Through months of polling data, rally speeches and campaign interviews, one of the many themes of this election season emerges: Most voters say their biggest motivator is the economy.

But what do they really mean by that?

Economic conditions are often presented by political media as an esoteric factor, like the weather on Election Day. But most economists and political scientists will tell you that the economy as it exists, by any broad measure, and the economy as it exists in the minds of voters are often two entirely different things. .

“It’s that kind of situation where there’s a disconnect with the real economy or the labor market that we’re measuring,” said Lonnie Golden, an economics professor at Penn State who studies labor market statistics.

Economic data can be expected to be “disconnected from what people experience personally, but not in an unbiased way,” Golden continued. One might assume, for example, that a portion of the population will have a worse experience than the aggregate data shows, and that an equal portion will have a better one.

“But there seems to be a systematic underperception of the health of the labor market and the health of the economy,” Golden said, and in many cases economists are “all shaking their heads and saying ‘I don’t don’t know.”

Experts across the country have made observations similar to Golden’s. Voters consistently place the economy at the top of their concerns and express a generally negative perception of it, despite the fact that the vast majority of indicators show the U.S. economy to be remarkably strong.

Unemployment remained low and job creation remained high, even as the Federal Reserve kept interest rates high to curb inflation. Price increases have declined almost entirely, and wages – particularly for the lowest paid workers – have seen record increases.

But you might not know that from campaign advertising, even from President Joe Biden’s own party.

Democrats have aired a slew of ads promoting Vice President Kamala Harris’ proposed economic reforms, sympathizing with voters who say they are struggling financially. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump also hammered Harris on the period of high inflation during her term in 2022 and 2023.

In many cases, Trump’s statements are a misinterpretation of the end of his own administration, when a drop in demand due to the COVID-19 pandemic caused indicators such as gasoline prices and generated layoffs that did not resume until much later in 2017. President Joe Biden’s term.

Democrats have been scrambling to combat Trump’s optimistic portrayal of his own term and his lack of specifics on how he will turn the clock back to a pre-pandemic economy.

“There’s nothing Trump can do to bring down the price of eggs, the question is what he’s going to do in the future,” said Jim Gilligan, a Democratic volunteer knocking on doors in Harrisburg Sunday – a conversation between Gilligan and other canvassers who have relationships with many voters.

A growing number of political scientists point out, however, that these real conditions matter less and less electorally.

“People’s views on the economy are driven by their partisan much more than we thought 30 or 40 years ago,” said Sarah Niebler, a political science professor at Dickinson College.

“I think part of it is polarization,” Niebler continued. “We just filter everything about our opinions on policies through a partisan lens and through a partisan identity. »

Voters’ opinions on the economy — and many other political issues — are actually a chicken-versus-egg problem. Do voters express their beliefs on different issues and then adopt the partisan allegiance that suits them best – or do they join a partisan team and then shape their positions accordingly?

Partisanship “is more a part of our identity than an amalgamation of positions on a given issue,” Niebler said, making it particularly difficult to say which policy changes — if any — on a given issue will actually swing votes.

Polls have long shown, Nieber said, that voters’ opinions on the economy almost always change quickly after an election, suggesting that “people rely on partisan signals and not the policy itself.” A seminal study in 1992, Niebler noted, found that voters were more likely to reward a candidate based on what they thought would happen economically rather than on what had happened – which made it difficult to tie voters’ opinions to a candidate’s actual record.

This year’s polls also show that partisan affiliation is a better indicator of how someone rates the economy than their own personal financial situation, according to Pew Research Center data, a phenomenon that has also been observed from anecdotally during interviews with voters.

Republicans who spoke with PennLive before and after this year’s political events are most likely to say the poor state of the economy is their top concern. Most acknowledge that their families have been doing quite well in recent years, but point to conservative media reports of past inflation.

Similarly, Democrats are much more likely to say that Biden and Harris’ good handling of the economy is a major driver for them, citing positive economic numbers shared by liberal-leaning media, although very few of them they say their own financial situation has changed just as much. .

This is not to say that there are no differences in actual material circumstances. Salary data, for example, can tell very different stories.

According to federal data, inflation-adjusted average weekly wages for production and non-supervisory workers – a common measure of blue-collar Americans – increased 4.2% in September compared to the same month before the pandemic in 2019. Over the previous five years through 2014, that growth was just over 7%, meaning most workers experienced less growth during the COVID years but still exited firmly in the lead.

More specific data, however, show significant divergences. Low-wage workers saw much larger gains, according to tracking of the same employees by the Atlanta Federal Reserve, and wages rose much more for those who changed jobs than for those who stayed.

Once inflation began to fall in early 2023, people who changed jobs saw massive gains, while those who stayed in their jobs saw significantly smaller gains. In May 2023, for example, those who changed jobs saw their median salary increase by 7.5% over the past year, even as inflation fell to 4.1%. Those who did not change jobs experienced a more modest growth of 5.7%.

The gap has since narrowed; as of September 2024, migrants and stayers have seen their median wages increase by 5.3% and 4.8%, respectively, over the previous 12 months, with inflation now down to 2.4%.

That outcome would be considered remarkably good by almost any standard, Golden said — but it may be that those who remain are those who simply receive more political attention.

“I think Democrats always face a dilemma because they want to appear in touch with the most disadvantaged people,” Golden said. “If you say ‘well, 4% unemployment, 3% GDP growth, 2.5% inflation, 4% wage growth, we’re killing it!’ – if you say that someone will say that you are insensitive to people in difficulty.

These views are also relative, Golden emphasized, with voters’ expectations being just as important as their objective experience.

“Everyone relates to some sort of standard. They may be expecting it to be even better,” Golden said.

Economic numbers might be perfect by the standards of experts like him, “but if people don’t believe them, or if they don’t get the correct information, or if they compare against something unrealistic, then they may arrive at unrealistic results. with their own conclusions that don’t add up,” Golden said.

This relativism has been used to explain a number of different political changes. A recent New York Times study, for example, found a loss in economic status for uneducated white men compared to other demographic groups, which experts say could explain their shift to the right as well as the propensity of Trump supporters to link the economy to the economy. immigration because they believe they are competing with immigrants for limited wages and benefits.

(Most data sets show that the economic boost from immigration increases non-immigrant incomes).

All of this is to say that it’s very difficult — when voters tell pollsters that their most important issue is the economy — to determine how much of that reflects measurable experience versus relative or selective experience filtered through partisanship .

Political scientists once thought that the economy was somewhat immune to this from hot-button partisan issues like abortion, Niebler said, “but now we’re talking much more frankly, I think, about the fact that the economy is also filtered by partisanship. .”

“Most voters don’t think through every issue and make a list of candidates’ positions for and against each issue versus their own positions on each issue,” Niebler said.

“That’s just not how most voters are making decisions right now,” she said, and “in some ways everything is so polarized and divided by partisanship that it doesn’t matter which question is the most important.”