The Vibecession Comes for MAGA

The American right’s views of the U.S. economy deteriorated significantly over the past month.

Survey results released by YouGov and the Economist on Tuesday showed that only 43 percent of Trump voters describe the economy as good or excellent, down from 51 percent a month ago. Most of that decline has come from people who had described the state of the economy as good moving into the group that describes the economy as “only fair.”

We can see similar movements in the other ways YouGov slices up the electorate. The share of self-identified conservatives who take a positive view of the economy fell to 45 percent from 51 percent. The share of MAGA supporters with positive views declined from 63 percent to 53 percent. Among Republicans, the positive views fell from 51 percent to 44 percent.

A lot of consumer sentiment polls can be discounted because they are warped by partisanship and under-sampling of Republicans and Trump supporters. And the YouGov poll arguably does under-sample Republicans. But that does not explain the negative direction of the poll numbers among Republicans, Trump voters, conservatives, and MAGA supporters.

When you breakdown polling results into smaller categories, the results tend to become less accurate because the sample size is smaller. But the co-movement of views across the categories of people on the right suggests that this is picking up something real.