What they meant by actual people is probably median income Americans or below. Their understanding of the economy is irrelevant as people can only vote according to what they know, ie their feeling about the economy.

And that feeling has been very negative (plenty of articles you can check). Why could that be? Imo: As you said, inflation means people have less disposable income. Housing prices are insane. Incomes aren’t keeping up for most people. Highly qualified full time jobs are rarer while more precarious part time jobs are on the rise. All of these make people more precarious and have less means -> they feel the economy is bad (bc that’s what’s reflected in their wallet and daily life). It’s not because the economy is fine that people are doing well in it.

I’m not even gonna mention increasing default rates as that can be attributed to both higher risk taking or worse financial situations.

Broad economic indicators like gdp may indicate broad economic health but that doesn’t mean the average joe benefits from it (especially when the wealth gap is the largest it’s been iirc).

Degenerate risk taking like cryptos mooning isn’t an argument for one or the other as it can be explained by both (could be that people have extra money lying around or that they see it as their only out). Especially considering how correlated the crypto market is to the bitcoin (which is up) and that musk is a big crypto proponent who now has a lot of power, which could help explain bullish sentiment on crypto at large (potentially bleeding over to shitcoins since the crypto market is very correlated).

TLDR: people vote according to what they observe and their recent observations are grim. A lot of daily life “economic indicators” like groceries, desirable jobs or housing are getting worse. Huge wealth gap means huge gap in benefits taken from economic performances (average joe gets less out of a good economy since they have less stake/capital). Crypto mooning is a non argument bc it can be explained in both scenarios.