Americans' Views Of The Economy Are Partisan, But They're Not Immune To Bad News
“How is the economy doing?” is a question that we have several hard, objective metrics with which to answer. But increasingly, how Americans think the economy is doing seems to depend on their party. But just because views of the economy are polarized, that doesn’t mean they’re stagnant — and that could prove pivotal for President Trump in 2020.
Quinnipiac University’s latest national poll of registered voters, conducted Aug. 21-26, found a huge gap between how Republicans and Democrats perceive the state of the economy: 43 percent of Republicans described it as “excellent,” and another 45 percent described it as “good”; among Democrats, however, just 2 percent described the state of the economy as “excellent” and 37 percent said it was “good.” A plurality of Democrats, 43 percent, thought it was “not so good,” while 17 percent called it “poor.”
In total, 88 percent of Republicans used a positive adjective for the state of the economy, while only 39 percent of Democrats did the same. That 49-point gap in how the two parties perceived the strength of the economy was the second-largest that Quinnipiac has measured in the last three years. (The largest gap came this January, amid the government shutdown.)
Granted, it’s not unusual for voters’ politics to color their perceptions of the economy. During the Obama administration, Democrats were generally more optimistic about the economy than Republicans were; that flipped a few months into Trump’s tenure. Since then, Republicans have consistently viewed the economy more positively than Democrats have, but as the chart above shows, the gap between parties has really widened over time.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/americans-views-of-the-economy-are-partisan-but-theyre-not-immune-to-bad-news/
= new reply since forum marked as read