Political strategist James Carville liked to say, “It’s the economy, stupid” when talking about elections during the time he counseled Bill Clinton in his presidential campaigns. Carville’s theory was that people vote according to economic conditions. Is the economy going good? Then voters will keep the person in power. If not, that person will be voted out.

If Carville’s theory is still legit, Joe Biden is in real trouble. Team Biden is trying its best to convince voters that Bidenomics is working and everything is going well with the economy. Inflation was at 1.2% when Trump left office. Biden’s economic decisions shoved that number to over 9% and now inflation is coming back down from a 40-year high. He wants credit for that. Inflation is still over 3% but most Americans don’t feel the relief that Biden touts.

Biden’s poll numbers are bad. Kamala’s poll numbers are bad, too. The White House has failed to convince voters that happy days are here again. In July, for example, food prices went up a total of 4.9%. There is nothing more basic to voters than food prices. The price of gas is going up again, too, and that’s another important entry in family budgets. Voters are feeling the pain and happy talk from Biden and his surrogates isn’t going to change how Americans feel at the end of the month as they struggle to make ends meet until the next paycheck.

Does James Carville still think an election revolves around the economy? Carville is beginning to have some doubts. He is frustrated that Biden’s approval numbers are so low even though unemployment is low and inflation has fallen.

“Well, I’ve always thought so,” Carville, 78, said last week to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer when he was asked point-blank if he still believed the political philosophy for which he’ll be remembered.

“I’m starting to doubt myself a little bit, because this economy is quite good. Maybe it will kick in. And sometimes it takes a while for people to feel it,” he said.

“The economic bounce back, it was had by any measure … but, for whatever reason, people are not connecting this, [they] don’t think that economy’s that good,” Carville told The Hill. “To the extent they think it’s good, they’re not giving the president’s policies very much credit for it.”

“I can understand how these guys are disheartened,” he said of the White House. “So you wonder, well, why this disconnect?”

The problem for Biden is that he has failed to communicate with Americans. He hides from the press and ignores questions about everything. When he does speak, he makes mistakes about numbers and policies and seems to just make up his own facts. He still blames the previous administration for absolutely everything. The economy was already in recovery mode from the pandemic devastation when Trump left office. Instead of building on that recovery, Biden came into office and his policies destroyed any progress that had been made. Trillions of dollars of federal spending contributed heavily to historically high inflation. Inflation is devastating to everyone, but especially to middle-class, lower-class, and fixed-income Americans.

Since the damage was felt so early in Biden’s term, Americans are still not ready to believe any positive news on the economy. Biden is a habitual liar and that doesn’t help, either. Most people don’t believe what he says about anything. Americans have all-time high credit card debt and those credit cards have high interest rates, thanks to Bidenflation. This is a bad time to buy a home, thanks to mortgage rates.

Carville and other Democrats try to describe the economy as good and yet Americans aren’t feeling it.

“I think some of it is, there’s just so much built up on how bad the economy was, the struggle the economy was in, are recessions coming? I think that’s a hard bell to unring,” Carville said.

On the Republican side, Bruce Mehlman, former assistant secretary at the Commerce Department during the George W. Bush administration, said that the economy is less of a factor these days.

“Over the past two decades, traditional economic metrics have increasingly detached from presidential approval numbers and right-track or wrong-track sentiment, with the 2022 midterms the ultimate example,” said Mehlman, a founding partner at Mehlman Consulting. “The data screamed ‘giant wave,’ but many anxious voters preferred known incumbents over frightening disruptors.”

As long as the disconnect is not corrected by Team Biden, voters are not going to respond to happy talk from the president and Kamala about Bidenomics. They see Bidenomics as successful while most Americans have a different point of view. Americans aren’t stupid. They know what is costs to feed their families and fill up their gas tanks to get to work. They know what they are paying to get out of credit card debt and how the cost of cooling their homes has increased this summer. The disconnect is with Team Biden and not the people living in the real world paying the bills.