The previous year, Bush looked unbeatable, carrying a 90 percent approval rating at one point heading into his race for reelection. But Carville, Clinton’s top political strategist, saw that Bush was vulnerable on the economy, which was still rebounding from a recession that began in the first quarter of 1991.

Though the recession was over before the end of the year and the economy was soon growing at an impressive clip—GDP grew at a 3.5 percent rate in 1992—Carville saw he had a winning message, in part because Bush had broken his pledge to not raise taxes.

Thirty years later, a different U.S. president is facing an even worse economy, and a midterm reckoning appears all but certain.

Like Bush, President Joe Biden has been plagued in his first term by consecutive quarters of negative economic growth, which fits the traditional definition of a recession. Unfortunately for Biden, the story gets much worse from there.

For more than a year, Americans have been struggling with historically high inflation, which has far outpaced wage growth. Despite early assurances from White House officials and Federal Reserve leadership that inflation would be “transitory,” inflation has not only persisted but gotten worse, with estimates showing it eating away $717 per month from Americans’ budgets by the summer of 2022.

Inflation remains at a 40-year high and is the top issue on the minds of voters heading into Election Day, but it is not the only economic calamity plaguing Democrats this November.

In 2022 the stock market saw the worst start to a year in a half century—a consequence of bad policies, ripping inflation, and the Federal Reserve hiking interest rates. Since then, things have not improved much. Sour earnings from Google and Facebook parent companies Alphabet and Meta last week snuffed out an October rally attempt, and as of last week the year-to-date returns of three major indexes were scary: the Dow was down 10 percent, the S&P 500 was down 19 percent, and the Nasdaq was down 30 percent.

This means that it’s not just inflation eating away at Americans’ retirement accounts. Because of a historically bad stock market, many Americans in 2022 saw the biggest drop in their 401k ever.

Unfortunately, signs suggest things are about to get worse, with the war in Ukraine growing more intense and the Federal Reserve working to wind down its quantitative easing experiment.

“These are very, very serious things,” JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon observed last week, “which I think are likely to push the U.S. and the world—I mean, Europe is already in recession—and they’re likely to put the U.S. in some kind of recession six to nine months from now.”

All of this spells doom for Biden’s hopes of holding Congress.

The incumbent president’s political party tends to struggle in midterms even when things are good. Congressional Democrats are facing serious headwinds in the form of a historically bad economy.

The irony is that, similar to the George H.W. Bush administration, Biden’s own policies are partly responsible.

Economist Lawrence Summers, with whom Biden worked in the Obama White House, said it was an “unforced error” to continue enhanced unemployment benefits for so long in 2021, which exacerbated the labor shortage.

Numerous Biden policies also made energy more expensive and contributed to inflation, while his so-called Inflation Reduction Act will almost certainly cost jobs and reduce economic growth. Indeed, almost without exception Biden’s policies have made government bigger, and have the economy groaning under their weight.

With elections only days away, prediction markets show the federal government likely heading for gridlock, which is generally good for the economy.

Assuming it happens, there will be a great many theories as to why Democrats lost. But don’t forget the most obvious reason: “the economy, stupid.”

Jon Miltimore is managing editor of FEE.org, the online portal of the Foundation for Economic Education.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.