It was only recently that Donald Trump stopped telling Americans that their country was a backward, third-world wasteland. After he was elected, Trump decried the official unemployment rate—which he once suggested was as high as “42 percent”—as “totally fiction,” despite the fact that he would soon own that number. Even as recently as his inaugural address, the president was triggering the economic anxieties of the white working class by claiming that the economy was a post-apocalyptic hellscape of “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones,” with “crime and gangs and drugs” robbing the nation’s children of their unrealized potential.

The next day, a new era began. February’s strong jobs numbers? All Trump. Creating 20,000 telecom jobs via Charter Communications? You have Mr. Trump to thank, except for the fact that they had been in the works for a year already. “Since November 8th, Election Day, the Stock Market has posted $3.2 trillion in GAINS and consumer confidence is at a 15 year high. Jobs!” he tweeted in March, followed a few days later by a more primal exclamation: “JOBS, JOBS, JOBS!”

The president’s enthusiasm, and his penchant for taking credit for any positive economic data beginning the minute he walked into the Oval Office, are apparently having an effect. Suddenly, according to a recent analysis by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Trump’s supporters no longer see the rotting carcass of unemployment and desperation that surrounded them until January 20. Now, everything’s all rosy (emphasis added):

When G.O.P. voters in Wisconsin were asked last October whether the economy had gotten better or worse “over the past year,” they said “worse’’—by a margin of 28 points. But when they were asked the very same question last month, they said “better”—by a margin of 54 points. That’s a net swing of 82 percentage points between late October 2016 and mid-March 2017. What changed so radically in those four and a half months? The economy didn’t. But the political landscape did. . . . Something similar has happened in the nation as a whole. As The New York Times reported recently, Republicans and Democrats have done an about-face since the election in their economic outlook, with the partisan gap in national consumer sentiment bigger than ever before.

In other words, the “economic anxiety” that so famously drove Trump to his shock electoral victory in Rust Belt states like Wisconsin reflected political reality more than economic reality. Or, perhaps, that no objective reality is as powerful as partisanship.

It certainly wouldn’t be the first time:

Marquette University’s Charles Franklin told the Sentinel that the results are “a testament to the power of partisanship to rewrite our perceptions, even when objective reality has hardly changed.”