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I’m away but alas staying in touch with political news at home, and thought I would check in with one of the best public opinion quants about where we stand right now …
TRANSCRIPT:
Paul Krugman in Conversation with G. Elliott Morris
(recorded 5/13/26)
Paul Krugman: Hi everyone. Returning today to G. Elliott Morris, my favorite polling and public opinion analyst. We’ve had an eventful time with redistricting and there’s a lot of stuff going on, so we’ll see where this goes. The big news is, of course, the Court leaving Democrats stunned by overruling the referendum with Virginia redistricting, which now gives Republicans a substantial lead. You’ve been doing some analysis. How should we think about how this changes November?
G. Elliott Morris: Yeah. Big picture is: as long as Democrats are still winning the popular vote by four points, they’re still taking back the House of Representatives. A lot has changed over the last three weeks. First, the Supreme Court has invalidated section two of the Voting Rights Act. This was the portion of the law that prevented state legislatures or other state bodies from diluting the power of black voters.
Krugman: Right.
Morris: This, of course, matters for our partisan calculations, because black representatives in the South tend to be Democrats. Now the Supreme Court has said states can divvy up their votes. Republican-led states in the South, including Tennessee, Alabama, and Louisiana, have since passed, or are about to pass, maps that will take away three Democrats at least, and potentially five. So that is quite a few seats. On top of that, there has been other redistricting news. Virginia voters had passed a constitutional amendment to adopt a Democratic gerrymander that has been struck down. So Democrats in Virginia are going back to their old map, and they will lose two seats because of that—two seats that they would have otherwise gained. So, if you’re catching up on the math here, that’s three seats lost from the Democrats. It would have only been one; now it’s three.
But then we have redistricting in Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, and Missouri. If you add up all of those Republican states, they have taken away about 13 seats from the Democrats, and Democrats have gained only five or so out of California, the only state they have really redistricted. If you add up all this, then Democrats are down about six seats from the gerrymandering wars that Donald Trump started last year. And that could be potentially decisive in a close race.
Krugman: My very informal impression was that prior to all of this stuff, the kind of Republican bias of the voting was largely gone, and that the House majorities tended to more or less reflect the popular vote. But now we’re in a situation where we’re back with probably the biggest ever Republican lean there.
Morris: Yeah. So the 2024 congressional map was technically still biased toward the Republicans. If in a perfectly average year with perfectly average candidates—and that is the big “if”—if 2024 had been rerun, we would have expected Democrats to lose the majority of seats, even if they had won the popular vote by about a point. The big benefit in 2024 was that recruitment by Democrats in close seats was really, really good. So they beat expectations. But if you rerun it, it still would have been slightly biased towards Republicans. Now we’re at around a Republican bias of four points, which is close to the bias right after the 2010 redistricting. What happened in 2012? So this is pretty bad. We’re getting to the point where the structural bias in basically every electoral institution at the federal level is significantly overweighting Republican votes, just by the fact of where they live or who’s in charge of drawing the maps.
Krugman: A few weeks ago, I talked with Kim Lane Scheppele, my old friend from Princeton, about Hungary. And, you know, a lot of what Orbán did was, in fact, basically whatever the Hungarian word for gerrymandering is, but on a heroic scale. She said that they basically weighted rural voters by about 3 to 1 over urban voters. But of course, that was overtopped by a huge wave election. And you would still think that the most likely scenario, given the current polling, is probably still that the Democrats are going to probably crest.
Morris: I think the 2026 election will be significantly pro-Democratic, and that the gerrymandering won’t matter. It won’t matter in terms of who wins the majority of the seats. Democrats will still be down six seats, at least, from where they should be. But if they’re gaining twelve, then, you know, they’re still managing to recapture the House because it was so close last time. Republicans only had three extra seats at the last election. So it’s a pretty easy wave election for the Democrats. But they’ll still be down seats, like they’re still deprived of representation in the South. And more importantly, in 2028, when we’re not expecting Democrats to have such a large wave—unless the country comes to its senses. I know you talk a lot about tariffs here. That’s a big example. Then we’re expecting a much closer election. And in that 2028 scenario, this gerrymandering could give Republicans the majority, even if Democrats win the popular vote.
Krugman: Just a quick, amateur question on this stuff: to what extent is there the possibility of a “dummy-mander”? I was just thinking about the Hispanic vote—that the Republicans may have drawn these districts on the belief that the 2024 Hispanic vote was going to remain. And they seem to have really lost that, at least if the polling is at all right. Does this mean there’s a possibility that the Republicans have essentially diluted their own support in order to wipe out Democratic districts, and that they’ve opened the possibility of losing a lot of normally red seats?
Morris: So, it’s a great question. I’ve done some math on this. My own simulations of election outcomes, where I assume rationality. But Republicans basically went after five districts in Texas. Maybe two or three of those are highly susceptible to a dummy-mander. In which case, if you do the math and Latinos move 20 points toward the Democrats, and everyone else only moves ten points to the Democrats—assuming Latinos are moving twice as much as everyone else, which is pretty close to what happened in the 2025 elections—then Republicans only gain two seats out of Texas, but they’re still gaining seats. So there is a possibility that they have drawn themselves too thin in the case of a big Latino backlash. But they’re just subtracting some seats that they could have otherwise gained. So it’s not the fact that they’re going to lose overall in terms of the overall gerrymandering. In other words, they’re still coming out ahead.
Krugman: Okay, that’s slightly depressing, but I’ll take it. I find myself wondering: if we really have a very clear, massive, public backlash against Republicans, but these maneuvers keep them in control of the House, how much damage does this do to legitimacy and feelings about the government?
Morris: I don’t know how much worse feelings of legitimacy or approval of the government could get. I mean, approval of Congress is 20%, SCOTUS is 20%, and Trump’s approval rating is 35%—only by virtue of that question being really partisan-polarized. If you actually ask Americans how they approve of Donald Trump’s handling of stuff like prices and tariffs, then it’s closer to 25%. So, it would be very striking to have lower confidence in the US government to solve the problems of everyday people. Basically, this might make an impact on how Americans view the functioning of their democracy or what have you. And actually, from my point of view, that type of education could be useful for stuff like electoral reform or proportional representation. But we don’t have to get into that for now. But it’s pretty bad out there. It’s pretty bleak out there, Paul.
Krugman: The unpopularity of Donald Trump is really extraordinary, and the unpopularity of the policies. Things have really gone downhill. Things were really going downhill, I think, even before the Iran war.
Morris: Yeah. If I’m telling the story of the Trump administration, I’m looking at five main events besides his inauguration, which is itself a sort of negative signal to the American people. I’m looking at the Liberation Day tariffs in April of last year, which caused a drop in Donald Trump’s approval rating and then mostly trickled along, slightly dipping as every day people are realizing what the administration is doing. They tend to react negatively to the president regardless of what he does. This was true for Biden as well, by the way. It’s just a sort of weird factor of political psychology here. And then the next event I’m looking at is a sort of confluence of immigration events that happened from May to June of 2025. So you have the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Donald Trump sends the National Guard to LA and to Chicago. And this creates a lot of negative press attention for him. And you see his approval rating on the economy and deportations overall drop again by about 5 or 10 points. And then he trickles around; he’s losing support. And then over the next six months, really not much happens in his approval rating. And then the government shutdown happens, and a lot of Americans come around to the news that Donald Trump has basically defunded a lot of Medicaid and premiums are going to increase. That, of course, sets in in January of this year. And then I would be looking at the Iran war. You would also want to add the killings in Minnesota as well. That was a big signal to Americans about the negative outcomes of Trump’s deportation agenda and militarization of U.S. cities, essentially. So those events are about immigration and prices. The health care thing is still kind of a price anxiety. And you can see his approval rating dropping. His approval rating was positive when he started. He’s at -25 or so now in our polling; he’s closer to -30. So it is worth emphasizing: very few people like Donald Trump. If you walk down the average American street, you will encounter between three out of ten or four out of ten people who actively support what he is doing. And that’s very low for a president of the United States historically, and in absolute terms, it is just worth emphasizing that people do not like this period.
Krugman: Yeah, I had forgotten that he did have a positive approval briefly.
Morris: He did have a bit of a honeymoon when he started. But it really deflated very fast.
Krugman: And it’s extraordinary, actually. It feels like much longer ago than it was.
Morris: There seems to be an awful lot of enabling of Donald Trump on the part of congressional Republicans. A lot more than you would expect based on his approval ratings overall and his approval ratings in their districts. Now, in my opinion Trump reacts to public opinion only from a narcissistic point of view. He shares the polls when they’re good and he calls them fake news when they’re bad. He’s constantly talking about how much the public loves him. That is the type of thing a narcissist would do. But in terms of reining in political actions from the White House, I do think we’ve seen rather little evidence that the polls are meaningfully moving him.
Now, there are a couple of cases. The big one is the retreat from Minneapolis after the killing of Rene Goode and Alex Pretti there. There was a dramatic increase in support for abolishing ICE and a dramatic decrease in approval ratings for ICE and the president’s immigration and deportations agenda right after that. So it seemed to matter in terms of public opinion. But look, I think we’re in an environment where most legislators, especially on the right, are insulated from general electorate opinions, especially the opinions of the average person who might not turn out to vote. And that is enabling an awful lot of bad behavior on the part of the president. And partisanship is really an overwhelming force for bad on the right, given the president’s proclivities. So I think you are right here to say, you know, the polls are the polls. And it is important to say that people don’t like this. But Trump is not necessarily the type of actor you would expect given that information.
Krugman: I just wonder, because the papers are full almost every day with some scandalous or just outrageous behavior. Kash Patel’s personal brand of bourbon and all of that stuff. But one of the things I learned from you about swing voters, and you have a very straightforward definition of being badly or poorly informed, which is just: do they know who controls Congress? But I wonder whether any of this stuff even reaches a lot of voters.
Morris: Yeah, I doubt the average person knows about the Kash Patel whiskey—the “cash money” whiskey. By the way—I’m a big fan of whiskey, and that seems like a real betrayal to all the whiskey fans. Yeah, there’s a problem here, which is that most legislators just really don’t care what the public thinks, including in their district and including overall. And really, nowhere is that clearer than in the Republican Party when Donald Trump is passing tariffs that will cause inflation or asking for $1 billion for his ballroom, etc. And the voters who aren’t really paying attention to the news might not hear about that stuff, but it doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter. And they are getting signals of the president’s incompetence from stuff like gas prices going up. And just a general news environment being bad about the President of the United States. So some of this does filter through to them.
Krugman: Okay. Let’s go on to the vibecession. There’s a lot of payoff in the economics and business punditry world for turns of phrase. And Kyla Scanlon with the vibecession, as I think she said.
Morris: Yeah, she should get a Nobel Prize for vibecession.
Krugman: Yeah, she’s set for life on just that one term, although she’s actually very good on other things. But it is quite amazing, right? Just before we recorded this, the latest survey of household economic dynamics from the Fed came out, and so even leaving aside the approval ratings and so on, public views about how they’re doing—most people still say we’re doing okay—but the views about the state of the economy have just fallen off a cliff. As we might expect, people are incredibly negative. The first question is: do we think that, in some sense, people are more negative than the reality? But do you have a different take on that?
Morris: I will just respond directly to the last thing, which is yes, there is a vibecession. The vibes are still lower than you would expect. Even fundamental indicators and even this one that Jared Bernstein has proposed—that I’ve sort of back-tested in some modeling: the excess inflation number. Even if you account for excess inflation, or just price levels being higher than people expect, consumer sentiment as measured by the University of Michigan is still about 10 to 15 index points lower than you would expect. So there is still some level of anxiety out there that is breaking from our historical understanding of economic anxiety.
Krugman: Okay. So you think that there is, in fact, still a mystery component, at least based on the consumer confidence index.
Morris: Yeah, I guess the other way to say it is that those historical models that predict consumer sentiment are still missing something. Maybe they’re missing that people are reacting more to inflation now than unemployment or other structural variables than they were in the past. And you have to find some way to account for that. I mean, I’ve tried every way possible. Even if you P-hack it, you really can’t get there.
Krugman: People may not know, but P-hacking is essentially playing with variables until you get something that is statistically significant.
Morris: Except that it isn’t really, because we’ve tried all the alternatives to find the thing that seems to work. By random chance, you would have arrived at an answer. But what I’m saying here is, even by random chance, you cannot arrive at a prediction of consumer sentiment that is perfect. There’s some fundamental break around two years ago in the vibes about the economy. And it’s lower even if you account for stuff like excess prices. And that’s got to be an important part of our story.
There’s a subset of internet commentators, mainly on Bluesky, who insist that the economy is actually good and the vibes are just wrong for no reason. I don’t think that is right, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say there’s no vibecession. I think it’s somewhere in the middle.
Krugman: Okay, so I guess there should have been a break two years ago. But you think that things are worse now relative to the fundamentals than they were in 2023?
Morris: Yes. If you predict consumer sentiment with excess inflation via the S&P 500, economic growth, and such—you can get a very good prediction—almost perfect out-of-sample until December 2024 or January 2025.
Krugman: Which is an awfully convenient result if you are focusing on Trump-related sources of economic pressure.
Morris: But it also is around the time when the president started passing inflationary policies. So it could just be that people, after January 2025, were hyper-aware of inflationary policies like tariffs, or just the “horse in the hospital” aspect of this presidency. Maybe they’re mapping that onto their economic sentiment. I am still searching for answers for the last year or so. But if you include excess prices in your model of consumer sentiment, this basically fixes, I think, the original vibecession aspect through the end of 2024. But now we’re in a sort of different vibecession environment, perhaps related to Trump. I’m not sure.
Krugman: Okay, so “Vibecession II,” which is to go along with “Trump II.” So, you really are saying there is basically a “Vibecession II,” which is interesting, and that there’s something that goes beyond all the solutions that we’ve tried to find to explain why people were so depressed in 2024. Now, even with all of that, something else has happened now.
Morris: Yeah. I think I can explain the vibecession of 2022, 2023, and 2024 very well as an excess price shock.
Krugman: Alright.
Morris: I don’t think we have a good explanation, economically or otherwise, for the 2025-2026 vibe session—”Vibcession 2: Electric Boogaloo.”
Krugman: Yeah. Well, of course, people are feeling really bad because we have crazy tariffs, we have cuts to health care. And you know Trump is so terrible. So, of course, people are feeling something terrible. But I don’t think that’s what’s going on in the minds of the average American. So, there is something going on there.
Morris: If I were putting on my political scientist—maybe political psychologist—hat, it is very possible that the amount of coverage about the Biden economy in derogatory terms, and inflation and the blame of the president for inflation in 2022 and 2023, caused voters to think about the president more and then think about the direction of the national economy. And therefore, if that is true, then getting a figure like Trump into office would cause a pretty negative backlash in overall economic sentiment, even if it’s not causing this negative backlash in their personal financial situation, as you know.
Krugman: Yeah. I mean, it probably doesn’t matter for the public views, but in my view, Biden bore very little responsibility for that inflation. It was supply chain disruptions in the aftermath of COVID, and European Union inflation was basically identical to U.S. inflation. But this time around, you really have to say, well, the 3.8% inflation that we just got is—
Morris: Yeah, you could definitely put a “Trump-flation” label on it, at least for the time being. Jerome Powell said so. “Daddy” said so. So you gotta listen.
Krugman: Yeah. No, it’s pretty amazing. So for listeners, in all of these discussions, economists like to talk about inflation, which is the rate at which prices are rising. And the conventional approach to understand consumer sentiment is to talk about inflation and then unemployment and maybe some other things as well. But if you talk to actual people, they talk a lot about what things cost. And so there’s this argument that says people are upset because even though inflation came way down from its peak in 2022, prices didn’t. The level of prices leveled off rather than coming down. But this split raises a lot of problems. So why don’t we talk about the excess inflation?
Morris: So, this work is based on the theory that voters react negatively to a shock in prices, or really a shock in inflation. Especially if inflation had been low for some amount of time—20 or 30 years in the most recent case. To measure excess prices, I’ve built on economist Jared Bernstein‘s work. So our model for this is to predict what prices would have been today using inflation from the last 20 years or so. And then we measure the residual between actual nominal prices and the prediction of prices. And at least in my work, when I say “prices,” I mean the index price of vehicles, shelter, and of food. But the results are actually the same if you use PCE.
Krugman: Personal Consumption Expenditure, as the Federal Reserve calls it.
Morris: Which is like the CPI, Consumer Price Index, but it’s arguably a little bit better, and the Federal Reserve relies on the PCE.
Krugman: Yeah.
Morris: So it really doesn’t matter what goods you’re looking at. Today, prices are about 15% higher than they would have been given 2% inflation over the last six years or so, basically since COVID. And if you add that variable to some model of consumer sentiment that has traditional measures of economic activity like inflation, the S&P 500, and unemployment, then you do get a much better prediction of consumer sentiment over time, including in the 1970s when the change in the price level was even worse than it was over COVID.
Krugman: There’s what I think of as the “Morning in America” problem. You may think people are upset now because things cost a lot more than they did before COVID, but, well, that was also true in 1984 under Ronald Reagan. It turns out that the increase in consumer prices in Ronald Reagan’s first term was almost identical in percentage terms to the increase in prices under Biden. But of course, Ronald Reagan ran as a triumphant rescuer of the U.S. economy. “It’s morning in America”. And Biden was deeply unpopular. And the explanation, which I think all of us working on this have come to, is that at the beginning of the 1980s, people were expecting lots more inflation. And at the beginning of 2021, they were not. And that’s kind of what you’re measuring.
Morris: Yeah. And this isn’t just me talking, either. If you look at the political scientists’ voter psychology work on what they call “retrospective economic perceptions” and predict those ratings based on changes in economic indicators, then inflation causes a much more negative impact on economic evaluations after a period of what they call “good times” when inflation is low. So psychologically, this works, too. If people are primed to see increases in prices of 10-15% for a decade and then they see it again, they react less negatively than they do in, say, your COVID-era price spike after 30 years of low inflation.
Krugman: Yeah. Although what is kind of interesting—and I know that you’ve been doing statistical modeling and I’m just pulling stuff out of my—
Morris: Well, I’m not an economist and I don’t have a Nobel laureate.
Krugman: Well, yeah, but that was a long time ago. But anyway, in the mid-’70s, people were still completely shocked. I mean, I’m also an old guy, and I remember the ‘70s, and we were all really, really shocked. And yet, consumer sentiment, even in the Ford administration, was not as negative as it has been lately. And still, times were really good in the ‘60s and up through about ‘73. I’m still kind of shocked at just how bad perceptions are now. But your models seem to track the ‘70s okay.
Morris: They do. Yeah. And they do because of this adjustment for the good times versus the bad times. So if you take our excess price measure, which again is just the percent difference between expected prices and actual prices in nominal terms, and you adjust for the average inflation in the CPI over the last decade, then you essentially decrease the excess price measure for the ‘70s and hold it about constant for the post-COVID period, mainly 2023 being the peak. And you get a much better fit in the model. So this is built on our voter psychological theory that people react more negatively to higher prices after a period of good times than bad times. So things are being triangulated here in our overall story of the impact of excess prices, even if, as I said at the beginning, this isn’t a complete explanation for the vibe session here in 2026, which is somewhat different somehow.
Krugman: Just an interjection—I’m a garrulous old guy here—but I associate stagflation with the taste of Hamburger Helper because I was working summers as an undergraduate as a research assistant, and my friends and I, in our dreadful shared apartment, were using a lot of Hamburger Helper because we didn’t know how to cook. And also meat was really expensive, or seemed so at the time. So, yeah. But it’s interesting that people were not as depressed. And I think that maybe they had already kind of internalized that the economy can be tough or something.
Morris: That’s, in effect, what we’re saying here. They weren’t as surprised. They’d internalized high prices as something that could happen in their lifetimes. You know, I was but a twinkle in my daddy’s eye in 1970. But you can do a lot worse than Hamburger Helper. Hamburger Helper is a good staple food for your working-class person.
Krugman: Well, I had some roommates who insisted on soybeans with everything, and that I could have done without. But anyway, it was the ‘70s.
So this question of what do we think are the prices that people expected—and you’ve been basically fitting a trend to recent price movements, right? And projecting forward? I think you’re using something like the average inflation rate over the past five years to project forward? Or how are you getting that?
Morris: For excess prices? I mean, it’s the trend in prices. So that is mathematically equivalent to the average inflation from the 15 years prior to whatever date you are predicting on. 15 years prior to the five years prior. So the idea is that people have formed their expectations for inflation over some period of the last ten years on average.
Krugman: So, we have direct measures, supposedly, of what inflation people expect. There are surveys. There’s University of Michigan. And some surveys, but especially University of Michigan, do ask people what they expect the inflation rate to be over the next 5 to 10 years, which kind of gives you a medium-term expected inflation. And you can get an implied inflation forecast out of the bond market—the TIPS spread, the break-even inflation, whatever jargony stuff. But there is an implied inflation forecast. So those are not necessarily congruent with lagged—
Morris: Just the excess price measure.
Krugman: Yeah. So here’s my question: let’s say consumer expectations of inflation over the next five years are somewhat elevated now. They’re higher than they were. This is not, I think, the way it comes out in your analysis, but I would have thought that would make it easier to end the excess price stuff. Because if you want to have prices lower than what people are expecting, given that they’re expecting higher inflation at this point, then they’ll be pleasantly surprised if we only have 2% inflation. But I think that is not how you’re seeing it, right?
Morris: No, I’m not using the survey measure of what you would expect your inflation to be over the next five years.
Krugman: So what you’re doing is sort of saying that people’s expectation of inflation is something like inflation over the last five or ten years. And you have actually used the expected inflation of the survey, which says, “What if inflation is actually that high, and then it’s going to be really bad ?” But I would have turned that around and said, “Well, people are already expecting pretty high inflation, so they’ll be pleasantly surprised if it’s lower than that. And that should make it easier to get back to a price level that people find acceptable.” But I don’t know if I’m making sense.
Morris: Yeah, you’re making some sense. But we are not using a psychological measure of excessive prices, and that is different from a survey measure. We are using an actual mechanical level of excess prices from the residual of the trend. So one way to reconcile the fact that the objective measure of excess prices, rather than the survey-based measure, is more explanatory—you could say people are bad at predicting prices in the future, just in general, which would be true. Or that the survey isn’t picking up on anxiety about the price level with that variable as well as you would expect. And one thing to mention here is that the University of Michigan’s measure of what I’ve called “price anxiety”—which is just the percent of people who have a bad opinion of the economy—the percent of those people who attribute it to worse personal finances is at an all-time high. And it surged in 2021 and 2022 and stayed there; it never came back down. Which is similar, you’ll notice, to the trend on consumer sentiment through the University of Michigan. I don’t have the Conference Board data in front of me or memorized.
So it is possible that people are bad at predicting what prices should be. One idea would be if we took the expected change in prices over the next year and divided it by average CPI—overall inflation—over the ten-year period preceding. I wonder if that number would be at an all-time high. That’s a very easy check after the fact. I bet it would be near an all-time high.
Krugman: Probably getting too meta, but what we’re trying to predict is a variable that is consumer sentiment, which is not a behavioral thing. It’s like asking, how do people answer a questionnaire? And this is a question: should we also be using questionnaire-type answers to predict it? Obviously, at some level we’re interested in objective economic stuff, but I wonder whether we should inherently prefer the objective economic stuff as a way of predicting. I’m not making a whole lot of sense here but—
Morris: No, this is making sense to me because I spend a lot of my time thinking about the difference between our perceptions of objective reality and these survey-based measures which, for whatever reason, can deviate from that. And my argument would be that we should be using the survey-based measurement of anxiety in addition to our “economic fundamentals”—our structural variables—because our models and our job as modelers is fallible. And we can’t rely on the people when they tell us in surveys that they are anxious for whatever reason, instead of pouring cold water on it because our models don’t line up.
Maybe this is just my opinion, but you are right. Of course, we want to know how people are reacting to objective conditions on the ground. And the only way we can really do that is by looking at the match between executive positions lying around and some other outcome variable. So, I’m acknowledging it’s tricky. There’s no clear answer, I guess.
Krugman: So, two questions left. S&P 500, and again, if people don’t know, that is the broad index of the stock market—that really shows up as something that explains how people feel.
Morris: Yeah, the annual change in the S&P 500 is pretty direct to consumer sentiment, even after controlling for stuff like your annual change in CPI, PCE, etc.
Krugman: So that’s really kind of interesting, because the vast majority of Americans own very little stock, so the impact of the S&P 500 on most people’s economic position is really kind of small. I’m wondering whether that’s more like a signal. People like me are always saying the stock market is not the economy. But it’s not clear that’s how people see it.
Morris: Yeah. The S&P 500 impacts media coverage quite a lot. And in our models, we try to control for negative media sentiment. But again, our empirical analysis of media sentiment is often different from how people are interpreting this. So I tend to really land on one answer here, which is, if you look at the polling on price anxiety—the percent of people who are saying their situation is worse because of personal finance issues—that’s at an all-time high. And if you trust the people, that is pretty explanatory of consumer sentiment on its own. But it requires some hurdles to get there.
Chart 7A in the University of Michigan shows the percent of people whose finances are worse and who say personal finances is the reason why.
Krugman: Yeah. So I mean, at some level, if our numbers say that personal finances are actually better, but people say they’re worse, at some level, customers are always right.
Morris: Yeah. Exactly. But that leaves us at a loss for an explanation. It does leave us putting our shoulders up.
Krugman: Last thing. And again, I’m just throwing stuff out there because I’m puzzling over this stuff myself. So a lot of these issues are in some ways harking back. I still always think that “Morning in America” in 1984 is in many ways a crucible for making sense of all this stuff. But 1984 as a year was closer to the end of World War II than it is to today. And it was a very, very different country then. And I always wonder, are we trying to get a model that fits a society that has changed immeasurably over time?
Morris: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so much of the vibe session discourse—not necessarily Kyla Scanlon, but I believe Nate Silver wrote this article for the New York Times Opinion Page that was about how the consumer sentiment index broke down. This was after The Economist had done something similar, I believe. Much of the discussion of that was based on the idea that you could build a model of consumer sentiment historically. And now it’s breaking down. And one conclusion from that is that people aren’t thinking about the economy rationally anymore. But another conclusion is that they’re thinking about the economy differently than they have been previously. And that seems entirely legitimate to me. And if that is the case, then we should be looking at the polling data and the perceptions data more and the fundamentals indicator less to explain consumer sentiment.
Krugman: Okay, but the big news to me is that we really are seeing sort of a second downward leg in the vibecession.
Morris: “Vibecession 2.0,” yeah.
Krugman: Which is really quite remarkable. It’s going to matter enormously in many ways, obviously in the elections. So that’s news to me and actually worth highlighting.
Morris: Well, now you have a headline.
Krugman: Now I do. Hey, gotta feed the beast on Substack, as you know.
Morris: Yeah. Right. Well, look, in terms of consequences, and maybe to go back to where we started: Donald Trump’s approval rating on prices is like 30% or less, and from 70%—it’s down -40 or so. And that was the last time I looked at this, which was a week and a half or two weeks ago. And he’s been losing ground very fast. That is congruent with an electorate that is very upset about prices, even if the objective data don’t explain why to us. So there’s some triangulation of the anxiety in terms of evaluations of the president. And if that number stays as low as it is, then we should expect the type of rout in the midterms that is large enough to overcome, basically, effectively, the Republican cheating through gerrymandering over the last decade or so. That might be where I would leave it.
Krugman: Yeah.
Market Design
