Republicans and lean Republican respondents really, really, really don’t like current economic conditions, changing “significantly” after Trump’s election, contributing to an outsized impact on the country’s overall consumer confidence index. University of Michigan. Democrats and more modest Democrats think things are about the same as they were in mid-2016 (under Obama).
Figure 1: University of Michigan consumer sentiment compared to 2016M06 (bold black line), contribution from Democrats/lean Democrats (blue bar), independents (gray bar), and Republicans/lean Republicans (red bar). The NBER has defined the peak to trough dates of the recession in gray. Source: University of Michigan, NBER and author’s calculations.
I assumed weights of 0.33 for Democrats and Republicans, and 0.34 for independents (not too far from the actual weights). Note that in recent months, disaffection among independents has been decreasing, as has disaffection among Republicans – however, the latter shows a less pronounced decrease.
Additionally, and interestingly, Republicans/lean Republicans viewed the pandemic and immediate pandemic period as better than during the last six months of the Obama administration.
