Voters say they care most about the economy, but do the numbers actually matter?

Across months of poll data, rally speeches, and campaign interviews, one of several themes this election season stands out: most voters say their primary motivator is the economy.

But what do they really mean by that?

Economic conditions are often framed by political media as an esoteric factor, like the weather on election day. But most economists and political scientists will tell you that the economy as it exists by any broad measurement, and the economy as it exists in the minds of voters, are often two entirely different things.

“It’s this sort of situation where there’s a disconnect with the actual economy or job market that we measure,” said Lonnie Golden, a Penn State economics professor who studies labor market statistics.

Economic data may be expected to have “a disconnect from what folks personally experience, but not in an unbiased way,” Golden continued. One might assume, for instance, that part of the population will have a worse experience than the aggregate data show, and an equal part will have a better one.

“But there seems to be a systematic under-perception of how healthy the job market is and how healthy the economy is,” Golden said, and in many cases economists “are all shaking our heads and saying ‘I don’t know.’

Experts across the nation have made observations similar to Golden. Voters consistently rank the economy as their top issue, and express a generally negative perception of it – despite the fact that the vast majority of metrics show the U.S. economy as remarkably strong.

Unemployment has remained low, and new job creation remained high, even as the Federal Reserve has kept interest rates elevated to tamp down inflation. Price increases have almost entirely abated, and wages – particularly for the lowest-paid workers – have notched record gains.

But you might not know that based on campaign advertising, even from President Joe Biden’s own party.

Democrats have run a bevy of ads promoting the proposed economic reforms of Vice President Kamala Harris, sympathizing with voters who say they’re struggling financially. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has likewise hammered Harris on the period of high inflation during their tenure in 2022 and 2023.

In many cases Trump’s statements are a mischaracterization of the end of his own administration, when a drop in demand due to the COVID-19 pandemic caused metrics like gas prices to plunge, and generated layoffs of jobs that didn’t return until much later in President Joe Biden’s term.

Democrats have worked to combat Trump’s rosy depiction of his own time in office and his lack of specifics as to how he will reverse the clock to a pre-pandemic economy.

“There’s nothing Trump can do to turn back the clock on the price of eggs, the question is what are you going to do going forward,” said Jim Gilligan, a Democratic volunteer who was knocking doors in Harrisburg on Sunday – a conversation Gilligan and other canvassers have had with many voters.

A growing number of political scientists, however, are pointing to evidence that these actual conditions matter less and less, electorally speaking.

“People’s views of the economy are motivated by their partisanship much more than I think we thought they were 30 or 40 years ago,” said Sarah Niebler, a political science professor at Dickinson College.

“I think some of that is because of polarization,” Niebler continued. “We’re just filtering everything about our views on policies through a partisan lens and through a partisan identity.”

Voters’ views on the economy – and many other policy issues – are effectively a chicken-versus-egg problem. Are voters staking out their beliefs on different topics and then adopting the partisan allegiance that best suits – or are they joining a partisan team and then shaping their positions to match?

Partisanship “is more a part of our identity than it is an amalgamation of issue positions,” Niebler said, which makes it particularly difficult to tell what – if any – policy changes on a given issue will actually swing votes.

Polling has long shown, Nieber said, that voters’ view of the economy almost always shifts rapidly after an election, suggesting that “people are relying on the partisan cues and not the actual policy.” A seminal study in 1992, Niebler noted, found that voters were more likely to reward a candidate based on what they believed was going to happen economically rather than what had happened – making it difficult to peg voters’ views to a candidate’s actual record.

Polling this year also shows that partisan affiliation is a better predictor of how someone rates the economy than is their own personal financial situation, according to data from the Pew Research Center, a phenomenon that has also been seen anecdotally in interviews with voters.

Republicans who have spoken with PennLive before and after political events this year are very likely to say the poor state of the economy is their primary concern. Most acknowledge that their families have done quite well in recent years, but point to reports in conservative media about past inflation.

Similarly, Democrats are far more likely to say that Biden and Harris’ good handling of the economy is a major driver for them, citing positive economic numbers shared by liberal-leaning outlets, even when very few say their own financial situation has changed that much.

This isn’t to say that differences in real, material circumstances don’t exist. Pay data, for instance can tell very different stories.

Inflation-adjusted average weekly earnings for production and non-supervisory workers – a common measure of blue-collar America – were up 4.2% in September versus the same month pre-pandemic in 2019, according to federal data. Over the prior five years back to 2014, that growth was a hair over 7% – meaning that most laborers saw less growth during the COVID years, but still came out solidly ahead.

More specific data, however, show significant divergence. Lower-wage workers notched much larger gains, according to same-employee tracking by the Atlanta Federal Reserve, and pay rose much more for those who switched jobs versus those who stayed.

Once inflation began to drop in early 2023, job-switchers saw massive gains, while job-stayers saw notably less. In May of 2023, for example, those who changed jobs had seen a median pay raise of 7.5% over the past year even as inflation declined to 4.1%. Those who didn’t switch jobs saw more meager growth of 5.7%.

The gap has since closed; as of September 2024, switchers and stayers saw median wage growth of 5.3% and 4.8%, respectively, over the prior 12 months, with inflation now down to 2.4%.

That outcome would be considered remarkably good by nearly any standard, Golden said – but it may be the case that those left behind are the ones who simply receive more political attention.

“I think the Democrats always have a dilemma because they want to appear to be in-touch with the people that are the worst off,” Golden said. “If you say ‘well, 4% unemployment, 3% GDP growth, 2.5% inflation, 4% wage growth, we’re killing it!’ – if you say that someone is going to say you’re being insensitive to the people who are struggling.”

Those views are also relative, Golden stressed, with voters’ expectations being just as important as their objective experience.

“Everybody makes a connection relative to some sort of standard. Their expectation might be that it could be even better,” Golden said.

Economic numbers could be perfect by the standards of experts like himself, “but if people don’t believe it, or they don’t get the correct information, or they’re doing a comparison relative to something unrealistic, then they can come up with conclusions of their own that don’t match,” Golden said.

This relativism has been used to explain a number of different political shifts. A recent New York Times data study, for instance, found a loss of economic standing for non-college educated white men relative to other demographics, which experts said could explain their rightward shift as well as the propensity of Trump supporters to tie the economy to immigration out of the belief that they are competing with immigrants for finite pay and benefits.

(Most datasets show that the economic boost from immigration increases non-immigrant income).

All of this is to say that it’s very difficult – when voters tell pollsters their most important issue is the economy – to tease out how much of this reflects a measurable experience versus a relative or selective experience filtered through partisanship.

Political scientists used to think that economics was somewhat insulated from this compared to hot-button partisan issues like abortion, Niebler said, “but now we’re talking much more frankly about, I think, the fact that the economy is also filtered through partisanship.”

“Most voters are not thinking about all of the issues and making a pro-con list of candidates’ positions on every issue versus their own positions on every issue,” Niebler said.

“That’s just not how most voters are making decisions right now,” she said, and “in some ways, everything is so polarized and divided by partisanship, it almost doesn’t matter what one issue is most important.”