How Republicans feel about the economy changes depending on who the President is rather than the actual performance of the economy.
Although it seems they’re particularly susceptible to it, this phenomenon isn’t entirely constrained to Republicans. It’s classic groupthink. Any idea or emotion that reenforces the group is good, and idea or emotion that threatens the group is bad.
If you’re looking for news sources, AP and Reuters are a starting place but you should be reading as many different sources as you can. I hate to encourage the use of Google but news.google.com can be a useful resource for quickly finding a bunch of different sources covering the same topic.
Fully agree on AP and Reuters. They’ve got good journalists. As for aggregators, Google News is good, but I’ve found Ground News is better, and it’s not run by a monopoly, so there’s that.
We’ll need ranked choice (or some other voting scheme other than First Past The Post). Otherwise it’ll just end up the same as it always has.