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In this paper, we use the public's approval of the president in managing the economy as a context for testing therole of partisanship in aggregate opinion. Drawing on Bartels' (2002) notion of biased partisan updating andGerber and Green's (1999) model of unbiased Bayesian updating, we find consistent (although not uniform) evidence of partisan bias in aggregate opinion. These findings in support of partisan bias lead us to consider how partisanship can be incorporated into models of aggregate public opinion. Drawing on the work of Mankiw and Reis (2002,2006) and Carroll (2003), we develop a model of economic approval that takes seriously the role of partisanship--namely, the influence of partisanship is likely to create a public that respondsmore slowly and heterogenously to changes in the economic environment than one that updates in a --rational" and --unbiased" way. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]