You must hate Trump, part 2

 It occurred to me that I didn't show the average gap in Democratic and Republican perceptions of economic conditions by administration.  I'll do that, and show the gap in expectations too.  The gap is defined as the difference between supporters of the President's party and supporters of the other party, so it's always expected to be positive.

                            Current            Expected        Observations

Carter                        5.5                    3.1                        1

Reagan                    16.0                23.3                          5

GW Bush                16.6                18.4                        10

Obama                        7.6               23.3                        25

Trump                        21.7               52.0                        46

Biden                            4.4                46.6                        7

 

There is no clear tendency for an increase in partisan differences in ratings of current conditions.  It is larger under the three Republican administrations than in the three Democratic ones, although the numbers of observations in some of the administrations is small.  There is a clear increase in partisan differences in expectations--it was more than twice as large under Trump as under Obama, and has been almost as large under Biden.  Taking a closer look:

 

 

 Republicans grew more pessimistic from December to January (maybe in December some still believed that Trump would get a second term) and have stayed about the same since then.  Democrats have pretty steadily grown more optimistic.

A large gap from the beginning, with little change until Covid hit.   The very last observation was November 2020--presumably most of the survey was done after the election, explaining the big drop in Republican expectations.  Democrats became more optimistic in September and October, maybe because of increasing confidence that Biden would win.

Obama

Partisan differences were small at the beginning, then grew over most of the administration and seemed to decline towards the end.  The biggest gap was in Nov 2012, just after Obama was re-elected.  I

And GW Bush:

 

  Partisan differences declined as the recession deepened.  

It seems like there's a tendency for partisan differences in expectations to be smaller when economic conditions are bad.  That is, supporters of the president's party seem to be more affected by economic declines.  But the big story is the increased partisan gap since Trump.

Returning to the issue that started this series of posts, partisan differences in perceptions of reality have definitely increased on some things.  But some of those, like the extent of election fraud, are things about which the average person has no real information.  On economic conditions, people do have relevant experience, and there are also standard figures which are reported by all news outlets.  So if partisan differences on perceived economic conditions haven't increased, that's understandable.  But that is an "if"--they might have increased, but the evidence isn't clear enough to be confident.