Very good points in this article. People being people, we tend to view things through our own circumstances. If you feel that your future is endangered, then you will vote against the incumbent, whether you are employed or not. The problem with Obama is that he came into office with so much hype and misplaced expectations that the let down amongst the voters who voted for him (as opposed to the hard core Democratic ideologues) is his major albatross. Voters will cut a POTUS a lot of slack if they think his heart is in the right place and he has an idea as to what he wants to do, however Obama seems to lack the maturity and temperament to reassure voters who are concerned about the direction we are headed in. After all, he wants to transform this nation rather then serve and preserve it.
by James Piereson
The disappointing employment report made public on July 8 provided fresh evidence that economic growth is slowing and the state of the economy will be the central issue in next year’s presidential election. As if in anticipation of the jobs report, David Plouffe, senior political adviser to President Obama, said shortly before the bad news was released, “The average American does not view the economy through the prism of GDP or unemployment rates or even monthly jobs numbers. People won’t vote based on the unemployment rate; they’re going to vote based on: How do I feel about my own situation? Do I believe the president makes decisions based on me and my family?”
Plouffe has a point. Several incumbent presidents have been reelected in the face of abnormally high unemployment. Ronald Reagan won reelection in 1984 with an unemployment rate of 7.5 percent and, most famously of all, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was reelected in 1936 despite a jobless rate of nearly 17 percent. On the other hand, Gerald Ford was defeated in 1976 when unemployment stood at 7.7 percent, and George H.W. Bush lost in 1992 with unemployment at 7.5 percent. In his memoir Six Crises, Richard Nixon attributed his narrow defeat in 1960 to a sudden upsurge in unemployment in September and October of that year.
As Plouffe suggests, the unemployment rate by itself is not the decisive factor in national elections. What seems to matter most is the overall direction of the economy during the election season and whether voters see things moving in the right or the wrong direction. FDR and Reagan won reelection because they made the case that conditions were improving, as in fact they were in 1936 and 1984. Ford and Bush (41) lost because they could not make that case. This is why new signs of economic weakness pose such a threat to President Obama’s reelection.
Yale University economist Ray C. Fair has devised a simple formula by which we can accurately predict the two-party division of the popular vote on the basis of three economic factors: (1) per capita growth of real Gross Domestic Product during the three quarters preceding the election; (2) the growth in inflation during the incumbent’s term; and (3) the number of “good news” quarters during the incumbent’s term in which real GDP grows by more than 3.2 percent. This equation, when applied to elections from 1880 to 2008, yields a remarkably close approximation of the popular vote for president.
In recent months Fair has used his formula to predict the outcome of the 2012 election based upon economic forecasts of inflation and GDP growth in 2011 and 2012. Last November, when forecasts projected growth exceeding 3.5 percent in 2011 and 2012, it predicted a landslide victory for Obama with about 56 percent of the popular vote, up from 53 percent in 2008. When the equations were adjusted in April with somewhat less rosy forecasts, the president’s predicted vote share dropped to 52 percent.
[……]
Obama came into office thinking that he would become a modern-day FDR, rescuing the U.S. economy from Republican mismanagement through public spending, aggressive regulation of business, and expansive welfare programs. The old-time religion does not appear to be working as we head into the election season. With the economy faltering and Obama out of ammunition, is it possible that instead of reprising FDR he will turn out to have been the contemporary incarnation of Herbert Hoover?
Read the rest – The Economy and the Election
Tags: James Piereson
