That’s because nobody looks at actual data. Most people just watch their cable news show / website of choice and are told how to feel.
This chart is meaningless without labeling the left axis.
this is less about politics and more about how (see that gray strip?) the pandemic broke peoples’ brains.
social media + politics is a toxic brew that isn’t making it any better though.
And is currently lower than when we were in the “wiping our asses with newspaper” stage of COVID.
Is it “on the way down” or “down from 2 months ago?”
The single strongest predictor of how a Democrat feels about the economy is the unemployment rate, followed by other sensible factors like inflation, wage growth, and interest rates.
The single strongest predictor of how a Republican feels about the economy is if the president is a Republican, that’s it. The other factors are far less significant.
It has been this way since Ronald Reagan.
Any decline in Republican economic optimism under a Republican president is profoundly more significant than when Democrats sour on the economy under a democratic president (frequent occurrence). There is a Gulf of difference between how the constituencies respond to actual, measurable economic conditions.
That said, this is a tiny blip. Let’s see where it goes.
It is sensible but tough to prove hypothesis that this may be a causal factor for why the economy does better in average under democratic control: their constituents experiences are anchored to the same economic realities we try to measure with data, and their vote is influenced by it. This is not true of Republican constituents, so their representatives reflect those values.
It’s not like there’s any data informed decision making going on anywhere now tho
This reddit post is GOP focused, and the attached graph details the difference in sentiment between GOP/independents/dems on an unlabeled non-percentage axe, where it appears GOP sentiment goes up on a win, remaining generally more positive than Independents and Dems while they’re in power with some degree of noise in the actual numbers. This reddit post presents the first such variation in numbers as being some kind of feature worth noticing, but without explaining why.
Bigger swings for Republicans than Democrats. I think that’s most telling.
Someone should do R-D or D-R, going back to 1966.
Shut up and eat your $20 egg, you fools.
That’s the smallest dip ever
Damn. Just as the price of eggs is going down and inflation’s been whipped. People don’t know when they have it good.
These poor independents, hanging on for dear life 😂
15 comments
I’m the Reuters editor who helped prepare this chart. [Our story](https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-consumer-sentiment-deteriorates-sharply-march-2025-03-14/), published minutes ago, provides more about the context and data. We’ll update it throughout the day.
That’s because nobody looks at actual data. Most people just watch their cable news show / website of choice and are told how to feel.
This chart is meaningless without labeling the left axis.
this is less about politics and more about how (see that gray strip?) the pandemic broke peoples’ brains.
social media + politics is a toxic brew that isn’t making it any better though.
And is currently lower than when we were in the “wiping our asses with newspaper” stage of COVID.
Is it “on the way down” or “down from 2 months ago?”
The single strongest predictor of how a Democrat feels about the economy is the unemployment rate, followed by other sensible factors like inflation, wage growth, and interest rates.
The single strongest predictor of how a Republican feels about the economy is if the president is a Republican, that’s it. The other factors are far less significant.
It has been this way since Ronald Reagan.
Any decline in Republican economic optimism under a Republican president is profoundly more significant than when Democrats sour on the economy under a democratic president (frequent occurrence). There is a Gulf of difference between how the constituencies respond to actual, measurable economic conditions.
That said, this is a tiny blip. Let’s see where it goes.
It is sensible but tough to prove hypothesis that this may be a causal factor for why the economy does better in average under democratic control: their constituents experiences are anchored to the same economic realities we try to measure with data, and their vote is influenced by it. This is not true of Republican constituents, so their representatives reflect those values.
It’s not like there’s any data informed decision making going on anywhere now tho
Am I missing something here?
The [article](https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-consumer-sentiment-deteriorates-sharply-march-2025-03-14/) OP links in [comments](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1jb660h/comment/mhrd4ht/) discusses aggregate consumer sentiment as a percentage and Trump’s imposition of tariffs.
This reddit post is GOP focused, and the attached graph details the difference in sentiment between GOP/independents/dems on an unlabeled non-percentage axe, where it appears GOP sentiment goes up on a win, remaining generally more positive than Independents and Dems while they’re in power with some degree of noise in the actual numbers. This reddit post presents the first such variation in numbers as being some kind of feature worth noticing, but without explaining why.
Bigger swings for Republicans than Democrats. I think that’s most telling.
Someone should do R-D or D-R, going back to 1966.
Shut up and eat your $20 egg, you fools.
That’s the smallest dip ever
Damn. Just as the price of eggs is going down and inflation’s been whipped. People don’t know when they have it good.
These poor independents, hanging on for dear life 😂
This is a cool figure. Thanks for posting.
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