Republican and Republican-leaning respondents really, really, really don’t like the current state of the economy, a “dramatic” shift since Trump’s election, which has had a huge impact on the University of Michigan’s overall consumer confidence index. Democrats and Democratic-leaning respondents believe the situation is about the same as it was in the 2016 midterms, during the Obama administration.
figure 1: University of Michigan consumer confidence relative to June 2016 (thick black line), with contributions from Democrats/Lean Democratic (blue bar), Independents (gray bar), and Republicans/Lean Republican (red bar). NBER-defined recession peak-to-trough dates are in gray. Source: University of Michigan, NBER, and author's calculations.
I assumed a weight of 0.33 for Democrats and Republicans and a weight of 0.34 for Independents (not too far off from the actual weights). Note that dissatisfaction among independents has been declining in recent months, as has dissatisfaction among Republicans—although the decline in the latter has been less dramatic.
Also, it’s interesting that Republicans/leaning Republicans think this pandemic and the current pandemic period is better than the last half of the Obama administration.
