The left and the mainstream media want you to believe the economy is in a shambles. Turn on any legacy media program and you'll hear the same gloomy script, and the polls seem to back it up, with Americans telling pollsters they're sour on where things stand. With the 2026 midterms less than a month away, that narrative is the most valuable asset the Democrat Party has.
Yet something doesn't quite add up.
People who believe they're living through an economic disaster don't usually spend as if it were a boom.
National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett made that case Sunday, when CNN's Jake Tapper pressed him on gas prices and inflation.
"And ahead of an election cycle, the fact that there's possibly partisan pollsters telling us that the people are really, really depressed, it's a classic Democrat move," Hassett told State of the Union. He added that he doesn't buy it, because depressed consumers would show up in the consumption data.
"But, in fact, the retailers are doing well," Hassett said. "I talk to the banks all the time. They say that their consumers are happy and they're paying back their loans."
Tapper countered with a weak September jobs report and downward revisions to earlier months. Hassett answered that the latest figure looks much better once you remove the drop in government jobs, a decline the administration engineered on purpose. "And so which do you believe, the government hard data or the polls that have been wrong about every single election since I can remember?" he asked.
Consumer activity, not polls, tell us the real story about the economy: https://t.co/kCLqXfY7qi
— Matt Margolis (@mattmargolis) October 4, 2026
Hassett has a fair point. Some pollsters are almost certainly partisan, which shouldn't surprise anyone, given the Trump Derangement Syndrome that has spread through our institutions since 2015. But the deeper problem with the polls, I'm sure, is that questions about economic outlook reflect partisanship far more than they measure the economic assessment.
I know this because I’ve seen. After every presidential election, we see this play out. The party that lost suddenly decides the economy is collapsing, the party that won decides happy days are coming again, and the numbers shift dramatically, even though nobody's paycheck or grocery bill changed overnight. A survey that swings that hard on a change of administration tells you how people feel about the president.
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Retail activity is a far more objective measure, because people can lie to a pollster, but they can't lie with their purchasing habits. That measure suggests Americans are doing fine in this economy. Consumer spending has trended up all year. Chain store receipts are up. Household debt as a share of GDP is falling, and retail sales excluding autos and fuel spiked sharply in August.
Of course, Republicans can't coast on any of this, because voters act on perception rather than data. Fuel prices remain high, and a voter who feels squeezed at the pump feels it everywhere, just as we did under Joe Biden and Barack Obama.
The bottom line is that, yes, gas prices are high, but the economy is better than the polls and the left want you to believe. Americans keep telling pollsters they're miserable, and then they keep spending, borrowing less relative to the size of the economy, and paying back their loans. When you ignore the partisan responses to the polls, things are clearly much better than we’re being led to believe.
