President Joe Biden is on track to break a century-old presidential record: losing reelection despite the economy growing. Not since President William Taft lost in 1912 has this happened.

Understanding how the economic and political trends are coming together underscores just how far Biden has sunk with the public in just under three years. The economy appears to be coming in for a soft landing after all. Having faced a historic surge in inflation and then an equally aggressive interest rate response, the final shock looks to lie with those who thought inflation could not be tamed without a recession. This is unusual, and it is ample reason for Wall Street’s recent euphoria .

Yet, while the economy seems to be coming in for a soft landing, Biden’s landing looks ever more like a crash. Gallup’s latest poll shows his approval rating at just 39%, the lowest of any modern president at this stage of his first term and barely above the 37% of the electorate who identified themselves as Democrats in 2020 exit polling . RealClearPolitics’s average of national rematch polling with former President Donald Trump shows Biden trailing 44.5% to 46.8%. As recently as August, Biden led by a roughly equal margin.

And while these margins may seem small, they are magnified by 2020’s outcome : Biden needed a 4.4% popular vote margin to manage a narrow Electoral College win that hinged on his narrow victories in six battleground states —states he is routinely shown to be trailing Trump in today. So, Biden really needs to be leading by 4.4% of the popular vote and in those six battleground states.

If this soft-landing economic trend and this crash-landing political trend both hold, it will be the first time since Taft in 1912 that an incumbent president lost with an economy that did not shrink within a year of his reelection. During Taft’s four years in office, the economy grew each year. What cost Taft reelection amid good economic times was his former boss and former president, Teddy Roosevelt, turning on him and running a third-party campaign that split the Republican Party. The Democrat Woodrow Wilson went on to win the presidency with the lowest popular vote percentage since 1860.

According to Measuring Worth’s historic GDP calculator, in the 112 years since, the only times incumbents have lost the White House have been when America’s economy has shrunk. Overall, incumbents rarely lose. Only Herbert Hoover in 1932, Gerald Ford in 1976, Jimmy Carter in 1980, George H.W. Bush in 1992, and Trump in 2020 have lost reelection. And in each case, real U.S. GDP shrank within a year of their defeat.

In all except Hoover’s, each of these defeats, other factors certainly played a part: Ford had Watergate, Carter had the Iranian hostage situation, Bush had Ross Perot’s split of the Republican Party, and Trump had COVID. But the one common thread running through each was a shrinking economy.

That the economy would play such a large political role is not surprising. It is arguably the most widespread electoral variable. It affects everyone and does so where it matters most: in their wallets. People demand prosperity, and they hold presidents accountable when it fails to occur.

In contrast to the five incumbent defeats since 1912, incumbents have won 13 times . The argument can therefore be made that the biggest political variable is incumbency, and the biggest economic variable is prosperity. Yet historically, when the two have collided, the economy has prevailed. This brings us back to Biden’s peculiar presidential predicament — and its particular irony.

Biden sacrificed fiscal policy precisely to keep the economy from shrinking. Biden spent heavily , effectively maintaining COVID crisis spending levels throughout his first term — averaging 25.7% of GDP, compared to 21% of GDP in pre-COVID 2019.

Biden’s deficits and debt have followed. Biden's deficits have averaged 7.9% of GDP, versus 4.6% of GDP in 2019, and his debt has averaged 97.8% of GDP, versus 79.4% in 2019.

Still, Biden wanted more. His student loan debt forgiveness giveaway was only prevented by the Supreme Court , and he is still trying to find a way to do this, while the only reason he did not spend more was because members of his own party denied it to him in his hypocritically named Inflation Reduction Act .

Yet the upshot of, and coinciding with, Biden’s massive spending efforts was the high inflation his Inflation Reduction Act was supposed to prevent. With inflation came the high interest rates needed to tame what his excessive spending helped fuel. For the average person, Biden’s dramatic inflation surge and accompanying high interest rates have resulted in high buying and borrowing costs.

Certainly, the economy is not the only reason Biden is politically imperiled. It is just one of several reasons for his flailing and failing presidency. Yet the ultimate irony is that it has been his very efforts to avoid being undermined by the economy that are undoubtedly a large reason his reelection threatens to replicate Taft’s fate of a century ago.

J.T. Young was a professional staffer in the House and Senate from 1987-2000, served in the Department of Treasury and Office of Management and Budget from 2001-2004, and was director of government relations for a Fortune 20 company from 2004-2023.