They're not hoping for a recession. Both sides think it describes the present state and action must be taken to prevent it.

Thinking the economy is not doing great is different than wanting the national economy to do poorly.

I don't think that's exactly right. I think everyone wants the economy to do well, but most people's ability to gauge the economy is very limited, so they defer to other information sources to tell them how the economy is doing even if they're personally doing fine [0].

If you look at employment over the past 20 years [1], you'll see that Obama took office when the economy was in freefall and after about 9 months the economy turned around and started growing steadily until someone let COVID run wild in the US, at which point the economy fell off a cliff. But the right wing media isn't going to (and never would) say Obama handed Trump a very strong economy and Trump was the first president to oversee a net loss of jobs in over 80 years. The right wing media also won't mention that Trump was all in on making the money printer go brr so that his reelection didn't also have to overcome an explosion of poverty in addition to explosions in death and unemployment. But the right wing media isn't interested it accurately describing reality; it's goal is to secure power for right wing politicians, and to have a shot of doing that in a democracy, right wing media has to conceal the inconvenient facts that show Democrats are actually better stewards of the economy, produce lower rates of violent crime, and are consistently better at delivering improvements to the net and median quality of life of residents of the US.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/15/business/economy/inflatio...

[1] https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/ces0000000001

You have your cause and effect backwards. People assume that "the other guy" is constantly doing all the bad stuff in the world and that "their guy" does all the good stuff. They're not hoping the economy tanks to win an election, they're hoping the electorate realizes "the other guy" tanked the economy and now their base will be energized/swing voters will move to their column.

Also, if you don't believe anyone in Europe is rooting for collapses you seem to be ignoring Short positions or how capitalism works. Everywhere in the world, someone benefits from the people in power failing/bad things happening. This isn't an exceptionally American trait.