In writing my last post, I recalled a couple of posts I wrote about the question "In America, each generation has tried to have a better life than their parents, with a better living standard, better homes, a better education, etc. How likely do you think it is that today's youth will have a better life than their parents--very likely, somewhat likely, somewhat unlikely, or very unlikely?" If you count "very likely" as +2, "somewhat likely" as +1, "somewhat unlikely" as -1, and "somewhat unlikely" as -2, you can compute the mean score for Democrats and Republicans, and take the difference between them. The mean for the thirteen surveys for which I have data is about +20--Democrats tend to be more optimistic. The gap differs depending on the party of the president--it's +42 with Democratic presidents and -28 with Republicans. This difference isn't surprising--people generally have more favorable assessments of conditions when their party is in power. But an interesting pattern emerges when you plot differences over time:
The gap is essentially the same on the four occasions when a Republican was president (Reagan, GW Bush twice, and Trump), but it varies a lot when a Democrat is president. In particular, it was a lot bigger on the last two times--April 2011 and December 2012. This change was mostly driven by variation in Republican views, which became substantially more pessimistic while Obama was president.
I think this reflects the process I talked about last time, in which
Republican elites persuaded their base that they were facing an epochal
threat. A possibly encouraging thing is the Republican views became considerably more optimistic during the 1990s--maybe cheerfulness keeps breaking in, despite the efforts of party leaders.
[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]
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