Image Source: Pexels

Republicans and lean Republican respondents really, really, really don’t like economic conditions right now, switching “bigly” upon Trump’s election, contributing to an outsize impact on the overall University of Michigan consumer sentiment index. Democrats and lean Democratic respondents think things are about the same as mid-2016 (under Obama).

Figure 1: University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment relative to 2016M06 (bold black line), contribution from Democratic/lean Democratic (blue bar), from Independent (gray bar), and from Republican/lean Republican (red bar). NBER defined peak-to-trough recession dates shaded gray. Source: University of Michigan, NBER, and author’s calculations.

I’ve assumed weights of 0.33 to Democrats and Republicans, and 0.34 to Independents (not too far off actual weights). Notice that in recent months, independent disaffection is decreasing, and so too is Republican — however, the latter is exhibiting a less pronounced decrease.

Also, as an interesting aside, Republicans/lean Republicans viewed the pandemic and immediate pandemic period as better than in the last half year of the Obama administration.

More By This Author: