Ask Americans to place their life on a ladder from zero ("the worst possible life for you") to ten ("the best possible"), and the answer is supposed to reflect the big, slow things: health, marriage, money, meaning. It also, it turns out, reflects something faster — who occupies the White House.
Gallup interviewed roughly a thousand Americans daily from 2008 through 2017, recording party identification alongside the ladder. Following the share of each party "thriving" — Gallup's label for people who rate their current life 7 or higher and their expected life in five years 8 or higher — produces one of the cleanest natural experiments in subjective well-being.
Thriving, by party, through two transfers of power
Share of each party's identifiers classified as thriving (life today ≥ 7 and life in five years ≥ 8 on the 0–10 ladder). Hover for values; shaded bands mark inauguration years.
In 2008, the last year of George W. Bush's presidency, 53 percent of Republicans were thriving against 42 percent of Democrats — an eleven-point Republican edge even as the financial system was failing. By 2012, deep into the Obama presidency, the picture had inverted: 57 percent of Democrats thriving, 49 percent of Republicans. Then 2017 arrives, and the lines snap past each other again: Republicans leap to 62 percent — their highest of the decade — while Democrats slip to 54.
Three things make this more interesting than ordinary partisan cheerleading. First, the question is not political — respondents are rating their own life, and their expectations for it, not the country's direction. Either partisans' genuine expectations about their futures move with elections, or the political mood colors how people frame the most personal judgment a survey can ask. Both readings are consequential.
Second, the swings are immediate and large by the standards of this literature. Democrats jumped eleven points in the year Obama took office — 42 to 53 percent between 2008 and 2009 — and Republicans six points in the year Trump did, from 56 to 62.
Third, the response is asymmetric: the winner's surge outruns the loser's slump. Republicans gave up about five points across Obama's first term; Democrats slipped two points in 2017 and stayed far above their 2008 level. The data are more consistent with "winning feels good" than with symmetric despair.
Independents, meanwhile, track the national average and react to neither transition with anything like the partisans' amplitude — a quiet control group running through the middle of the chart.
The honest caveats: these are unweighted estimates from a very large rolling sample, so treat exact levels with care while trusting the turns; party identification itself shifts slightly over time (some people change labels rather than feelings); and the decade contains a recession and recovery whose benefits were not politically neutral. But the double crossing — down-up, up-down, twice, on cue — is not the shape an economic story makes. It is the shape an electoral story makes.