Gut issues

In the end, American voters, like voters everywhere, voted based on their fears and their anger. Gut issues gave Trump a rousing victory. Americans were more worried about grocery bills and paying rent than the end of democracy.

- BOO CHANCO

If it was just about the economy as economists see it, America's economic metrics tell us the economy was, as described by The Economist, "glorious." It should have given Kamala Harris a landslide victory last week.

A week before the election, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman wrote in The New York Times that the week's "data release on gross domestic product for the third quarter, the last one before the election, paints a portrait of remarkable economic success."

David Goldman, a CNN analyst, observed that "by several major metrics, the US economy is on fire, the envy of the rest of the world... Trump will be inheriting a strong economy — on paper, anyway."

Goldman provides glowing details of how good the economic numbers are:

Jobs: The biggest indicator of economic security is whether or not you have a job, and a historically high percentage of people do.

GDP: The broadest measure of the US economy is booming. Gross domestic product grew at a seasonally adjusted annualized rate of 2.8 percent last quarter, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported. That's a healthy pace by any measure and it's on par with the economic expansion during the Trump administration, when people were feeling much better about the state of the economy.

Projected US economic growth for this year remains the strongest of any of the G7 economies, according to the International Monetary Fund.

Paychecks: Workers' paychecks are growing at a 3.9 percent adjusted rate, a faster clip than inflation, which means the amount of money Americans have to spend is growing. Inflation-adjusted disposable income per capita rose for the 27th straight month, according to the BEA, the longest streak on record.