Presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton might this year be the luckiest person in politics.

For one thing she’s broadly unpopular (at 40.6 percent approval and 54.9 percent disapproval she’s 14 points underwater), but the two pols she’s most likely to square off against are even more so: Zombie Republican Ted Cruz is 23 points upside down (32.3 approve versus 55.8 disapprove), and he’s a piker compared to GOP front-runner Donald Trump, he of the 29-point favorability deficit (33 percent approve and 62 percent disapprove – which is a slight improvement over a couple of weeks ago).

But writing at the Monkey Cage blog in The Washington Post today, the excellent political scientist John Sides points out some more news that figures to redound to Clinton’s benefit if it’s still operative in November.

Despite the fact that conventional wisdom holds that voters are querulous about the economy, Sides notes, Americans are actually feeling pretty good about the state of the economy. He reached that conclusion after charting data from the Index of Consumer Sentiment, which he says is “the longest-running measure of American attitudes about the economy.”

You can find the chart and his full post here, but the key point is:



As of the first quarter of 2016, even with a slight downturn in the second and third quarters of 2015, consumer sentiment was as positive as it had been since the mid-2000s. It was also as positive as it had been in the mid-1980s during the recovery from the recession of 1981-82. For example, the value of consumer sentiment at the end of 1983, as Ronald Reagan’s reelection campaign was gearing up, was 91.6. In the first three months of 2015, it was almost exactly the same: 91.5.





That’s right: We’re currently experiencing “Morning in America” levels of economic pleasure. And the only time in the last 30 years that the economic mood was markedly better was in the go-go ’90s, when the president was named ... Clinton.

It’s true that Trump’s gloomdoggling message that the economy is a ruin because of Presidents Clinton and Obama has gotten traction in the GOP, but the data Sides points to raises serious questions about whether the America’s-not-so-great-economically message will have general election legs.

All of this – from the improving economic mood to the dumpster-fire circus the GOP nominating process has become – undoubtedly contribute to another important trend that looks to boost Mrs. Clinton: Obama’s positive approval ratings. President Barack Obama is one of the few people in politics, it seems, to enjoy more public approval than disapproval. Per HuffPost Pollster’s average of polls, 49.5 percent of Americans approve of him while 47.1 percent disapprove – quite a contrast to the stretch from May 2013 to the middle of last month, when more of the public thought negatively of him than positively.

And as I’ve noted previously, FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver has estimated that the “rough line of when a president’s approval rating helps or hurts a candidate from his own party is about 48 percent; the farther north of that line Obama gets the more he becomes the proverbial tide lifting Clinton’s boat.