For example: On Sunday, CBS News released a new poll of the three swing states that shifted to Donald Trump in 2016, then shifted back to Joe Biden four years later. The poll, conducted by YouGov, found that most respondents in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin viewed their state’s economy pretty poorly — a few percentage points better than the national economy, but not great generally.
As expected, there was a gap between the parties, with Democrats significantly more likely to have a positive view of the national and state economies.
But pollsters also asked another question: How did respondents view their state’s economy under Trump? The difference is stark: On average across the three states, respondents viewed their state’s economy at least 20 points more positively when Trump was president than they do now. This is largely explained by the extremely positive evaluations of Republicans, but also by the very positive retrospective opinions of independents.
Just before the 2020 election, YouGov asked voters in those same states how they viewed Trump’s handling of the economy — a different question from how people viewed the economy in their state, sure, but a way useful to compare Trump’s views before the 2020 election with how his term is viewed now.
In each state, respondents were 15 points less likely to have viewed Trump’s handling of the economy positively than to have said this month that their state’s economy was in good shape during the Trump presidency . The YouGov poll conducted in October 2020 grouped party views in all three states, but the state-level results in the most recent poll were similar enough to show that the biggest differences between views of Trump in 2020 and retrospective views of the economy during his presidency. came from the Democrats.
On average, Democrats were 24 points more likely to tell YouGov this month that the economy under Trump was good than to say they approved of Trump’s handling of the economy in October 2020.
It is worth noting that in October 2020, due to the coronavirus pandemic, people in these three states were 5-7% less employed than the previous October. In each of these three states, employment is at least 1% higher today than in October 2019.
It is not uncommon, however, for polls to show that opinions of a president who has left office improve over time. In July, Gallup found that nine of the ten presidents who preceded Biden saw increases in their approval ratings relative to their time in office, including Trump. What’s unusual here is for a former president to run for office after leaving office. The boost Trump has enjoyed since leaving office has ramifications that gains under other previous presidents do not.
The recent CBS News-YouGov poll also found that Democrats were much more likely to say they were concerned about a functioning democracy in the future than about a strong economy. Republicans were slightly more likely to say the opposite.
This is an unusual question to ask, focusing on politics and political concerns of the moment. This reflects Biden’s focus on the threat to democracy posed by Trump’s possible return to power. But it also helps Biden that Americans view economic issues as less urgent than preserving democracy — given that even members of his party view the economy under his opponent better than when he was president.
washingtonpost
