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.