Americans Have Stopped Thinking the Economy Is Getting Worse
The outlook among voters of all political persuasion stabilized in April. That’s good news for Trump.
People queue at a food pantry in Staten Island, New York on May 14, 2020.
Photographer: Timothy Fadek/ReduxPresident Donald Trump has seen his poll numbers slide during the coronavirus pandemic, with nearly every recent survey showing him losing to presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden. But even amid staggering job losses and mounting financial hardship for millions of Americans, those same polls consistently show that voters believe Trump will do a better job of handling the economy. How can that be, given record unemployment and reams of dismal economic data?
New survey data that Democracy Fund/UCLA Nationscape shared with Bloomberg Businessweek offers a rather surprising clue to how it is that Trump has maintained such resilience. Americans’ opinions about the state of the economy, which collapsed with the onset of the pandemic in March, stopped falling about a month ago and have now stabilized—a pattern that is evident across all political persuasions.