Considering how much harm he did to farmers in his first term, and they overwhelmingly voted for him again in 2020 and 2024, I’d say they apparently prefer this over the alternative. I don’t expect this to change anything.
If that were true, you'd not see economy as the top or one of the top issues. Perhaps some marginal short term economical concerns can be offset by personality/perceived cultural improvements, but not to the point of bankruptcy or even close.
"It's the economy, stupid" was Clinton's slogan after all.
Polls also show that Republicans rate economic conditions as positive when there's a Republican in office, and negative when there's a Democrat in office regardless of the actual state of the economy. (The effect is much weaker among Democrats.)
This means that people care about the economy, but are terrible at knowing whether the economy is actually doing well or not, and certainly not educated enough to understand the impact that particular policies have on the economy.
The conclusion is that when there's a Democrat in office, Republicans are told by the Republican news media that the economy is bad; and when there's a Republican in office, Republicans are told by the Republican news media that the economy is good.
Find a conservative-leaning group on Facebook or reddit and see the resistance you get when you try to explain that Trump's tariffs are an inflationary tax on Americans. Political opinions have no bearing on reality, especially in the context of economic policy.
It totally does. If they say what they care most about is the economy, but they interpret the economy through the lens of whether their political party is in power, then their actions will be radically different than a theoretically objective voter.
If voters say that their top concern is X, but they act like they are willing to compromise on X for the sake of Y, then we should interpret that as Y actually being their top priority.
[1] https://www.sca.isr.umich.edu/files/partisaneconomy202504.pd...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030439322...
[3] https://www.politico.com/newsletters/morning-money/2025/01/3...
P.S. nothing about your conclusion is obvious. Everything cited seems to be referring to one specific period (COVID/Biden era inflation) with no historical analysis, in which case the parties in charge had every attempt to portray their loss as "economy was good but perceived by idiots who didn't know better" so I'll take the analyses with a grain of salt from clearly partisan hacks.
Joanne Hsu, UMich: https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/individual-contributions/?... and Politico is parroting the research.
It's not hard to find research that supports conclusions based on polling from different time periods. [1]
Fact is most people don't have enough data points in their personal lives to make any kind of conclusion about the state of the economy. They haven't gotten a raise in two years and their cousin Dale got laid off last week, but no one would extrapolate that to mean the economy is bad.
> They do different jobs, live in different geographic locations with varying density and urbanization
Yes, but they don't typically all swap locations with each other when a new administration takes power. Nevertheless their opinions do swap.
> economy was good but perceived by idiots who didn't know better
That is, in fact, exactly what happened.
[1] https://isr.umich.edu/news-events/news-releases/partisan-att...
That's not evidence of bias, unless, you think that anyone who makes a political contribution is unable to perform accurate research or do their job. Would you casually dismiss the work of a cop or a professor just because they made a donation? If you find a flaw in the research method, let me know.
You're literally looking for any reason to justify your a priori decision to ignore research you don't like. That makes you the partisan hack, not the researcher.
Faux News and other outlets have taught them it is a sin to vote for Ds or like anything they propose. They will chose any R over any D
I also see Democrats perfectly happy to see Democrats justly convicted of crimes. The Republican approach is to defend members of your "team" at all costs, no matter how guilty they are. The cult of personality is much strong on the Republican side.
Trump has sort of killed this phenomenon - partly because his brand has rubbed off on other Republicans, and partly because they have been running more extreme candidates even in blue states. Before Trump, though, it was not even close.