Few issues are more salient for voters or more important in political decision making than economic conditions, and no American public official is more closely associated with the economy than the president. Existing scholarship disagrees, however, about how partisan loyalties affect economic evaluations. We study how partisan control of the presidency affects economic perceptions using eight waves of panel data collected around the 2016 presidential election from a national probability sample. We find that although individual‐level perceptions are largely stable across time, the change in partisan control of the White House was associated with more positive evaluations among Republicans and more negative evaluations among Democrats. These effects are statistically significant yet substantively modest in magnitude. Our results indicate that partisanship is less strongly associated with economic assessments than some previous scholarship has claimed and suggest more sanguine conclusions about the prospects for presidential accountability even in a partisan era.

In times of crisis, citizens look to their leaders for aid and assistance. In the democratic context, the focal figure is likely the chief executive accountable to the whole of the nation. With a specific focus on the American president and the incidences of natural hazards, public opinion and governmental response to these crises are analyzed. While one may expect such a universal actor to aid each according to their need, new scholarship finds that voter behavior and electoral institutions incentivize the president to support only a small slice of the electorate. Empowered by federal disaster relief legislation in the 1950s, the president targets electorally valuable voters when disbursing aid or allocating resources in response to disaster damage. Voters in those areas respond myopically and tend to vote for the incumbent for reasons ranging from economic to emotional. Thus, elites anticipate voter reactions and strategically respond to disasters to mitigate blame or punishment for the event and capitalize on an opportunity for electoral gains.