You never know

 A few weeks ago, I wrote about a claim that "only about four percent of all marriages today are between a Republican and a Democrat."  I gave some results from surveys that asked people how their spouses voted, but mentioned that in some cases people might be mistaken.  There aren't many surveys that ask members of couples separately about their votes, but I found one from 1993 by Nancy Burns, Kay Lehman Schlozman, and Sidney Verba (data in ICPSR).  Among couples in which both members voted in the 1992 presidential election, 76% voted for the same candidate and 24% split their votes.  Of course, that election was unusual because an independent candidate (Ross Perot) got a large number of votes.  Limiting it to Bush and Clinton, 67% voted for the same candidate, and 7% split their votes.  

The survey didn't ask people how they thought their spouse voted for President, but they did ask whether they disagreed on any race.  In 47% of the couples, both said no, and in 22% both said yes.  In the other 31%, one partner thought that they didn't disagree on any races and one thought they did.  Breaking votes for president down by perceived disagreement:

                                 Same            Different

Both No                   96%              4%                      [89%-0%]
Split                         68%              32%                    [60%-15%]
Both yes                   46%              54%                    [32%-12%]

The figures in brackets are limited to Bush and Clinton votes.  Looking at it another way, almost half of the split votes, and more than half of the Bush/Clinton split votes, came from couples in which one member thought that they agreed on all the races (there were no clear gender differences in accuracy of perception).  

Although the data are old, I think that the general point is still relevant--if there's ambiguity, people tend to assume that their friends and family vote the same way that they do.  It's possible that increased political polarization has made people pay more attention to evidence about what their friends and family actually think, but it's also possible that it's made people more likely to avoid political discussions and more likely to assume that reasonable people agree with them.  

Two nations?

 A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times had a piece on the upcoming election that said "Red and Blue Americas are moving farther and farther apart geographically, philosophically, financially, educationally and informationally."  It went on to say "In 1960, about 4 percent of Americans said they would be displeased if their child married someone from the other party. By 2020, that had grown to nearly four in 10. Indeed, only about 4 percent of all marriages today are between a Republican and a Democrat."  I already wrote about the last point.  I think it refers to perceived voting differences from one's spouse (there aren't many political surveys which interview both members of a couple):  they are rare today, but were also rare in the previous years for which I had data (1944, 1960, and 1984).  This post will consider the hypothetical question about a child marrying someone from the other party.  This is a summary of all the relevant questions I could find:

Year                       Positive               Negative             Survey

1960                     14%                       4%                         Almond/Verba
2008                                                     24%                     YouGov               
2010                                                     41%                     YouGov
2014                     28%                       17%                       Pew
2017                                                     14%                      PRRI
2018                     69%                       35%                       PRRI     
2020                                                     38%                      YouGov

The three figures in boldface involve the same question:  the others all had different questions and different response categories.  Some of the surveys just asked one question about marrying someone from the other party, but others asked everyone two questions--one about marrying a Republican and one about marrying a Democrat.  For the ones with two questions, I also show positive responses--people who say they would be pleased if the hypothetical child marries in the party (rather than saying it wouldn't matter to them).  There's clearly been an increase in both positive and negative reactions, although the differences among the questions makes it hard to say much about its exact timing (I wish people had stuck with the 1960 question).

Why do we have stability with (perceived) party differences within actual marriages but increasingly negative reactions to party differences in a hypothetical marriage?  People generally know something about their spouse's political views (although there's undoubtedly a tendency to exaggerate agreement).  But with the hypothetical question, they have to come up with an idea of what an unspecified Democrat or Republican would be like.  The most likely source for that would be prominent Democratic or Republican political leaders.  In a time when ideological differences between parties were small and political leaders tried to show respect for the other side, that wouldn't seem so bad.  But with larger differences and more conflict between the parties, it would.  That is, increased objections to a hypothetical marriage to someone from the other party don't necessarily reflect increased social distance between Democrats and Republicans in the public--they could just reflect increased differences at the elite level.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

All together now?

 A few days after the 2008 election, a USA Today/Gallup poll asked "In dealing with the problems facing the country, do you think Barack Obama will make a sincere effort to work with the Republicans in Congress to find solutions that are acceptable to both parties?" and parallel questions about whether the Republicans would make a sincere effort to work with the Democrats and Obama and whether the Democrats would make a sincere effort to work with the Republicans.  In March and September 2009 they asked about whether the various parties had made a sincere effort to work with each other, and in February 2010 they asked about working together on health care reform.  They also asked the forward-looking questions after the 2010, 2012, and 2016 elections.  The figure shows the percent who said that Obama, the Democrats, the Republicans, or Trump would (or had) worked with the other party:

Obama consistently ran ahead of both the Democrats and Republicans in Congress, and the Democrats were generally somewhat ahead of the Republicans, but they all rose and fell together.   In principle, you might expect that they would move in opposite directions at least some of the time:  that people would see one side as being obstructionist and give the other side credit for trying, but that didn't happen with any of these surveys.  Rather, the public seemed to blame both sides about equally when there was disagreement (if anything, Obama's ratings might have fallen more than the Congressional parties).  

I think this data helps to explain why Republicans turned against the Senate immigration deal.  If it had passed, Biden would have gotten some of the credit from the public, and most Republicans are unwilling to do anything that will make Biden more popular (several of them said as much).  A few years ago, I suggested that a strategy of uniform opposition had driven down Obama's popularity.   Republicans have continued with that under Biden.  Of course, there has been some important bipartisan legislation, like the American Rescue Plan Act, but they were mostly early in his term and my impression is that the Republicans have tried to avoid publicizing them.  It used to be that when popular legislation was passed on a bipartisan basis, both parties would talk about it and try to claim some of the credit.  But more recently, people seem to have realized that elections are more about the President than about Congress, so for an opposition party, denying credit to the President is more important than claiming credit for yourself.  And blocking potentially popular legislation might make your side less popular, but it will probably make the other side less popular as well.

A few other observations:

1.  The numbers expecting the parties to make a sincere effort to work with each other were higher than I expected. 
2.  Just after the 2016 election, 58% expected Trump to make an effort to work with the Democrats, which was somewhat ahead of the number who expected the Republicans in Congress to work with the Democrats.  That might be because in 2016, many people saw Trump as a "dealmaker" rather than a traditional conservative, or it may be that there is a tendency to have hopes for a new president.  
3.  It's not possible to be sure, but it seems that the questions that asked about the future produced more positive responses than those that asked about the past.
4.  Following from the previous points, it's unfortunate that this question hasn't been asked since 2016--I would like to see how expectations have changed.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Republicans and reality

 If you go by the standard statistics, the economy is doing very well--unemployment remains low, inflation and interest rates are coming down, the stock market is rising.  Yet the public still isn't impressed, although ratings have been improving recently.  Paul Krugman suggests that the reason is politics--that Republicans have rated the economy as bad ever since Joe Biden took office, and have continued to do so even as economic conditions have improved.  He says that Republican "beliefs are nearly impervious to reality."  

The Michigan Consumer Surveys have a monthly "index of consumer sentiment" which goes back to the 1940s.  Since April 2017, they have regularly asked people about their party identification.  The figure shows consumer sentiment by party during the Trump administration:

There wasn't much variation among either Democrats or Republicans until Covid hit in early 2020 and ratings declined among both before rising a little in the fall.  I count January 2021 as the beginning of the Biden administration, so changes in the last two months are probably a response to the election results.  Through October 2020, the correlation between Democratic and Republican ratings is about 0.9.  

During the Biden administration:

Ratings diverged in the first few months and Democrats became more positive and Republicans became more negative--since the summer of 2021 they have tracked each other pretty closely.  Over the course of the Biden administration, the correlation has been about 0.75.  That is, Republicans and Democrats responded to reality in similar ways during both administrations (and to similar degrees--the standard deviations were about the same).  Of course, politics make a difference--Democrats were more favorable under Biden and Republicans were more favorable under Trump.  It's possible that the change of administration had more impact on Republicans--this seems to be the case for beliefs about crime rates and the prospects of the next generation.  But it's hard to say, because economic conditions also changed substantially between late 2020 and mid-2021:  unemployment fell but inflation rose.  

The general point is that negative perceptions aren't just Republican partisanship:  something was making Democrats feel worse about the economy between mid-2021 and mid-2022.  

And something has made Republicans feel better since mid-2022:

 That still leaves the question of why views were so negative in mid-2022, and are still pretty negative despite recent improvement.  In August 2022, unemployment was 3.7%, annual inflation was 8.2%, and the index was 53.2.  In November 1973, unemployment was worse (4.8%), inflation was essentially the same (8.3%), but the index was twenty points higher (76.5).  I'd say that the two most plausible explanations are (a) a general shift towards more negative assessments, maybe because of more negative media coverage and (b) a stronger reaction to the inflation of the 2020s because it came suddenly and people weren't used to it.