How much money do you have available for a personal emergency compared with a year ago — less, about the same or more? It’s a simple accounting question — all math, no politics.
Not exactly.
In a recent national survey of registered voters on a wide range of election-year issues by researchers at the University of South Florida, one answer stuck out: Six in 10 answered that they have less rainy day money than a year ago. That by itself is no real surprise. Last year was tough, and even though the S&P 500 hit a record earlier this month and was up 24% last year, not everyone is invested in the market or feels its benefits. Indeed, general economic trends have only recently started to perk up, and an improving economy doesn’t necessarily pad people’s piggy banks right away.
So far, no big news here. But break the answers down by party affiliation and it gets interesting. Fully 68% of Republicans say they have less emergency money now, while only 49% of Democrats do. That’s a chasm of 19 percentage points, the spread by which Gov. Ron DeSantis crushed Charlie Crist in the 2022 gubernatorial race. It’s hard to believe that such a yawning gap exists between Democratic and Republican voters on a basic nonpartisan fact: the size of a personal rainy day fund compared to a year earlier.
Of course, it’s possible that the 2023 economy was uniquely bad for Republicans and pretty good to Democrats. After all, 16% of Democrats say they have more emergency money than a year ago.
But that’s probably not what happened, is it? It’s much likelier that faced with an objective question — is your emergency kitty bigger or smaller than last year? — partisans on both sides filtered their answer through their politics. The result is that far more Democrats than Republicans say they have a bigger emergency cushion now. And far more Republicans say they have a smaller one. Turn a neutral accountant loose on all of their actual finances, and the truth would probably fall somewhere in between. There is an objective answer. We just didn’t hear it. That’s one of the limitations of these kinds of surveys.
Debating President Jimmy Carter just before the 1980 landslide election, Ronald Reagan famously asked the American people: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” That was a question about feelings, not fact. But it was fair, because the fact of the poor economy and a national malaise informed the feelings of the electorate. It was true that most people felt they weren’t better off.
What about today? Perhaps a touch of “confirmation bias” is at work, with some people conflating their reality with what they wish to be true. Maybe Democrats want to feel that things are going better, so they decide that their emergency fund has grown without actually checking. Or, since Republicans want to throw the old bum out, they answer the opposite without actually calling up their accounts.
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The point is, this should be a simple question about facts, not feelings. The USF survey is a nationally representative slice of American voters. When the balance in an emergency fund or bank account — a literal bottom-line number — is subject to interpretation, it’s probably time for voters of all stripes to do a reality audit about a lot of things. What do we know and how do we know it? In assessing a fact, we should put our personal politics aside, actually count the pennies in the piggy bank and see how it all adds up.
Read More: Here’s the political problem of counting pennies in a piggy bank