In the Battleground States, Voters Like Their Economy More Than ‘the Economy’

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, August 06, 2026

 

Navigator Research has released a new poll. It features answers from 1,500 likely 2026 voters, across 67 competitive congressional districts. Among its findings is this:

 

A majority (65%) rate the national economy negatively, including more than four-in-five independents.

 

That’s pretty disastrous stuff! It also found this:

 

High costs are having a direct and personal impact. More than a third (36%) say their personal financial situation is bad.

 

Hang on a moment. That’s a bit odd, no? Here are the full results:

 

 So 63 percent of respondents said that their “personal financial situation” is either “excellent” (11 percent) or “good” (51 percent) — up from 55 percent in May of this year; 64 percent of respondents said that their “personal financial situation” is “better” (15 percent) or “about the same” (49 percent) as it was “a few months ago”; and yet just 34 percent of respondents said that the economy is either “excellent” (5 percent) or “good” (29 percent).

 

I will confess to finding this confusing. One of the criticisms that I often leveled against Joe Biden — and have also leveled against Donald Trump — was that it is impossible to tell people that their financial situation is good when they do not think that it is. It simply does not work. People can see their receipts, their paychecks, their bank accounts, and so forth. They can see their bills. They know how much pizza cost last year relative to this year, or whether they feel secure in their obligations, or whether they are progressing toward their goals. Try as one might, one cannot fake consumer sentiment with happy talk or tell people that they are confident when they are not. If people say that their personal financial situation is a mess, it is fruitless to talk to them about “the economy” as an abstraction.

 

But what happens when those same people say that their personal financial situation is good, and yet remain convinced that, as a general matter, “the economy” is bad? In the Navigator Poll, 63 percent of those asked said that their finances were either “good” or “excellent,” but only 34 percent of those asked said that the economy was “good” or “excellent.” Surely, if one is to remain consistent, then one ought to consider the first answer much more important than the second? It is true, of course, that people’s perception of “the economy” is more than just their own finances. But it shouldn’t be so much more that we see a gap of that size.

 

Ultimately, the economy is the people. If 63 percent of Americans said that their personal financial situation was “not so good” or “poor” but only 34 percent said “the economy” was bad, we’d be shocked, right? We’d say that the economy “wasn’t working for real people”? We’d say that the statistics were useless or fake. Well, shouldn’t we be shocked here, too? And shouldn’t we perhaps reconsider whether the economy is good or bad? Ronald Reagan famously asked, “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” He didn’t ask, “is your vague conception of ‘the economy’ more positive than it was four years ago?”

 

Within a democratic system such as ours, it presents something of a problem when nearly two-thirds of the public says that their situation is good or excellent, but just one-third of the public says that the economy is good or excellent. It’s almost as if they’re answering a different question . . .