People care about the economy affecting them personally. I think people stopped caring about statistics when they realized the media was using statistics to lie.
You're half right. People only care about the economy as far as it effects them. Unfortunately, most people only have a rudimentary knowledge of the economy; they lack knowledge of how it affects them personally and how to judge whether or not it's doing poorly. That's why they depend on media narratives and ideologues to drive their opinions. Ask a layman "What's wrong with the economy?" As in, "What metric do you use to decide that the economy is bad?", and 99% of them will be unable to give you an intelligible answer beyond 2 or 3 words buzzwords: "unemployment", "high taxes", "debt" etc. People use easy things to form opinions, like statistics and "expert" analysis.
>1% of the American voting populace is a "political junkie" in the way that the people here and on other political websites are. We would all do good to remember that when analyzing things like current voter attitude on particular issues - we have to assume 90% of people are tragically misinformed and easily misguided to the wrong conclusions on complex issues. Politics would looks a great deal different if this weren't a safe assumption to make.
