May reason trump the Trump in all of us

Essentially, Trump will win if he can put "normal America" against the 10%. There is a (very) large part of America that is very very much not happy with how things are going. If Trump can be the anti-establishment candidate I am convinced he will win. There's a number of things that could easily happen, for instance, if the establishment were to appear to screw up in the next 3 weeks (a war, a terror attack, a stock market crash, a large bankruptcy, a huge layoff, ...*) Trump would be pretty much assured victory. That seems to be the strategy. Of course, that's never going to get him anywhere on Hacker News.

But that doesn't even appear necessary:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N

US households have slowly lost living standards since about 2000. The difference in experience for most households since 2000 would be small, until the 2008 crisis happened. Then it was extremely noticable and it still hasn't recovered. This means that there is in fact a basis for a large part of America to be unhappy about how the country's going.

2 comments about this graph:

1) It's an average. Because of outliers at the top, the "normal" experience is really below it, even more so since 2008 because for "the 1%", ie. the top, there was little downward slope, and in fact a constant upward slope since about 2003-2004. This came at the expense of the large majority of the US.

2) it's using PCE deflator inflation statistics, not CPI, which is what is felt by ordinary Americans. PCE deflator is often criticized for being an underestimate of real inflation, so there is an argument you should take out about 0.2% year-on-year starting in 2000. That makes the graph much worse than it already is.

I'm not counting Trump out.