The Wall Street Journal asked Republican voters what they thought of the economy over the past year:
Here's the actual data for the past 12 months:
- Real GDP: Up 2.5%
- Inflation: CPI down from 8.4% to 3.3%
- Jobs: Up 3 million
- Stock Market: S&P 500 up 10%
- Housing: Median home price down 7%
In fairness, I'd probably agree that things were getting worse if I spent all day marinating in Fox News, Donald Trump, right-wing Twitter, talk radio, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page.
That really needs to be correlated with those that claim to believe that Trump won and other conspiracies. The question is whether there are actually sane Republicans, or the minority that give the other answers just random noise.
There are no sane Republicans.
They will all race to the polls to restore the White House and the nuclear football to a man found by a jury to be a sexual predator, whose company and CFO were convicted of tax fraud, and who by then will likely have been convicted of one or more felonies.
They could nominate someone else, of course, but they crave being bullied by a criminal thug.
"…they crave being bullied by a criminal thug"
That is how they view "leadership". Most of them have no idea.
No, it's basically the flip side of insisting that the US is the most racist country in the world and currently the most racist it has ever been.
In both cases it's talking up your book, years after the book stopped having any relevance to reality.
"By affirming this easily-refuted statement, I demonstrate my attachment to the cause".
The word "believe" is used frequently in a different way than you or I might use it, especially when talking to reporters and pollsters.
And then there's the other end of the spectrum, the 'Yes, but we still writhe under the lash of capitalism" crowd.
Exactly. Some respondents fed on a steady diet of Fox News no doubt sincerely believe the economy really is in bad shape. But clearly these days many people who respond to polls treat them as they do all other aspects of their lives: an exercise in owning the libs.
👍👍👍👍👍
Exactly. It's a cult, not a political movement. If The Leader tells you the sky is green and the sun rises in the west, then that's what you will affirm, regardless of what your own lying eyes tell you.
a study came out recently that purported to show a strong majority of republicans truly believe all the crazy shit they say they believe. i'm not sure how reliable the methodology was, but I've personally moved into the camp of believing most republicans are just truly deluded nuts.
I think what is even worse isn't just that they lie about everything. It is that they are driven by hatred.
https://www.mattball.org/2023/08/partisanship-and-hatred.html
Its not just Fox News. Ive been hearing that the poorest workers are barely keeping up and that union pay is getting crushed compared to the private sector.
Everybody is struggling, or at least thats all anyone is interested in talking about.
Well, that is indeed true, but grossly incomplete. From the link, they polled 1500 registered voters. 600 of whom voted in a Republican primary. While they broke-out stats for Republican primary voters, they didn't give a break-down for Democratic primary voters. They did, however, give the overall for "Registered voters." What Kevin is calling "Good" is their "Excellent/Good" and what Kevin is calling "Bad" is their "Not so good/Poor" - which are the roll-ups among Excellent, Good, Not so good, and Poor... Or for some questions, then whether the topic area was moving in the "Right" or "Wrong" direction.
Among Registered voters:
Q17 Economy: Excellent/Good 36% Not so good/Poor 63%
Q18 economy better or worse: Better 28% Worse 58% Same 12%
Q19A Inflation moved in the right direction: Right 20% Wrong 74%
Q19B Job Market direction: Right 45% Wrong 44%
Q21A Stock Market direction: Right 27% Wrong 48%
Q22B Housing cost direction: Right 8% Wrong 86%
Since that cannot be all Republicans' doing, it leads to the question of in what were the rest of the respondents marinating...
For completeness, the affiliation responses, Q6/7
Republican: 33%
Independent/Lean Republican: 9%
Democrat: 32%
Independent/Lead Democrat: 9%
Independent: 11%
Something else: 3%
Don't Know: 3%
With Republicans at 90% negative and 33% composition, 30 percentage points of the negative responses are due to Republicans.
Minus Republicans, economy (17 and 18) are 50:50 good: bad; inflation and housing costs are bad; jobs and stock markets are good.
Response to inflation numbers tends to lag, especially if prices haven't dropped back down to previous levels. Housing costs are higher--prices may be down a little, but costs of mortgages are up.
"I'd probably agree that things were getting worse if I spent all day marinating in Fox News, Donald Trump, right-wing Twitter, talk radio, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page."
I don't think people marinating in news from NYT, WaPo, CNN, NPR, etc. are getting the idea that things are getting much better.
Even when they begrudgingly admit good economic news, there's a caveat. Look: something else to worry about.
This WaPo headline is a good example:
U.S. deficit explodes even as economy grows
The article treats the bigger deficit as a shock and a mystery. Oh, no! How could that be in a growing economy! It does mention higher interest payments and lower tax receipts, but it fails to quantify how much impact they have on the total deficit. (Interest payments are higher bc of Jay Powell. Tax receipts are down bc of last year's bear market.)
The GOP is gearing up for a shutdown and slashing the budget in an election year fits with their agenda. Expect right-wing media to pump up worries about the deficit crisis. Traditional media can't help itself but play along.
Mueller She Wrote on this poll.
https://twitter.com/MuellerSheWrote/status/1698752963039404282
Republicans really aren’t happy unless a huge portion of the population is unemployed and billionaires are snapping up the assets of the middle class at fire sale prices.
Reagan: recession
HW Bush: recession
W Bush: Great Recession
Trump: recession
Clinton: no recession
Obama: no recession
Biden: no recession
It is simple: some parts of the economy are doing well, others not. The status quo is for those that have will have more and those that don't will not. That's not to say things are getting worse for the have nots it's just that the distance to travel to the good life continues to grow faster than their pace could ever hope to keep up, much less reach.
No one in the lower tiers owns stock, shares in the GDP, gets the good jobs, and what little inflation there is magnified by paltry wages. Own a home? [my laughing fit has just begun]
I don't argue with any of that, but it's also the case that the bottom 10-20% -- minimum-wage workers who mostly don't own homes, have few if any assets, etc., and perpetually struggle to make ends meet -- is only very sparsely populated by Republicans. The average Trump voter is solidly middle- to upper middle class, often a small business owner. They're doing just fine. They just want to hate on the libs and if they have to tell a pollster it's raining upwards and the sky is orange to show how much they hate Biden, then that's what they'll do.
That is a very incisive point that I turned a blind eye to. I will niggle a bit. I'm willing to bet that rural poor ARE die hard Republicans, as well as rural middle class and rural upper class. The gross populations don't compare in raw numbers, but our system is engineered so that doesn't matter today (e.g. the Electoral College, gerrymandering).
Maine's as good an example as any -- the rural poor are Trumpy AF, as the kids say, but Washington and Piscataquis and Hancock counties are, to a first approximation, empty.
Not so fast, Kevin. The polls are also showing that most independents and a sizable fraction of Democrats feel the same way. It's not FNC marinating that's the problem here -- it's the mainstream media. They pay far more attention to bad economic news than good, and they also consider how people "feel" about the economy to be news worth reporting.
When people hear about how other people feel about something, in many cases they conclude that they should feel the same way. So when the TV machine tells viewers how people "feel," they are actively promoting that view.
Of course, the Right Wing Media is also to blame, but Mainstream Media is far too eager to promote their talking points, perhaps to fend off accusations of liberal bias (which of course will fail).
Increasingly, not even the TV news.
Other people's social media suggested to you, or the rip-and-read at the top of the hour on drive-time radio, or the sidebars and such on web pages you visit.
Check out what Google offers you via "Discover" if you have the main Google page so set up.
https://www.howtogeek.com/721851/what-is-google-discover-and-how-do-i-view-it-on-my-phone/
That's 'the media' for a lot of people these days.
I predict Trump could turn round all those data points after just three months in office.
At this point, fuck Republicans and what they think about anything. It’s like asking people in a mental hospital what they think about any national trends. It means absolutely nothing and they’re all just lucky we didn’t insist on killing all their ancestors after the Civil War.
Who stopped Sherman, anyway?
I think that this analysis has a short-term/medium-term problem.
Relative to August 2019, the mortgage payment for a newly-purchased typical house in my area has increased 2.5x. Electric rates have increased 50%. Used car prices have increased at least 50%. And etc.
Yes, those prices aren't going up as rapidly as they did last year, but they're a lot higher relative to wages than they were pre-COVID.