… The old adage that Americans vote their pocketbooks used to be a safe assumption. But things are more complicated now, and the economy is not quite as major a driver in presidential popularity as it once was.
As this column mentioned last month, noted political scientists John Sides, Lynn Vavreck, and Michael Tesler point out in Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America that while there had been a strong relationship between consumer confidence and presidential job-approval rating from Presidents John F. Kennedy through George W. Bush, that relationship disappeared under Barack Obama and has not resurfaced under Trump. It seems that hyper-partisanship and the increasingly tribal nature of American politics has diminished, if not severed, that relationship in at least two ways. CONT.
Charlie Cook