Head-to-head · Report
Have You Been Better Off?
The 1980 Reagan question computed from data: is today’s administration (Donald J. Trump II (R)) performing better or worse than Joseph R. Biden I (D) on the 24 metrics households actually experience — wages, inflation, grocery prices, mortgages, jobs, markets, savings. Two scoring views.
Last updated November 06, 2026
The 1980 Reagan question, scored across 24 metrics
Ronald Reagan asked voters in his 1980 debate against Jimmy Carter: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” Translated into present-day data: is today’s administration (Donald J. Trump II (R), 655 days in) performing better than the prior one (Joseph R. Biden I (D)) on the metrics households actually experience — wages, inflation, grocery prices, mortgages, jobs, markets, savings?
Two scoring views below. Each metric is direction-aware (inflation lower=better; wages higher=better) and classified as better, worse, or mixed on each view.
Apples-to-apples is the fairer read — it avoids the mechanical bias of comparing 655 days of accumulated change against a full 1460 days. Full-term is the voter’s actual lived experience of the prior administration.
By dimension — where today stands up, where it doesn’t
Seven groups of metrics. green = today beats Joseph R. Biden I (D); red = today is worse; grey = mixed.
All 24 metrics, grouped by dimension
Values are the metric’s primary statistic — cumulative % change since handoff for growth metrics, time-weighted average experienced value for level metrics (grocery prices, mortgage rate, unemployment rate, etc.). Verdict pills use the metric’s built-in direction convention.
Purchasing power
Inflation
Kitchen-table grocery prices
Housing
Jobs
Markets
Fiscal / savings
Methodology
What “better” means per metric. Each of the 24 metrics has an inherent direction: wages up is good, inflation down is good, housing prices have mixed interpretation (good for existing owners, bad for buyers), treasury yields are mixed (good for savers, bad for borrowers). The report uses the metric-specific direction to decide winners.
The two views.
- Match days (655-day window): fair head-to-head. Today’s administration (655 days in) vs Biden’s first 655 days. Removes the mechanical “longer term = more accumulated change” bias.
- Full term: today’s administration vs Biden’s full 4-year term. This is the voter’s actual experience of the prior administration — what they remember living through.
Primary statistic by metric type.
- Growth/level metrics (CPI, payrolls, SPX, HPI, wages): cumulative % change from handoff to latest observation.
- Average-experienced metrics (unemployment rate, mortgage rate, grocery prices, LFP): time-weighted average across the window — what households actually paid or experienced day-by-day.
Data sources. FRED for macro/markets/inflation; BLS for employment + wages; BEA for personal saving rate; USDA / FGIS for grocery prices. All stored in presidential_performance.db; refreshed nightly via the Presidents orchestrator.
Caveat. This answers “better on the measurable numbers”, not “better in the way voters feel.” The 2024 election demonstrated that lived experience of inflation (what the grocery bill feels like today) can diverge sharply from cumulative inflation stats. Both are real.
Related reports
- Trump vs Biden — Matching Window — the same T2-vs-Biden comparison expanded to 85 metrics across 14 demographic cohorts.
- Same Days in Office — applies the matching-window idea to the full presidential ranking (not just T2 vs Biden).
- Full-Term Ranking — where every president ranks on 24 economic + market metrics over their full term.
- Back to Presidential Performance library