How Election Week 2022 Went Down

Though the economy is on everyone’s minds in the run-up to the 2022 midterms, it’s clear that not everyone is thinking about it in the same way. We’ve found in the ongoing FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos panel survey using Ipsos’s KnowledgePanel that Republicans are more likely than Democrats to rate “inflation or increasing costs” as a top concern facing the country. Other surveys have also found that, compared to Democratic voters, GOP voters are more worried about economic issues.

What’s even more interesting, though, is that party identification affects both how voters feel about the economy — and how they rate ostensibly objective economic indicators. According to a 2002 paper, inflation fell nearly 10 points under former President Ronald Reagan in the late ’80s, but most Democrats at the time said that inflation had actually gotten worse under him. Meanwhile, a plurality of Republicans (correctly) said it had gotten better. And during the ’90s, a smaller share of Republicans than Democrats reported that the budget deficit had increased under former President Bill Cllinton (in fact, it had fallen), according to a 2015 paper.

Democrats and Republicans also tend to disagree over which factors are driving economic uncertainty. Democrats tended to downplay the role of government action in higher prices, for example. Republicans, on the other hand, tended to emphasize government involvement, as we found in the first wave of our survey:

Of course, it’s also true that Americans tend to overestimate inflation overall, but the fact of the matter is that which party you identify with plays a significant role in deciding how you view the economy — and even how you view the cold, hard numbers. And that divergence could play a big role in how voters penalize (or reward) Democrats on Election Day.