From the outbox of Meyer’s inbox:
Technically this could be filed under the politics section but I put it here in the economy because that’s what is on everyone’s mind along with the gulf oil spill, the wars overseas, the out of control government spending and if LeBron James made the right decision to go to Miami. For the record, it was during former President Clinton’s first campaign when a staffer asked “how do we win elections?” to which he was given the answer, “it’s the economy, stupid.” That became the rally cry which swept Clinton into office. What will happen this November? Follow the money….
IT’S ALWAYS THE ECONOMY, STUPID by Ezra Klein writing for Newsweek Magazine.
It’s begun. With merely four months until the elections, we’re starting to see the articles outlining the angry divisions between the president’s counselors. The fight apparently pits the political team, which wants the president to turn his attention to the political problem of deficits, against the economic team, which wants him to keep focusing on economic stimulus. Politics versus governance is, of course, an age-old choice. The job of governing is different from the job of getting reelected. Or is it?
For decades now, political scientists have been building election models that attempt to predict who will win in November without making any reference to candidates or campaigns. They can get within 2 points of the final vote, and they don’t need to know anything about the ads and the gaffes and the ground games. All they really need to know about is the economy.
“In presidential elections,” says Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels, “a 1 percent boost in election-year income growth has typically increased the incumbent party’s vote share by about 2 percent. So an incumbent party that won 51 percent of the vote in an average economic year like 2004 would be expected to win only 46 percent in a recession year like 2008.” Which is, as you may remember, pretty much exactly what happened.
Congressional elections are a bit more difficult because they’re more local, but they end up being predictable, too. Gary Jacobson, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, has a model that uses the numbers of seats the majority party holds, the approval rating of the president, and the change in real disposable income, and predicts about 70 percent of the swing between elections.
All this suggests political scientists have a pretty good handle on what wins elections, so I began asking them the question that some say is bedeviling the White House: do you focus on appeasing the polls now or doing everything you can to improve economic conditions before the elections?
“A policymaker reading polls who finds that people are concerned about the deficit and says, I should rein in spending and I’ll get credit for that—I don’t think there’s evidence that’ll move voters,” says the University of Denver’s Seth Masket. “You want to get as much money in voters’ hands in the months before the election as possible.”
John Sides, of George Washington University, helped me run the numbers more directly: we made one graph comparing the share of the vote the incumbent party got and the change in the deficit that it had presided over. It looked like we’d spilled out a bag of dots onto a piece of paper. The next graph we made plotted vote share against change in real disposable income. The line fit perfectly—more perfectly, in fact, than I’d anticipated.
You can read the rest of the piece here.
