Republicans have never been more disconnected from the performance of an economy. The robust economic environment has defied it’s naysayers with its resiliency and is delivering a record year. You wouldn’t know it to talk to a republican though. The data shows republicans opinions of the economy have little if anything to do with its actual performance.
A good summary of the republican perception disconnect from reality.
Opinion | Republicans’ views of the economy are detached from reality
Consumer spending is
strong, and Americans are
starting new businesses at the highest rates since the Census Bureau began tracking this data in 2006. Yet when pollsters ask people how they think the economy is doing, they don’t just express concern. They say the economy is
terrible.
The polling data doesn’t show that Americans think the economy stinks so much as it shows that
Republicans say it stinks.
Some partisanship has always existed in polling about the economy: When there’s a Democrat in the White House, Democrats are more likely to say the economy is good than Republicans, and both sides change their opinions when the White House changes hands. But this difference has grown in recent years — and grown unequally. A pair of economists who
examined decades of polling data concluded, “While both Republicans and Democrats view the economy more favorably when their party controls the White House, the magnitude of this partisan bias is roughly
two and a half times larger for Republicans than for Democrats.”
We can see how that is playing out right now. In the latest edition of the University of Michigan’s
Index of Consumer Sentiment, the average Democratic score is over twice as high as the Republican score. But what is most striking is just how awful Republicans say the economy is. Their index score for this month is significantly lower than the score they gave the economy in the depths of the Great Recession in 2008 and 2009, when the economy was bleeding hundreds of thousands of jobs every month.
www.pewresearch.org
