On a March evening in 1984, at a televised debate in Atlanta, Walter Mondale leaned toward Gary Hart and borrowed three words from a hamburger commercial. Clara Peller had been barking "Where’s the beef?" at an undersized patty in Wendy’s advertising since January. Peller meant it literally.
Mondale’s use was metaphorical, meaning that Hart’s grand new ideas were mostly bun. He took the nomination—and then lost 49 states. We’ll come back to that later.
For a more modern audience, the question will be familiar for different reasons, and it came as a frustrated yell. "Where’s the beef?" shouted Gordon Ramsay, the British celebrity chef, over and over in his Hell’s Kitchen game show. "Where’s the f****** beef?!" Now, President Donald Trump is asking it again, eyes firmly on the midterm elections.
The price of beef has soared, so much so that Trump is cutting across his own "America First" trade policy to import hundreds of thousands of tons of the meat, tariff-free. His Department of Justice has also opened an investigation into "beef affordability" at some of America’s largest grocery stores. It is clear Trump sees the threat of beef becoming a symbol of a broader cost of living rise under his administration in the same way that eggs were for his Democratic predecessor, Joe Biden.
But here is the part about Mondale’s failure that should interest this White House. That same year, in 1984, a pound of ground chuck ate a larger share of the average weekly paycheck than in all but three of the 23 federal elections since 1980. Yet President Ronald Reagan’s Republicans gained 12 combined House and Senate seats—the best showing by any incumbent party in the entire run.
It begs the question: Is there any relationship between the price of beef and election performance for the party of incumbent presidents? To answer this, Newsweek created what we have called the Gordon Ramsay Beef Scream Index. It takes the average price of ground chuck beef at the time of a federal election relative to the average weekly earnings.
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