Justin Wolfers, CNN: “So I will tell you as an economist, I believe the hard numbers. The hard numbers tell us that the economy’s growing and it’s growing at a healthy rate. If you’d fallen asleep in 2019 and you woke up in 2023, you would discover pretty much the sort of economy you would have expected, and you wouldn’t think to ask, hey, was there a global recession and a global pandemic in between, and I think that’s really the president’s great claim that things are as good or better than they would have been without a pandemic.”
“Everything has gotten better over the past two years,” he continued, even though only 28% of people said so.
“A big part of that is this enormous partisan gap,” said Wolfers. “It’s gotten to the point where it’s almost pointless asking Republicans how they feel about the economy; only 7% of them were willing to admit the economy had gotten better over the past two years. So I think when we ask these questions, people are no longer telling us how they feel about the economy — really they’re telling us how they feel about the president."
