I've had several posts about the following 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, and so on. 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?" One influence on opinions was partisanship--people were more optimistic when a president of their own party was in power--but it seemed like the effect of the president's party was stronger for Republicans. Since the last time I wrote about this, there have been a few additional surveys and one change of administration, so I'm updating the analysis. Here is the percent of Democrats saying very or somewhat likely:
There's no clear difference between optimism in Republican (red) and Democratic (blue) administrations and also no clear trend. Positive views in the latest survey (September 2022) are low, but not the lowest ever (that was in 1995). Here is the corresponding figure for Republicans, using the same scale:
We can put these together and look at the gap between Republicans and Democrats:
In Republican administrations ranging from 1983 to 2019, it's consistently about +10 for Republicans. Under Democratic administrations, it was about -10 until around 2010, but since then has been much larger.* That is, Republican expectations for the relatively distant future depend on the party of the president much more than Democratic expectations do. It's worth noting that this question is focused on economics--I will look and see if I can find anything on expectations about other things, like the culture or the survival of democracy.*
*In 1999, positive expectations were higher among Republicans than Democrats (77%-72%). I thought this was probably a mistake, but I was able to check the original data and confirmed it.
[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]
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