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Notes -
While granting that the swiftness of the changes is almost certainly not a product of material changes on the ground, I think the claim that the view of the economy is purely partisan rather than driven by legitimate differences of opinion is doing too much work. People are capable of projecting forward a bit and considering what they think is likely to happen. They're going to be partisan because they have actual policy preferences that drive their partisan voting preferences. When Trump wins, people familiar with him correctly believe that there are about to be corporate tax cuts; Republicans think this is good and Democrats think it is bad, so they answer accordingly. When Biden wins, people familiar with him correctly believe that he'll do things like try to give away hundreds of billions of dollars to people that don't want to pay their student loans; Republicans think this is bad and Democrats think it is good, so they answer accordingly. When people are asked about "the economy" they're certainly answering with vibes rather than trying to do some quick calculus to try to figure out what the current rate of change of GDP per capita is, but I don't think they're obviously wrong in doing so.
People aren't "projecting forward", they're just parroting what their biased media consumption tells them. The fact that 80%+ of Republicans were positive about the economy in 2019, but then <20% of them were positive in 2023 is a pretty good indicator. They'll overwhelmingly point to inflation being disastrous and wiping out peoples' earnings, yet official data shows real (i.e. inflation adjusted) wages are up since then. When confronted with this fact, they'll then give very thin evidence trying to say the official statistics are all made up, even on a relatively more rigorous site like this one.
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