The job market is booming. Inflation has come back down to Earth. Americans are spending like crazy.
Whatever. Voters don’t care. They still think the economy is trash.
Yet for the next month, every last new piece of economic data will be proclaimed as good for Vice President Kamala Harris if positive or good for former President Donald Trump if negative.
In reality, the data — no matter how bad or good — probably won’t make an ounce of difference for most voters. The majority of them believe it’s “on the wrong track” or “weak,” according to a September poll of registered voters conducted by the Harvard Center for American Political Studies and the Harris Poll.
“The report card that consumers care about is their daily grocery receipts, not a CPI report from a government agency,” said Micah Roberts, a Republican pollster who helps conduct nonpartisan surveys gauging voters’ views of the economy for news stations.
Most voters likely don’t even follow the overall economic trends, let alone one month’s data, he said. Instead, their views on the economy are shaped by how far their dollars are stretching today compared to recent times. That track record isn’t great nowadays.
High inflation has left a bitter taste in Americans’ mouths
Even though the pace of price increases has cooled significantly from when inflation peaked at a 40-year high in 2022, goods and services cost consumers about 20% more in August compared to February 2020, per CPI data.
As a result, 66% of registered voters believe their family’s income is not keeping pace with the cost of living, according to a September survey of 1,000 voters nationwide that Roberts conducted for NBC News. That’s a higher share compared to when voters were asked the same question in 2022.
That’s a big reason why many Americans don’t think fondly of the country’s economic state, despite the unemployment rate staying remarkably low by historic standards for nearly three years, he told CNN.
Case in point: For almost two years, around 40% of Americans who said their household financial situation was worse than it was a year ago believed it was because of higher prices, according to monthly surveys conducted by the University of Michigan.
That’s helped contribute to consumers feeling more downbeat about the US economy than they have on average historically, according to University of Michigan surveys gauging consumer sentiment dating back to 1978. But overall, their attitude has started to improve as inflation continues to cool.
People who have more negative views of the economy are more likely to base their rating on their personal experiences or what they’re hearing from others, which tends to be more negative as well, Joanne Hsu, the director of the university’s Surveys of Consumers, told CNN, based on a recent poll her team fielded. Whereas if you get most of your information about the economy from a news outlet, there’s a higher likelihood you’ll have a more optimistic view of the economy because you’re more likely to come across elements that paint it in a more favorable light.
But the average American does not wait for news to come out to form an opinion on how the economy is functioning, she said. “They’re really relying more on their observations of the world around them.”
