Dems in Deep Trouble: 'Suffering Index' Hits Highest in History of Measuring

Nick Arama reporting for RedState 

Democrats are trying to deny reality in order to win the midterms.

In the land of alternate “facts” that Democrats would like to sell people, inflation is transitory and we aren’t in a recession. While Vladimir Putin was responsible for gas prices going up, Joe Biden is somehow responsible for them going down a little bit. It isn’t just that the demand dropped because the gas became so expensive. You should consider that a “raise” to your paycheck, even if it’s still costing you far more for gas than when Joe Biden started his term.

But the bottom line? Try as the Democrats might, they can’t change the objective reality of how badly Joe Biden’s economy is affecting the American public.

We saw at the beginning of the month the “misery index.” That was stacking up to bad news for the Democrats in the midterms.

A new study by Bloomberg Economics takes one gauge with a knack of predicting ballot outcomes — the misery index, calculated by adding up the inflation and unemployment rates — and projects it forward through election day.

The result: Based on past voting patterns, President Joe Biden’s party can expect to lose 30 to 40 seats in the House and a few in the Senate too, easily wiping out razor-thin Democratic majorities.

Now comes the “suffering index” and that’s at record highs. It’s worse than it ever was under the pandemic, which is saying something.

The percentage of Americans who evaluate their lives poorly enough to be considered “suffering” on Gallup’s Life Evaluation Index was 5.6% in July, the highest since the index’s inception in 2008. This exceeds the previous high of 4.8% measured in April and is statistically higher than all prior estimates in the COVID-19 era. Across extensive measurement since January 2008, the suffering percentage has reached 4.5% or higher on a handful of occasions.

It was 3.9 percent when Biden came into office and as Ed Morrissey at HotAir observes, it’s the steepest ascent in the history of measuring it.

That fits with how many Americans think we’re going in the “wrong direction” in the Real Clear Politics average: 22.9 percent think “right track” and 70.9 think “wrong track” in polls over the past month.

On top of that, Americans’ real disposable personal income has plummeted continuously for 18 months in a row and it’s getting worse. Even Walmart and Target are indicating that people are cutting back on discretionary items.

So people know exactly where they can trace all this suffering — and it isn’t Republicans. Democrats can say what they might, but they can’t argue with the hit that people are having on their wallets. The problem is that it was all avoidable, had Republicans been in charge. People know that because they can remember what things were like under President Donald Trump. That’s what the Republicans need to stress again and again when it comes to the midterms.