This isn’t normally the time when voters are asked whether they are better off than they were four years ago. That’s the question that tends to come around in presidential election years. But as the midterms approach, it’s what everyone should ask themselves as they decide who controls Congress for the next two years.

Because the answer is obvious.

Let’s turn the dial back to June 2022. Joe Biden had been occupying the White House for a year and a half. Democrats controlled Congress, handing him his $2 trillion “Build Back Better” spending extravaganza. The economy had more than recovered the ground it lost from the COVID lockdowns. The country should have been booming.

Four years later, with Republicans in control of Congress, Donald Trump got his One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which cut taxes and spending, funded immigration control, and started deregulating the economy.

Let’s look at the results.

In 2022, real hourly wages were falling. They’d dropped to $11.03 by April 2022.

They were $11.25 in April 2026, which means workers’ incomes have climbed out of the Biden hole and wages are up 2%, after adjusting for inflation. And, unlike 2022, they are going up, not down.

Inflation in April 2022 was 8.3%. In April 2026, it was 3.8%.

The TIPP Economic Optimism Index was 41.2 in May 2022. (It dropped to 38.1 in June.) It was 42.6 this May. (TIPP is a polling partner of I&I.)

The latest jobs data show that there are 5.9 million more private sector jobs today than there were a year ago. That’s the good news. The better news is that there are 190,000 fewer federal workers than there were in 2022.

In April 2022, the border patrol “encountered” 234,088 illegal border crossers, most of whom they released into the U.S.

In April 2026, they encountered … 12,836. (Surely this is one of Trump’s biggest and most unrecognized successes.)

The Dow Jones Industrial Average was 32,813 at the end of May 2022, and was moving sideways. This year, it was 51,075. That’s an increase of 56%. It’s been climbing for most of Trump’s second term.

Despite all the hue and cry over gas prices, they are almost identical to where they were in 2022 – after adjusting for inflation – $4.60 now vs. $4.54 then.

To be sure, there are some soft spots, particularly in the labor market. The unemployment rate in April 2022 was 3.7%. It’s 4.3% now. The labor force participation rate is down slightly, from 62.2% to 61.8%. There’s the Iran war, and Trump’s tariffs. But mostly, it’s the steady stream of the-world-is-ending stories that are making people more anxious today than they might have been four years ago.

Even so, voters in 2022 looked at what was happening around them and decided to hand control of at least one chamber of Congress over to Republicans. The result was to slow Biden’s reckless agenda to a crawl, allowing the economy to start healing.

We have always maintained that climbing out of the Biden hole would be an arduous journey. And while we’d argue that Trump could be doing a better job of communicating his wins, and staying focused on issues that everyday Americans care about, who is willing to claim that they were better off in 2022 than now?

So the question voters need to start asking themselves is do they really want to hand control of anything back to Democrats, knowing the misery they caused four years ago?

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board