Does that make sense?
It makes sense and I admittedly didn't know a lot of this (I revised my thought process to reflect that new information, in case I sound like I'm moving the goalposts), but it's kind of running parallel to the point I was trying to make. Let's take this from the top:
but the idea that inflation would be way different if they were included makes perfect sense, but it isn't true. The prices of things that are excluded have been rising at about the same rate (on a timescale as years go by) as the prices of things that are not excluded. Even for housing, which is a little surprising.
That makes sense, but not very relevant to my point. To a working class person, the big three items in their budget are food, energy and housing. Therefore to them, core inflation being X% implies that at some point they'll look at the items in their budget and find that they inflated X%. It doesn't, however, say anything about their present state, which is that everything is expensive as hell. The core issue here is that "at some point" isn't "now". The DNC missed that distinction in their campaigning strategy, and bragged about their (sort of real, to be fair) accomplishments rather than doing damage control.
That's the percent inflation in meat over the time Biden was president. It's 15% cumulative. Your low-income worker who made 30% more, nominally, is able to buy 15% more meat now then they were in 2020.
You're using 2019-2023 wage growth with 2021-2025 inflation, so this comparison is meaningless. Now I actually can't find 2021-2025 (or 2021-2024 for that matter) wage growth numbers, but they're probably not 30%.
They still have 3% more, though, and they can buy more meat now though (22% nominal gain over 15% meat inflation).
Again time intervals don't match.
I'm saying that there is a big disconnect, now that we're talking numbers, between the numbers you are saying and the vibes that they should imply.
That disconnect is because core inflation, as it pertains to working class finances, is a promise rather than a statement of fact. That promise wasn't fulfilled by election season, a fact which completely flew over the DNC's heads. Fundamentally, that's the source of the disconnect.