates of culture and ideas, as filtered through the Electoral College, should run counter to the quality of economic decision making. One can hope that attitudes will be better aligned in 2026.
This post written by Jeffrey Frankel.