Even Republicans are souring on the economy. Hello and welcome to the newsletter, a grab bag of daily content from the Odd Lots universe. Sometimes it’s us, Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway, bringing you our thoughts on the most recent developments in markets, finance and the economy. And sometimes it’s contributions from our network of expert guests and sources. Whatever it is, we promise it will always be interesting. If you like chatting with us, check out the Odd Lots Discord, where you can hang out and talk with us and with other listeners 24/7.

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I think at this point, we’re used to every survey on anything related to the economy being bad. The public mood is rancid, and there have been a million articles that have proposed a theory as to why that is, whether it is mundane and obvious (inflation has been hot for years) or more abstract, like how social media is making everyone depressed (comparison, as they say, is the thief of joy).

Another bad consumer sentiment reading is, in itself, not big news anymore. And sentiment readings, as a whole, feel kind of poisoned, because we know the degree to which so many people judge the economy through the lens of politics. In fact, you could argue that we should view economic sentiment polls as political polls in disguise, and then take that as the signal. So with that, here’s a chart of Republican consumer sentiment (per the University of Michigan survey) going back to 2012. It was high during Trump’s first term. It was low during the Biden administration. And of course it shot up immediately when Trump won a second term. What’s notable here is that consumer sentiment among Republicans is now tumbling, erasing most of the gains made since Trump’s victory at the end of 2024. Again, it’s hard to find fresh news with these sentiment reports, but this drop in how Republicans see the economy is clearly breaking a pattern, meaning that this was, arguably, the most interesting University of Michigan Sentiment survey in a long time.