The partisan consumer sentiment flip is underway
No, this does not discredit economic materialism.
We’ve been talking a lot about consumer sentiment in recent months, typically just by looking at total numbers. But you can, of course, always carve survey numbers like this up by demographic — and when you parse them by partisan alignment, a completely unambiguous trend jumps out. Just look at the chart above: when Trump was in office, consumer confidence among Republicans was soaring while it was much lower among Democrats. Then, right around when Biden won the 2020 election, the trend reversed: now Democrats were bullish on the economy while consumer confidence sunk among Republicans. And now, with Trump on the verge of retaking office, those numbers have begun to flip again.
What’s going on here? Well, if you read Morning Consult, you might take this as evidence of a “vibecession” — or a gap between how the economy is performing and how people feel about it. Superficially, these partisan realignments would seem to support that reading, because they clearly have everything to do with political ideology and nothing to do with the economy. Right?
The third variable
One immediate problem with this read is that partisanship cannot actually explain this chart — not entirely. If it did then you would expect Republican consumer confidence to be maxxed out and Democratic consumer confidence to be hovering near zero. Plainly, however, something is influencing partisans on both sides not to take maximalist positions. And in fact, except for the few days where their positions on the graph flip, one can see that the lines generally move in tandem: when one goes up the other goes up, and when one goes down the other goes down.
So what’s really happening here is that partisan commitments are influencing some third variable. And we can get a pretty clear idea of what that third variable looks like simply by looking at consumer confidence among a third group: independents.
Independents don’t show us the crazy election-week flips that Democrats and Republicans do, but they do seem to track the other trends perfectly well. Just looking at the drop in consumer confidence among independents during the start of Covid, for example, one could reliably predict that consumer confidence crashed among Democrats and Republicans as well.
So already it makes zero sense to suppose that these lines are somehow detached from economic conditions. They reflect economic conditions as partially filtered through a partisan lens, which is completely in line with Marxist conceptions of materialism. Recall what Engels wrote in 1890:
The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure — political forms of the class struggle and its results…also exercise their influence…
Partisanship and material relations
One might leave the explanation there, but I think it important to observe that partisanship itself expresses a material relation.
In a capitalist economy the state itself can become an arena for class struggle. Just as often it becomes an arena for intra-class struggle, with various factions of the bourgeoisie wrestling with each other. The fight over Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act was a classic example of the latter: some industries (such as the auto industry) were generally supportive of the Act because health insurance prices had become an onerous expense for the owners, while other industries (such as the health insurance industry) saw Obamacare as a threat.
In cases like this, partisan alignment becomes a proxy for alignment with a whole coalition of economic interests. During the last election, for example, we saw that people who were relatively unconcerned with inflation tended to be very high earners or (judging by their education) upwardly mobile earners. The only income consituency that Kamala Harris won — the highest income bracket — are people who had less stake than usual in Trump following through with his campaign pledges to lower prices. In fact, it became popular among many of Harris’s constituents to deny that inflation was a problem at all!
Meanwhile, the people who voted for Trump tended to be people who felt like they were experiencing real economic hardship from inflation and wanted him to alleviate it:
So of course these people are more optimistic now that Trump is in office. Their views about the economy are informed by their partisan alignment — but their partisan alignment, in turn, was significantly determined by their position in the economy.
So we see that even the seemingly capricious partisan flip on the consumer confidence chart has a straightforward economic explanation. People who are struggling in the economy become invested in politicians who they think will help them, and this investment then has a predictable influence on how they’ll view the economy moving forward. These are subjective determinations of course, but they aren’t capricious — they reflect real facts about their position in the material economy.
Thanks for reading! My blog is supported entirely by readers like you. To receive new posts and support my work, why not subscribe?
Refer enough friends to this site and you can read paywalled content for free!
And if you liked this post, why not share it?