Sarah Sanders accidentally admits Americans credit President Obama for the economy

But the reason is not that complicated. And on Wednesday evening, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders accidentally admitted that reason when she tweeted out the latest Quinnipiac University poll:

66% of voters say the economy is "good" or "excellent" – the highest since 2001 – according to new Quinnipiac poll. America has turned a corner under the President’s strong leadership.

— Kayleigh McEnany 45 Archived (@PressSec45) January 11, 2018

The problem is that if you dig deeper into the Quinnipiac poll, voters say, by a margin of 49 percent to 40 percent, the strong economy was the doing of President Barack Obama.

Indeed, Trump entered office with the tail end of the longest uninterrupted stretch of private sector job growth ever recorded, and this year’s job growth, while robust, is still the lowest in six years.

Job growth was always bound to slow somewhat this year, because we were already approaching full employment. However, at least some causes of the job slowdown are directly attributable to Trump, including the decline in tourism revenue.

Moreover, none of the policies from Trump and his allies that were supposed to deliver jobs have had any success so far.

The Indiana Carrier plant, which Mike Pence gave a huge tax break in one of his final acts as governor, is shedding hundreds of jobs it was supposed to keep. The coal industry, which Trump said he could “bring back” by gutting environmental regulations, is still in decline. And many of the same companies that pretended they were giving bonuses to workers because of the GOP tax scam are also planning big layoffs.

With all that in mind, voters are rightly skeptical about crediting Trump for the state of the economy. And Sarah Sanders, who apparently did not bother to read the finer details in the Quinnipiac poll, failed to notice this.