Presidents are blamed for just about everything – especially during an election season. As the presidential debates of 2024 begin, the blame game is certain to be part of the spectacle. But presidents are not really responsible for as many things as voters, journalists or political opponents try to blame them for.

For the first time since 1912, a former president is a party’s presumptive nominee, running against the incumbent. Both men – Donald Trump and Joe Biden – have records from their time in the Oval Office of actions they have taken or not taken, and of problems they have been blamed for, whether they had any control over them or not.

In my own discipline of political science, there is a cottage industry of trying to predict presidential elections. These efforts look at a wide range of factors that, rightly or wrongly, are associated with, attributed to or blamed on the president, including the performance of the stock market, unemployment rates, consumer sentiment about the economy, and a variety of other measures related to economic output.

But these scholars, like the public at large, are trying to gauge how well a candidate will do based largely on factors presidents have little to no control over.

The public demands action, and candidates promise it, but the presidency is an impossible office. It combines outsized expectations – which presidents themselves have embraced by campaigning as the voice of the whole country – with highly constrained political power in a system distinguished, currently, by gridlock.

At the debates, both Trump and Biden will likely speak of their records and make promises about what they would each do in their prospective second terms. But those goals will be largely out of reach without the support of Congress, which usually requires one party to hold both a majority in the House and a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. This is an unlikely outcome for either Biden or Trump.

The public pays little attention to the area where presidents have the most direct authority: foreign affairs.

In the current election campaign, the state of the national economy will undoubtedly be influential. But it is a complicated picture. Unemployment is low, the stock market is doing well, and inflation may be under control.

But higher prices are on voters’ minds. According to Gallup polling, the high cost of living is far and away Americans’ most important financial problem. A survey from April 2024 showed that 41% of the public volunteered that the high cost of living was their most important financial problem. That’s up 6 percentage points from when the same question was asked in 2023. In a distant second is the cost of housing.

In years past, the cost of living had hardly registered in the minds of Americans. From 2010 until 2021, the percentage of Americans identifying inflation as the most important financial problem was in the single digits. That percentage skyrocketed in 2022 and continued rising from there. This economic turmoil may be in the rearview mirror, but it has left much more expensive groceries on the shelves.

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