Olivier Armantier, John J. Conlon, and Wilbert van der Klaauw

Following the 2016 presidential election, as noted on this blog and many other outlets, Americans’ political and economic outlook changed dramatically depending on partisan affiliation. Immediately after the election, Republicans became substantially more optimistic relative to Democrats. In this blog post, we revisit the issue of polarization over the past twelve months using data from the New York Fed’s Survey of Consumer Expectations (SCE)—also the focus of a detailed technical overview in the latest edition of the Bank’s journal, the Economic Policy Review. The overview walks readers through the design and implementation of the survey, as well as the computation of the various statistics released by the SCE team every month.