The White House believes American workers have seldom had it so good. And lots of prestigious economists agree. But the voters aren’t buying. Maybe they know something?

[P]erhaps the voters are sensible and the economists are obtuse. And perhaps the indicators on which economists rely no longer mean what economists suppose them to mean.

  • Barry Zuckerkorn@beehaw.org
    1·
    8 months ago

    The consumer confidence index has been on a down ward trend over all since an initial jump with vaccine rollouts.

    Yes, and partisan affiliation is a big chunk of that shift during late 2020 and early 2021. Republicans went from generally positive to strongly negative when Biden was elected, while Democrats didn’t flip as strongly from strongly negative to still pretty negative. You can tie it to vaccines, but, uh, I’m gonna go ahead and point out a more significant shift that happened at the same time.

    I don’t think the lived economic experiences of Republicans and Democrats of the same income levels are all that different, but the cross tabs in these surveys show very different perceptions.

    So I stand by my general view that a lot of the mismatch stems from people’s feelings being poorly correlated with even their own experience.

    Telling people they should be happier because unemployment is low is an awful political strategy.

    I’m not trying to formulate any kind of political strategy. I’m just observing people and trying to explain what I see with a predictive/explanatory model, not formulating some kind of message. And my model is simple: Republicans will never be happy about the economy under a Democratic president, and most of the rest of the sentiment is just driven by gasoline prices, and to a lesser extent, food prices.