What Was The Question?

Colloquial language is full of phrasings that aren't quite idiomatic, but nevertheless can be meant to convey something slightly different than a literal reading would suggest. For example, I found myself tripped up on a few occasions, about a year ago, when people would ask me if I was afraid of contracting the SARS-2 coronavirus. My standard answer would be "no," and then the follow-up question would be something along the lines of "So you don't think that you can become infected?" Despite the fact that an irritated little voice in my head would immediately hiss "That wasn't the question you asked!" that was the question that they were intending, and so I resigned myself to needing to give a more complicated answer. And I think that a lot of questions operate this way.

FiveThirtyEight notes, in a recent article, that "Americans’ perceptions of the national economy have changed wildly depending on whether a Democrat or a Republican is in the White House," and the chart below, from Civiqs, appears to show that, especially for Republicans, whose gloomy view of the national economy hovered at about 70% until Donald Trump was elected, whereupon it promptly plunged into the single digits and remained there for almost the entirety of President Trump's term in office, before rebounding back to the 70% range when President Biden took office. Democratic respondents show a much different trajectory, but their understanding of a worsening economy died just as suddenly come Inauguration Day 2021.

According to Civiqs, the question was "Do you think the nation's economy is getting better or worse?" and there are four options, "Getting better" and "Getting worse," natch, but also "Staying about the same" and "Unsure." The extreme partisan disconnect between how Democrats and Republicans prompts FiveThirtyEight to point out that "political scientists have found that how we think about the economy is increasingly rooted in how we identify politically rather than in actual economic conditions." Which is entirely possible, especially given that most people don't really appear to pay any attention to actual economic conditions on the national level.

But part of me wonders if the people who responded to the Civiqs tracking polls were actually taking the question at face value, or if a number of them were reading it as "Do you think the nation's economy will become better or worse?" This interpretation can explain the wild swings that appear to have trailed the last two (Presidential) Election Days, yet doesn't require large segments of the population to appear to be completely out of the loop on what's genuinely happening with the economy.

Political rhetoric is known for a continuous stream of anything from insinuations to outright declarations that electing The Other Party into any position of real authority will bring about the immediate end of the world and everything good within it over the course of mere days, if not hours. Given this, it's reasonable to presume that some of this doom-and-gloomsaying works its way into how voters see the world. And as negative partisanship grows, so too does the conviction that officeholders are seeking to wreck the place, simply out of spite. For Democrats, who were large part convinced that Donald Trump was either a hopeless buffoon or malicious monster, it makes sense that they expected the national economy to go south for more or less the entirely of his term. They may have started out willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, but by the time the looming restrictions to control that global SARS-CoV-2 pandemic shellacked the stock markets, those voters who defined themselves as in opposition to the President were done with any pretense of expecting things to improve while he was still in the White House. Likewise, for Republican voters who had decided that Joseph Biden was at worst a cheat and at best an incompetent, their Sudden Onset Pessimism can also be viewed as a deep and abiding conviction that any day now, the bottom will drop out of things on his watch.

I think that there can be real value in understanding what people responding to questions believed their being asked, since I suspect that many people understand as well as I do that not all questions are asking what a literal reading of them would indicate. It wouldn't change the fact that this is all opinion polling, but it would shine a better light on what people are giving their opinions of.