this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2024
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Politics
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There are many different metrics that can be used, in politics and campaigns we’ve focused on one set for a while now because it generally gave us an accurate idea of how people were going to feel. If it no longer accurately predicts that, then we need a new set for political discussions.
This is not a case of online spaces filtering experience, nation wide polls and indicators suggest that people are generally unhappy with the economy. To turn around and tell people their wrong for not liking the state of the economy because one set of metrics looks good is tone def at best and political suicide at worst.
The Michigan Consumer Sentiment Survey that is basically the standard on this sentiment analysis seems to be heavily correlated with gasoline prices, far more than gasoline prices actually affect the economy.
And consumer sentiment about the economy has been moving upward over the past few months, while gasoline prices have been low. Did anything change between November and now, to bring it to the highest level of the last 3 years? I'd argue the only real change we've seen in the economy over the past few months is low gasoline prices. All the other long term structural things are still present.
The consumer confidence index has been on a down ward trend over all since an initial jump with vaccine rollouts. If you pick small parts of the graph and focus on fluctuations that support your argument you can make it look good but if you map it all the way back to the end of lock down, the trend is clear.
There are also other metrics beyond the consumer confidence index, such as Gallup’s economic confidence index which shows the same over all downward trend.
This is just the reality the number show, people are not happy with the sate of the economy and they don’t expect it to get better. Telling people they should be happier because unemployment is low is an awful political strategy.
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.
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.