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Has the Nation’s Economy Got Better or Worse Over the Past Year? (CES)
Share of U.S. adults saying the nation’s economy got better or worse over the past year, one survey a year, %
Plays the chart through its history. Pauses are where the data set a record or moved most.
Got better · Continuation · the recent trend, flattening · 3 years
Got worse · Continuation · the recent trend, flattening · 3 years
Dashed: the projection from the latest reading. Shaded: the range about two in three outcomes land in. A projection, not a promise.
Source: Cooperative Election Study, Cumulative Common Content (Harvard Dataverse, CC0). Weighted shares of each year’s national sample; the remainder said the economy stayed about the same or were not sure. Answer options vary a little by year.
How Americans have judged the national economy each autumn since the mid-2000s, from the Cooperative Election Study, a large national survey released into the public domain.
What this chart reads
- National Economy Got Better Over the Past Year (CES, % of adults)as “Got better”latest 2025-12-31
- National Economy Got Worse Over the Past Year (CES, % of adults)as “Got worse”latest 2025-12-31
Sources
National Economy Got Better Over the Past Year (CES, % of adults). Source: Cooperative Election Study, Cumulative Common Content 2006–2025 (Kuriwaki, Harvard Dataverse doi:10.7910/DVN/II2DB6), CC0 1.0. Palanor calculation of weighted shares from the public file. Refreshed by hand when a new year is released (scripts/politics/load-ces-economy.ts).
National Economy Got Worse Over the Past Year (CES, % of adults). Source: Cooperative Election Study, Cumulative Common Content 2006–2025 (Kuriwaki, Harvard Dataverse doi:10.7910/DVN/II2DB6), CC0 1.0. Palanor calculation of weighted shares from the public file. Refreshed by hand when a new year is released (scripts/politics/load-ces-economy.ts).
Charts are drawn from Palanor's signal library and recomputed from source data on every view. Transformations (changes, indexing, year-on-year rates) are Palanor's.