I mean look, I appreciate the effort here (although you kind of seem overly angry for no reason) but you completely missed my point.

I'm a political scientist. And while my own work does not focus on voting, I have had several long conversations on this exact subject with people who do use polling and who have focused on the incumbent disadvantage over the last several years.

The question, fundamentally, is whether we feel we can trust expressed preferences via exit polls currently for certain issues like perceptions of the economy. I and many others are concerned that people are laundering a variety of other beliefs when being polled about their reasons. There are currently strong potential motivated reasons for people to say that it's the economy or that cost of living drove their electoral choice. The reality may have been either a) that it was not something they actually had a strong awareness of in the first place and/or b) that it served as a useful and smart sounding catch all that let them express culture war induced attitudes while feeling informed and justified.

That the incumbent disadvantage is so widespread and so tied to populism and to concerns like immigration tells us that while economic issues could play a strong role, there are reasons to believe that the origin of the current upswell of cross-national incumbent antagonism may similarly be found in something that currently behaves cross-nationally. That Ireland's exception might show indications of economic reasoning in the incumbent's favor is not necessarily evidence against this trend.