How partisanship is making polling Americans more complicated


June 25, 2022

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There's something strange about how Americans see the economy these days -- or, at least, how they're describing it to pollsters.

For one thing, there's a stark partisan divide in responses to even factual economic questions. Take an April CBS News/YouGov poll that found Democrats were not only 41 percentage points likelier than Republicans to say that the condition of the national economy was good overall but also 29 points likelier than Republicans to correctly say that the number of jobs in the US had risen over the past year...

That array of evidence suggests that there's no single answer on the extent to which expressive responding drives survey results. "One of the most consistent things I find across my research is that none of these phenomena are all-or-nothing. They're all context-specific," said Matt Graham, a political scientist at George Washington University who has examined different methods for measuring the effect of expressive responding.

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