Left Economy, Right Economy
Joe Dutra is feeling great about the Trump economy. The Reno-based owner of Kimmie Candy, maker of ChocoRocks and other treats, says that taxes are going down, growth is picking up, and the rising tide is lifting all boats. “The more jobs we can create, the better the economy is for everybody,” he told me. “It's a trickle-down effect: We hire people, then they’re buying gasoline and they're buying goods and getting money into local stores. As you keep hiring more people, there's more money available in the system.”
Sarah Mahler surveys the same economic landscape and sees an entirely different story. The Reno-based veterinarian said she was concerned about the country’s economic direction. “We're behind,” Mahler told me. “We're behind where we were before the recession in terms of earnings, and my state and my county are feeling a huge crunch right now in terms of affordable housing.” The continuing recovery was still not helping working families across the country, she added.
Both Mahler and Dutra are living in the same white-hot economy of deep-purple Washoe County, with its huge new Tesla gigafactory and sprawling Amazon logistics facility. Both are well-versed with national economic indicators, citing the country’s falling unemployment rate and strongish growth rate. But Mahler is the chair of her local Democratic Party, a supporter of Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, whereas Dutra is a card-carrying conservative who served as a delegate for Donald Trump at the 2016 Republican convention. And the two had come to near-opposite conclusions about the direction of the economy.
Since the 2016 election, the partisan economic expectations gap—that is, the difference between Republicans’ and Democrats’ assessment of the economy’s direction— to an unprecedented level, going from roughly 20 points during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama to 56 points today. Democrats now expect an imminent recession, whereas Republicans anticipate a robust spell of growth to just keep going. “The gap is just huge,” Richard Curtin of the Institute for Social Research at the University
