Incumbent parties experienced defeats across the world in 2024. How can we understand the role of the economy in these outcomes? In the US presidential election in November 2024 and the UK general election in July 2024, both governments presided over improving national economies to different degrees, but large inflationary crises beforehand. Using two new purposely designed pre- and post-election panel surveys in both countries and novel questions on economics, we assess how voters in both countries used different national economic outcomes to inform their evaluations of incumbents, the relationship of those assessments to partisanship, retrospective and prospective economic assessments, and personal feelings of economic insecurity. We demonstrate how feelings of economic insecurity help us better understand heterogeneity in the economic vote and divergent assessments of the national and personal economy. The implications are important for understanding economic voting in general, and the outcomes of the US and UK elections in 2024 in particular.