Why Voters Are Down On The Economy, In Their Own Words 35:32

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$45 upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three-month plan only. Taxes and fees extra. Speeds lower above 40 gigabytes. See details. I think it's one big hot mess. I don't think the Republicans and Democrats are working together for the betterment of the people at all. I have no idea how the low-income bracket individuals are supposed to survive with inflation going on right now. I don't care who votes for who. I believe we want to see everybody just come together right now and work together as a people.

Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk. For much of Joe Biden's presidency, political observers have puzzled over a disconnect between economic indicators and consumer sentiment.

Unemployment is low, growth has been persistent, and inflation is receding. And yet the vibes are not great. According to tracking by the University of Michigan, consumer sentiment has recovered somewhat. Their index currently sits at 77, which is around what it was when Biden took office. But for context, the average in 2022 was 59. And the bad thing for Biden is that during Trump's first three years in office,

that is pre-pandemic, the index averaged 97. And indeed, an Echelon Insights poll from earlier this month found that voters favor Trump on making the economy work better by an eight-point margin. And that finding is in line with plenty of other polls, in fact, some of which show that gap even larger. So suffice it to say, voters don't love Joe Biden's economy.

But what exactly don't they like? To answer that, FiveThirtyEight teamed up with Perry Undem, a nonpartisan research firm, to conduct focus groups with voters. And we're going to hear some of that tape shortly. I'll also say later in the show. Another big project that we've been working on, FiveThirtyEight built an algorithm to group House members into caucuses based on how they vote, not just how they say they identify, just how they vote.

the Progressive Caucus or the Freedom Caucus. We're looking at how they actually voted. But first,

Let's hear from some voters. And here with me to help do that is FiveThirtyEight senior politics reporter Monica Potts, who listened intently to all of these focus groups. She's here with me now. Welcome to the podcast, Monica. Hi, Galen. Thanks for having me. So what was it like working with a focus group? Was it like the movies where you're standing behind a one-way mirror and the folks, you know, just feel free to say whatever they want without knowing that Monica is peering from behind the glass?

I wish it was behind a one-way mirror because I've always wanted to see one, but it was the digital version of that. It was on Zoom. So I was in kind of an observing Zoom room where they couldn't see me, but I could see them and I could watch the conversation unfold without having an effect on it, which was really cool.

In these groups, there were 16 voters and they were all undecided, but they were split up by whether they leaned Trump or Biden. And the discussion seemed to match what we see in the poll numbers, that Americans are not happy with the economy. To set the tone here, I want to play a clip from one of the voters in the group that leans Trump. This is Veronica and she lives in Georgia. I think it's one big hot mess. I think it's one big hot mess.

I think it's ridiculous that the Federal Reserve rate continues to go up. I think it's ridiculous that our credit card debt has hit an all-time high of almost $3 trillion. I don't think the Republicans and Democrats are working together for the betterment of the people at all. I have no idea how the low-income bracket individuals in the fourth will survive with inflation going on right now, their rent constantly being increased. I don't care who votes for who. I believe we want to see everybody just come together right now and work together as a people.

So, Veronica out of the gates describing the 2024 election as one big hot mess. Is it fair to say that that's reflective of how many of the voters assessed either their choices or the economy?

Yeah, they weren't all as critical as Veronica, but they all generally thought things had gotten worse. They thought prices were too high, little purchases like what they would make at the grocery store or the gas pump were too high, and they thought too many people were struggling and bigger things like housing and higher education were increasingly out of reach. And I have to say, too, that this was a group of largely, I would say, mostly middle-class people. There were a few people who were...

more at the bottom of the income scale, but they all kind of said those things were rough for them all the time. I feel like the middle-class people felt like things were newly hard for them or more hard for them than they had been before. And we should say that these sentiments crossed the whatever political spectrum was here between the lean Trump and lean Biden. And here's Claudia, a voter from Virginia, who leans Biden, echoing some similar sentiments.

Nowadays, we have to worry about, okay, so do I save for my retirement? Because I'm getting old. But then my kid is now 18 and she needs to go to college. And then I have two other ones coming up right behind her. So do I save enough for that? You know, groceries are up. Gas is up. There's no way out. Like you either have to plan for you or plan for your kids. It's crazy. So a combination of...

themes here that are somewhat specific about actual borrowing costs and the Fed interest rate and some broader things of saving for retirement, saving for college, things that we have been talking about for decades in American life. I mean, did any of the specifics of what you heard surprise you? I feel like people were a little less specific than I expected them to be, especially when it came to what they wanted the president to do about it.

One of the reasons I wanted to do this is because it's not as though the president has levers in the Oval Office where he says, make eggs $6 and make gas $4. It's not that directed. And so I thought that we would hear more about kind of broader economic things. But people really wanted just to say,

I'm struggling. My family is struggling. Everybody I know is struggling. I want the president to acknowledge that. I want to hear Trump and Biden on their campaigns acknowledge that and tell me what they want the country to do in five years. You know, we say that there's been some consternation about what is going on with sentiment versus actual economic performance. I think a lot of the academic explanation is something like this, that for the first two years of Biden's presidency,

Prices were rising much faster than wages, and that's after wages had been rising significantly faster than prices for all of Trump's term. And then at the very end, because of the stimulus payments,

wages were rising much faster than prices even during the heart of the pandemic. And so in some ways, it's a response to that. And then on top of that, increased borrowing costs, making things like homes or cars or a lot of the things that are sort of big life-defining events or purchases much more expensive. Does the academic explanation match the sort of real-life human experience?

I think what the academic explanation misses that the real-life human experience gets is that the indicators that people care about shift according to what is putting pressure on their everyday lives. So, you know, at the beginning of the pandemic, people were really worried about the unemployment rate because lots of people were getting laid off and they knew people who were getting laid off and they worried about keeping their jobs.

Now that that's mostly gone and prices are still rising and they're not going back to what voters remember 2019 being like, they care more about prices and they care more about inflation and they care more about, you know, what their wages are after they spend on the necessities. So I think that's part of what that misses. But also I would say that

What is generally true is not always true for everyone. So wages are going up, but they're mostly going up for people who switched jobs during the big labor market boom or for people who, you know, maybe used the pandemic as an opportunity to change careers or move up in their careers. So I think some people, like you can say overall broadly what's happening in the economy, but that's going to miss out a lot of the details of

at ground level of people who maybe work in an industry that's being particularly hit with layoffs, even though the overall job market is doing well, that kind of thing. So important here to note, as you suggest, that a focus group is not a population-level sample. And you're going to hear about all kinds of things that are specific to these 16 people that may not be sort of observed specifically.

on the population level in consumer sentiment data or polls asking about the economy, but still adds a lot of color to the data that we already have. You know, we heard, of course, from Claudia, who leans Biden, that she's still frustrated about the economy. So for people who...

even feel like the economy has deteriorated under Biden and that they were doing better off four years ago, and maybe even blame Biden for those economic conditions, why do they still lean towards Biden?

Well, a lot of the Biden leaners were a tad different from the Trump leaners in that they didn't necessarily blame Biden for doing bad things on the economy. They just felt like he wasn't doing enough. Maybe he deserved credit for some smaller things or, you know, moving in the right direction, but it wasn't fast enough and they weren't seeing enough from him. So even though they didn't give him top marks on the economy, they also didn't think he was doing like a super bad job. But I think also...

They had other things that they cared about more. So a lot of the Biden leaners were really worried about the state of democracy. They were really worried about some of the things they heard Trump saying on the campaign trail. They're really worried about the fact that Trump is facing criminal charges, you know, in four different cases around the country. And they also were worried about the way that they felt that Trump

And his campaign treated minorities in this country, what he said about immigrants. So those things kind of mattered to them more than their own personal economic condition when it came to how they're going to vote in November. And actually, exactly to that point, one of the voters in the lean Biden focus group felt this way. So first, let's hear her talk about the economy, and then we can get into some of the other things she's considering.

I sometimes go into the grocery store and think, like, my God, I can only get whatever meat is on sale. My wife makes a six-figure salary, but we still can't afford the groceries and the shopping and stuff around here. We have to be really, really strict with our budget. Later in the focus group, she said—well, I'll let her say it for herself—

the economy isn't the number one issue. Economics probably isn't going to be my deciding factor. What do you think might be? I think human rights issues, you know, minority rights. And I think that kindness and the goodness that we want in the country is more important than the money itself.

I want, you know, my neighbors and myself to be treated well, regardless of race or sexual orientation or whatever it might be.

So when we look at polling, we see that the economy is still pretty high up on folks' lists. And according to Gallup polling on the most important issue, it still ranks number one. But other things have increased as well. I mean, we've seen in particular that immigration has risen to now almost match the economy in terms of most important issues facing the country. We also see just questions of leadership, quality of leadership, and

Other things have sort of risen and fallen and maybe aren't as high on the number one most important issue, but we see folks saying that it might decide their vote, things like democracy or abortion or what have you. I mean, to what extent did some of these other issues come up? And even for the lean Trump group, were things like immigration ever trumping the economy? Yeah.

For the Trump group, they cared a lot about immigration. And people said immigration and the economy are my top issues. They didn't really single one out or the other out. But a lot of times, too, people saw those things as connected. Like, we can't deal with the economy while the border is in crisis. And I have to say, too, that what they volunteered for

about the immigration situation sounded a lot like Republican messaging. It was, you know, the border's out of control, Biden's not doing anything on the border, they're just rushing in, they're voting, people who aren't citizens can vote. And so they had a lot of, I would say, a mix of misinformation and some information about what was happening on the border that was influencing how they were talking about immigration.

it. And for the Biden group, they also had other things that they cared about, and that was mainly democracy, things like personal rights. A lot of people mentioned abortion unprompted. So they really care about a woman's right to choose. They saw the Supreme Court decision and the anti-abortion sentiment in the Republican Party as infringing on personal rights. So I think that even though voters care about the economy, when all is said and done, that may not be the sole factor that they vote on.

Yeah. I mean, was there anything that came up? Like we said, there's these moments where personal experiences come to the fore. Were there any moments that really just sort of surprised you?

There were a lot of things that I didn't exactly know how to place. There was a woman who works in IT. In a follow-up interview, she told me that when she was trying to hire people under the Trump administration, she had to go to extra lengths to justify why she might be hiring somebody outside of the country, like why she might be offshoring a job or why she might be trying to hire someone who

wasn't a U.S. citizen. That was her memory. But then under the Biden administration, she felt like that had all gone away and that all these jobs were going overseas. And she said that that was her personal experience, that she was involved in this in her own firm. And I had a hard time kind of

placing at what exactly that might be that she was talking about. There have been some shifts in policy and executive orders about immigration and hiring foreign workers between the two administrations, but nothing that would really account for her personal experience. So that really surprised me.

Was this a Biden or Trump leaner? And was she describing a dynamic that she was unhappy about, that she thought that Trump's policies on offshoring IT jobs were better? Yes, she was unhappy about it. She was a Trump leaner. And what she and other Trump leaners said, and even some Biden leaners said, was that we really had to start putting America first. That messaging from the Trump campaign was

of putting America first really resonated with a lot of Trump leaners, that they felt like American workers had to be put first, the American economy had to be put first, and they liked that part of Trump's message.

Yeah, and to that point, one sentiment that really united both the Biden leaners and the Trump leaners here was that America first message. And specifically when it comes to foreign aid and the recent aid package to Ukraine and Israel, etc. This here, we're going to listen to a Biden leaner talk about that. Biden is constantly giving money away to other countries when we got our own problems here.

What are we? Are we the Mother Teresa for every other country? This is crazy, man. Take care of home first. Then you help out when you can with other people. You know what I'm saying? Like, if I can't pay the bills here, I'm going to help another kid. It's the same thing with our country, bro. We are in such debt. But yet and still, we're constantly giving money away. And you see homeless people all over the place. So that is how somebody who says he's planning on voting for Biden or leaning Biden is feeling agitated.

Did we hear specifically about people being upset by the recent, you know, 95 billion foreign aid package that was passed?

This took place a little before that, but people in general were upset about Ukraine aid, Israel aid, aid to foreign countries in general. They felt like it was an opportunity missed to take care of things at home, that dollars going overseas prevented dealing from the problems that we have here and helping people here. And, you know, I have to say here, the reality, this comes up a lot, but the reality is that U.S. foreign aid in general is,

usually less than 2% of the federal budget. The Ukraine aid, even though in comparison historically it's been pretty massive, is still less than 1% of the U.S. GDP. But people feel like it causes us to miss opportunities to help people at home and that it makes more sense to solve all of our own problems first before we start helping other people with their problems.

Yeah, I think that's an important point. And going into a campaign, I mean, a lot of what we're going to hear about the economy is messaging. And to the extent that you can keep a message simple –

it'll probably resonate more with voters or be more memorable. And that is something that, of course, we've seen polling specifically post the Iraq war that folks really feel like America has spent a lot of time helping others abroad while things have gotten difficult at home. And obviously that gets exacerbated

when people feel down on the economy, right? Like post the financial crisis or during this period of inflation, it becomes not a, oh, we're all doing well, so why question how we're helping folks abroad, but we're in a tight spot. What are we doing helping folks abroad?

I think that's right. And I'll say, too, that I think when I asked people what they wanted to see a president do about the economy, they weren't that specific. But one of the things that almost everyone I spoke to wanted was to hear the president saying, we know things are tough for you. We know things are tough right now, and this is how we're going to make it better. And they felt like they were being gaslit by all the news about how great the economy is doing, you know, that they see that the job market is doing great in the

headlines and they hear it on the evening news and they feel like that's not true and they're not hearing the truth about the economy. All right. Well, we're going to leave things there. Thank you so much, Monica, for sharing all of this great voter insight with us. Thank you so much for having me. Now let's take an algorithmic look at how lawmakers in Washington are voting. But first, a break.

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The U.S. House of Representatives divides itself into some clear ideological caucuses. There's the Conservative Freedom Caucus and the Progressive Caucus on the right and left flanks of the two parties. There are the New Democrats and Republican Governance Group towards the center. And there's the Bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus.

These are groups that lawmakers can join to send a message about who they are and what they're trying to do in Washington. But at the end of the day, lawmakers can vote however they want. And so here at FiveThirtyEight, we devised an algorithm to look at the voting trends of all

all members of Congress and cluster them based on how they actually vote, not just their stated caucus. Call these the quiet caucuses. And here with me to discuss the project is FiveThirty editor Cooper Burton. Welcome back to the podcast, Cooper.

Thanks for having me again. So it wasn't the sole purpose behind the project, but one of the outcomes here is that you can sort of put lawmakers on blast for not actually aligning with the caucuses that they say they are a part of. And this is very rigorous. This is an algorithm putting these folks on blast.

What were some of the biggest surprises in terms of lawmakers who say they're part of the progressive caucus, but they actually end up voting with the moderates or vice versa? Or maybe somebody who says they're part of the freedom caucus, but is voting with the establishment? We had a couple of these kind of edge cases. One that really stuck out to me was Representative Ben Klein. So he represents Virginia's 6th Congressional District.

He is a member of the Problem Solvers Caucus, which, like you said, kind of bills itself as this bipartisan group of lawmakers. But when we actually analyzed his votes, we found that he actually voted most with a cluster that we called the far-right obstructionists. So that includes people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz. It's interesting to see Ben Klein actually voting with a group like this, even though he's part of the Problem Solvers Caucus.

And on the other hand, you have people like Max Miller of Ohio, who is a member of the Freedom Caucus. But then when you look at his voting behavior, he's actually grouped with this cluster that we call the Compromise Conservatives. So those are Republicans who are a little bit more moderate, and they're not really as willing to vote for these kind of hardline messaging bills. They're not really willing to obstruct Congress as much.

So it's interesting that he's a member of the Freedom Caucus, but then he's not actually voting like it. So those were some kind of edge cases we saw. You know, you also see it among the Democrats, too. Yeah, I think you put Representative Debbie Dingell on blast, if I recall.

That's right. So she is a member of the Problem Solvers Caucus, like Ben Klein, but she was grouped in with the progressive Democrats cluster. So normally we saw most of the Problem Solvers Caucus members in the most moderate clusters because they were willing to be the most bipartisan.

But Dingle was in probably the furthest left cluster that we had. Yeah, I mean, for these folks who are misaligned with their stated caucus, how do we make sense of that? Is it that they appreciate the brand, but hey, they're just still going to vote however they want?

Yeah, I think there is, you know, a little bit of electoral clout that you can get from saying that you're part of this problem solvers caucus. You know, it sounds really congenial. But then, you know, maybe you don't actually believe those things, but you want to say that you do. So maybe you can come across as more moderate or more level-headed in a re-election campaign. But also some of it makes sense. You know, Max Miller from Ohio, who I mentioned earlier, he's a member of the Freedom Caucus.

But he's also a member of some other more moderate caucuses like the Republican Main Street Partnership. And he's kind of publicly critiqued these sort of obstructionist tactics in the past. You also see some sort of lagging. So maybe a member who used to really affiliate with the Freedom Caucus has kind of drifted away from them. But it takes a little while before they formally cut ties from this caucus. So that could also contribute to some of what we're seeing.

So these are the edge cases, but do the quiet caucuses tend to overlap pretty well with the stated caucuses for the most part?

Yes, they do. For the most part, people, their cluster aligned with mostly the caucuses that they were affiliated with. And that's actually a good thing. You know, most members don't join ideological caucuses just because they usually join it because they agree with that ideology and they vote like it. So it makes sense. And it kind of means, you know, the algorithm is mostly working, but it's still kind of valuable to be able to tease out these surprise cases.

So we weren't just looking at surprise cases. Actually, the algorithm was instructed to break up Congress into eight different clusters in large part because there are already eight ideological clusters in Congress.

According to how they voted, and you would think, okay, eight clusters, there's two parties, you'd have four groups of Democrats and four groups of Republicans, but that's actually not what happened. You ended up with three clusters of Democrats and five clusters of Republicans. Why?

I should just mention there's not strictly only eight ideological caucuses in the House of Representatives. We just chose these eight because they're kind of the main ones, and eight seems like a nice good number. But you're right, when we ran the algorithm, it spat out three Democratic clusters and five Republican clusters. We didn't tell it to do that, it's just kind of where the data took it.

But it also makes sense when you are thinking of kind of the story of Congress this year and last year. The interesting stuff really is among House Republicans. It's not really among the Democrats. These high profile clashes and the headlines that we're seeing in the news, those are mostly among Republicans. They're about how Republicans are kind of in disarray.

And so by having more Republican clusters, by having five instead of four, you're able to kind of tease out the differences between each cluster more and kind of see the nuances about what really distinguishes each one from each other. More so than if you just have like one, two, three, like we have with the Democrats. The story there is not really that interesting. It's just...

moderates, progressives, and then everybody else. Of course, I mean, there is some notable stuff there. I shouldn't bash it too much. But the main story is really among the Republicans, so it kind of makes sense that they would kind of naturally have more clusters. So on the left, we have the core Democrats and then folks who are a bit more towards the middle, the moderates, and a bit more towards the left, the progressives. How did the algorithm end up dividing up Republicans into five clusters?

I wasn't the one who designed the algorithm, that was our senior researcher Mary Radcliffe, but kind of an overview of how it works. You start off by randomly dividing the members of the house into eight groups that are kind of close to each other.

And then you check to see if you can do better. So, for example, if a member is initially in this first random assignment, if they're part of group A, but you see that they're actually a little bit more closer to group B, then you want to move them. So you repeat this process over and over and over and over again. And every time you're kind of optimizing these clusters just a little bit better. So you're making the members...

in the cluster just a little bit more aligned with each other each time. And you have that process repeat itself as many times as you need to until it gives you kind of the most optimal clusters that you can have. So if you're choosing eight clusters, these are the closest aligned within themselves that you can get. And then we did a bunch of other methodological stuff too. And if people are interested in that, they can look at the interactive because we have a very long methodology statement that they can check out.

Yeah, in fact, I strongly recommend folks head over to FiveThirtyEight and play around with this yourself. It is an interactive, in fact, so that you can look at how people associate according to the partisan lean of a district or how long lawmakers have been in office, right? Like, you might think that the upstart progressive caucus would have the newest members. It actually doesn't.

The caucus that has the newest members is the more moderate caucus. And actually, if you think a little bit further, that does make sense because those are people who are in purple districts who are sort of getting booted out of office every time there's a swing one direction or another and likewise getting elected by the same token. Okay, so these five groups that the algorithm clustered for Republicans, who are they? How do they identify?

I've talked about a couple of them already. The first one is what we call the far-right obstructionists. Those are the Freedom Caucus type people. They're extremely conservative. They're the ones who are primarily behind the moves to oust former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy both times. So this is kind of the Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jim Jordan type of cluster. All three of those people are in this cluster.

And then we have the far-right establishment. So these are people who are pretty much just as conservative as the far-right obstructionists, but they're a little bit more interested in actually governing. So this cluster has most of the House GOP leadership, people like Steve Scalise and Tom Emmer. They're voting no on a lot of spending bills and things like that, but they're not as flashy or headline-making about it. And they're also voting for some of the more bipartisan stuff too. Not a lot, but a little bit.

And then we have the old guard Republicans. They're on average the longest serving cluster among the Republicans. So these are members who have been around for a long time. And they're not really with all of these new tricks and fads that the newer members are known for. They're not very showy. They voted yes on a lot of the spending bills. They voted yes on Ukraine aid bills.

And they kind of brand themselves as the adults in the room. And then the other two Republican clusters are the compromised conservatives and the moderate Republicans. So these two, as their names suggest, are the most moderate clusters. So they're not voting for these hardline messaging amendments. They're voting yes on spending bills. They're voting yes on Ukraine funding. They're the most bipartisan. There's a lot of members of the Problem Solvers Caucus in this group,

And they're also the most establishment-oriented on their side of the aisle. So the compromised conservatives are voting yes on these things a little bit less than the moderate Republicans are. And the moderate Republicans are coming more from districts that voted for Trump at a lower rate. But they're both kind of oriented in the same sort of direction of they're the most interested in governing, the most interested in working with Democrats across the aisle.

You mentioned that government funding bills and Ukraine aid were two of the big dividers amongst Republicans when it comes to actual legislation. What were some of the biggest legislative divides amongst Democrats, progressive, core, and moderate?

Among Democrats, we saw splits along two kind of major policy issues. So one was among bills and amendments related to criminal justice and policing. And the other was more votes related to foreign policy, particularly related to the Middle East. The moderate Democrats split with the rest of their party mainly on bills relating to policing. So these are things like defunding the police or creating a police bill of rights,

And also things like reclassifying fentanyl to make it a harder drug and punishable by higher sentences. So moderates were voting for these things at a lot higher rates than the rest of their party was in terms of the progressives.

They really split from the rest of their party on things surrounding foreign policy specifically relating to the war between Israel and Hamas. But then also more broadly kind of the fight against terrorism in the whole region. So progressives were really voting against sanction bills. They were voting against restrictions on humanitarian aid and things like that. And the rest of their party tended to vote for sanctions and for aid restrictions at a higher rate.

It's all really interesting stuff. I'm curious, Cooper, just from a personal perspective, if there was any one surprise or nugget of wisdom that you learned from doing all of this. One thing that really stood out to me was how many members in the progressive cluster voted yes on a bill that was, quote-unquote, decrying the horrors of socialism. It was a lot higher than I expected. I think it's just indicative of the fact that

you know, while we're grouping these members into these clusters that voted really similarly, they didn't always vote the same way. They didn't always vote in the way that you expect. You know, these aren't just random data points that we're working with. These are human beings and they have lots of fickle opinions and, you know, seemingly contradictory beliefs. A great note to end on, Cooper. Data are people too. And with that, thank you so much for joining me today. Thanks for having me.

My name is Galen Druk. Our producers are Shane McKeon and Cameron Trotavian, and our intern is Jayla Everett. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet at us with questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple Podcast Store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening, and we will see you soon. ♪