I thought for a bit about how to construct this sentence without it getting too long & clausey & quasi-runonical, and I didn't like any of the single-sentence formulations I was ending up with, so I'll go for a bit of linguistic algebra on this one...
X: people's claims of whether they're doing better now (they say they are)
Y: objective facts showing whether people are actually doing better now (they definitely aren't)
The sharp detachment of X from Y is a fascinating issue all by itself, worthy of much more investigation by economists/psychologists, but the only way it can be relevant in an election thread is if X is a better predictor of the election than not just Y, but also surveys that are actually about the election itself, and what we've seen so far from the early actual votes. Either X is the lone outlier that doesn't really point where the election is going, or all of the rest of that other stuff combined, including Y, is all outliers, leaving X as the only thing that's still reliable.
So, is X being brought up to assert the latter case, that absolutely everything else that has ever indicated likely election outcomes has all suddenly stopped doing so? Or just because the fact that X is so out-of-place and different from what everything else says that it's a fascinating sociological question by itself?
