I said a week ago that public polls seem to be saying one thing, economic facts another. Real Clear Politics’ compendium of 11 opinion polls on whether participants approve or disapprove of President Biden’s handling of the economy show a negative -22.5 percent spread (pro Trump, contra Biden).
But as Paul Krugman pointed out more recently, it’s Republicans driving that narrative, not U.S. adult citizens or Democrats.
Why? The big difference is that Republicans feel much worse for a number of reasons and that can skew the results.
Krugman cited a YouGov survey showing that overall 33% of U.S. adult citizens felt great-to-good personally about 2023 while 27 percent felt bad-terrible about 2023 for the country—pretty balanced.
With Democrats, however, 44% felt great-good while just 16% felt bad-terrible personally, whereas just 29% of Republicans felt great-good vs. 31% felt bad-terrible. You can begin to see the trend.
But there’s a big difference over how constituents felt overall about the country in 2023. Democrats felt much better about 2023—35% to 6% for Republicans, while a whopping 76 percent of Republicans thought 2023 was a bad or terrible year for the country, vs. 35 % of Democrats.
What does that tell us? Mainly that the two parties must get their information from different sources, which speaks to either the fact that the economic benefits of record low unemployment and economic growth in 2023 haven’t filtered down to the red states where Republicans dominate, or a willful ignorance about the facts.
It goes back to Nobel Laureate Robert Shiller’s thesis in his book, Irrational Exuberance; that most economic decisions are formed not by researching the facts but hearsay, word-of-mouth stories, or lazy thinking—i.e., not thinking through the hard news but following the stories that make them feel comfortable.
But it also heavily weights surveys such as Real Clear towards the dominant results—in this case the 76 percent of Republicans who believe 2023 was a terrible year.
Or, perhaps the negative opinions of Republicans about the economy have nothing to do with the economy or their personal well-being.
Maybe it has to do with deep-seated prejudices such as an inherent belief that new immigrants don’t benefit them; or females shouldn’t be allowed to control their own health, a very skewed belief system that babies lives take precedence over their mothers’?
It also calls into question what was once our storied educational system. We were the first country to institute universal K-12 education. But now our K-12 system ranks at the bottom of developed countries in the latest surveys.
Some red states are also banning books from school curriculums and libraries, even persecuting librarians and K-12 teachers for advocating them. Is our public K-12 educational system no longer adequate to maintain a Democracy?
Harlan Green © 2024
Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen
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