In theory, elections are choices between two candidates whose positions are duly considered by voters and whose victories are a reflection of popular will for those positions. In reality, of course, things are hazier. Candidates emphasize or downplay their beliefs to win votes and are subject to the vagaries of public belief and memory in ways that can be hard to predict.
For example: On Sunday, CBS News published new polling from the three swing states that flipped to Donald Trump in 2016 and then flipped back to support Joe Biden four years later. The polling, conducted by YouGov, found that most respondents in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin viewed the economy in their states fairly poorly — a few percentage points better than the national economy but not great overall.
Predictably, there was a gap by party, with Democrats being substantially more likely to view the national and state economies positively.
But the pollsters also asked another question: How did respondents view the economy in their states under Trump? The split was striking: on average across the three states, respondents viewed their state’s economy at least 20 points more positively when Trump was president than viewed the economy positively now. That was driven heavily by overwhelmingly positive assessments from Republicans, but also by strongly positive retrospective views from independents.
Just before the 2020 election, YouGov asked voters in these same states how they viewed Trump’s handling of the economy — a different question than how people viewed the economy in their state, admittedly, but a useful means of comparing views of Trump before the 2020 election with how his tenure is viewed now.
In each state, respondents were 15 points less likely to have viewed Trump’s handling of the economy positively than said this month that their state economies were in good shape during the Trump presidency. The YouGov poll conducted in October 2020 aggregated party views across the three states, but the state-level results in the most recent poll were similar enough to show that the biggest differences between views of Trump in 2020 and retrospective views of the economy during his presidency came from Democrats.
On average, Democrats were 24 points more likely to tell YouGov this month that the economy under Trump was good than said they approved of Trump’s handling of the economy in October 2020.
It’s worth noting that between 5 and 7 percent fewer residents of these three states were employed in October 2020 than the previous October, thanks to the coronavirus pandemic. In each of those three states, employment is at least 1 percent higher now than in October 2019.
It’s not uncommon, though, for polling to show that views of a president who has left office improve over time. In July, Gallup found that nine of the 10 presidents who preceded Biden had seen their approval ratings increase relative to when they were in office — including Trump. What’s unusual here is that a former president is running for election after having left office. The boost that Trump has seen since leaving office has ramifications that gains among other past presidents don’t.
The recent CBS News-YouGov poll also found that Democrats were much more likely to say that they were worried about having a functioning democracy in the future than they were about having a strong economy. Republicans were slightly more likely to say the opposite.
This is an unusual question to ask, one centered on the politics and political concerns of the moment. It is a reflection of the focus Biden has placed on the threat to democracy posed by Trump’s possible return to power. But it is also useful for Biden if Americans view economic issues as less urgent than preserving democracy — given that even members of his party view the economy under his opponent better than they did when his opponent was president.
