Sixty-five per cent, then thirty-three. That is how fast a political tribe can rewrite its view of the economy. In September 2024, in the last weeks of the Biden presidency, 65% of Republicans told pollsters the US economy was getting worse. Roughly half a year on, with Donald Trump freshly back in office and his "liberation day" tariffs announced, the figure had dropped to 33%. The underlying data barely moved. Annual consumer price inflation slipped from 2.4% to 2.3%. Unemployment edged up from 4.1% to 4.2%.
Democrats went the other way. Over the same stretch, the share saying the economy was deteriorating leapt from 28% to 73%. Analysts point to this when they say partisanship has bent economic judgment out of shape, and the White House is counting on exactly that as the midterms arrive on November 3.
The partisan filter, and its limits
For much of the twentieth century, the economy decided elections with some reliability. Voters punished incumbents for hard times and rewarded them for good ones. Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign line, "It's the economy, stupid," became shorthand for the rule. Partisan loyalty always softened it, but the rule held well enough to organize campaigns around.
That link has frayed. A recent study by political scientists at Stanford and New York University, quoted in an analysis by the Guardian's Eduardo Porter, estimated that the partisan gap in economic perceptions grew from about 20 percentage points early in the George W. Bush years to a peak of 73 points during Trump's first term. Two voters in the same town, reading the same grocery receipts, now report different economies.
The damage may run in both directions. Scholars based at Bucknell and at Texas A&M have argued that when voters refuse to cross party lines to reward or punish economic performance, officials gain room to distribute benefits narrowly, whether to fellow partisans, donors or the officeholder personally. If voters can't be moved, why bother with broad prosperity? It is a bleak thought, and the evidence for it is circumstantial at best, but it is where a system ends up when the scorecard has stopped counting. A 73-point gap is a lot of slack for any government to work with.
What the new polling shows
The White House's bet, then, is that loyalty will outlast the bills. Trump has told audiences the country is growing faster than it ever has. Whether his own supporters believe that is the question, and the latest numbers lean against him.
Polling by Harris for the Guardian, conducted earlier this month, found 38% of Republicans saying the economy is getting worse. A year ago the figure was 29%. It remains well below the 65% recorded at the end of the Biden era, so the partisan filter hasn't vanished. But nine points in twelve months is movement, and it comes from the group least inclined to give it.
The survey also predates the September inflation reading, which showed annual price growth jumping to 3.7%. Respondents were souring before the newest and ugliest number landed. Nobody can say yet how much further it will push sentiment in the final days of the campaign, though it is hard to see it helping. Next quarter's polling will show whether 3.7% sticks.
Trouble in the heartland
The erosion is sharpest among groups that have long anchored Republican coalitions. Among rural respondents, 64% said the economy was worsening, compared with 52% of city dwellers. For rural residents that is six points higher than in September 2024.
Farm country has plenty of reasons for the mood. The trade war closed off much of the Chinese market to American growers. The war in Iran has pushed up diesel and fertilizer costs, two inputs no farmer can skip. Immigration raids have thinned a workforce that rural employers depend on. And the administration's attempt to ease the price of beef through lower tariffs on imported meat has landed badly with the ranchers who sell it. A president who cuts protection to please the supermarket shopper is telling the cattle producer that the shopper matters more this quarter. Ranchers noticed.
White Americans, another pillar of the party's base, are following. Among them, 61% now say the economy is deteriorating, up from 48% in September 2024. Among men the share has risen from 46% to 52% across the same two years. None of these shifts is dramatic alone. Together they describe a base fraying at the edges rather than breaking, which in a close midterm may be enough.
What November will test
There is a fair case that the polls overstate the damage. Sentiment surveys are not ballots, and a Republican who tells a pollster the economy is slipping can still walk into a voting booth and pick the party label. Partisanship has survived worse. Plenty of analysts spent the last decade predicting that some scandal or downturn would finally break the pattern, and it never did.
But the pattern rested on a condition: that the economy felt tolerable enough not to force a choice between loyalty and the household budget. Inflation at 3.7%, expensive diesel and a farm sector under pressure begin to test that. Voters rarely abandon a party over a single grievance. They do sometimes stay home, and turnout, not conversion, is where a souring mood is most likely to show.
The real measure arrives in a little over a week. If Republican losses in rural districts run well ahead of the national swing, the economy will have reasserted itself in a way a decade of polarization suggested it couldn't. If they don't, the lesson for both parties will be uncomfortable: a party can preside over rising prices and struggling farms and still keep its voters. Governing with that knowledge is a different matter from campaigning on it.