Obama defies voting history
No president since the Depression has been re-elected with unemployment above 7.2% but he’s leading in the polls
For most Canadians, Barack Obama’s lead in the American presidential race is hardly a surprise. Since Canadians would vote for Obama over Mitt Romney by an overwhelming margin, many of us may wonder how the race could even be close. But in the United States, Obama’s increasingly solid lead is decidedly unexpected, and not only because American politics is generally more conservative than Canada’s (despite the best efforts of the likes of Stephen Harper and Rob Ford). The sense of surprise also stems from what is supposed to be a fundamental law in American politics: a weak economy will inevitably drag down the incumbent. Perhaps the most telling illustration of this law is that no president has won re-election with unemployment above 7.2 per cent since Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the Great Depression. The current unemployment rate is 8.1 per cent.
Hence, to many observers, Obama’s success is feat akin to defying gravity. Even though the election is far from over — the first debate is tonight — pundits are already searching for explanations. Many pollsters are taking an obvious route: reconsidering whether poor economic and employment numbers really are fatal to incumbents. After all, when Ronald Reagan was re-elected in the face of 7.2 per cent unemployment in 1984, he actually won in a landslide, carrying 49 of 50 states and winning the popular vote by just over 18 percentage points. As Nate Silver points out in his excellent political blog for the New York Times, it is unlikely that a slightly higher unemployment rate would have denied Reagan victory.
What may count much more is the direction of the economy and especially the voters’ confidence in that direction. And these factors look better for Obama: the economy has improved since the slump hit its worst point early in his term in 2009, and confidence indicators are improving, especially among the president’s base of Democratic voters. Still, other economic indicators continue to be grim — and they highlight that this has been worst recession, and the weakest recovery, in the U.S. since the 1930s. Public debt is at record levels, inequality continues to rise, standards of living for most Americans have dropped, poverty rates are up, and more people are slipping out of the middle class.
Moreover, voter backlashes against Democratic presidents during hard times have given Republicans many of their biggest recent triumphs: Reagan’s defeat of Jimmy Carter in 1980, winning Congress under the hard-right leadership of Newt Gingrich in 1994, and the “shellacking” delivered to Obama by the Tea-Party-driven Republicans in the 2010 mid-terms.
So what is different this time? The ineptitude of Romney’s campaign is certainly a major factor. Yet commentators from across the political spectrum are also starting to wonder if the current polls reflect something deeper.
The first factor cited is that the current slump is not your typical recession, and the economy itself is going through a major shift. If this is the case, then surely voting patterns — such as voters’ response to the economy — may be shifting as well. For instance, voters are not showing their typical reflex to oust a sitting president in bad times. This is especially noticeable among voters who tell pollsters that they feel their economic condition is about the same as it was four years ago. Usually this group will not accept stagnation and move to dump the incumbent — yet this time most polls show them supporting Obama by significant margins. Obama also leads in many states that suffered most during the recent slump, most surprisingly in hard-hit swing states such as Florida, Michigan and especially Nevada, which has the worst jobless rate in the country at over 12 per cent.
But what is also telling is where Americans are pointing the finger of blame — at former president George W. Bush and his party. One recent CNN poll showed that Americans blamed Bush and the Republicans rather than Obama and the Democrats for the poor economy by a whopping margin of 57 per cent to 35 per cent (in another sign of the current polarized climate, only 6 per cent believed the blame should be shared equally). These figures speak to more than a “hangover” from an earlier administration, and suggest that another deeper force that may be finally coming to the surface: years of the Republicans’ marching to the right have alienated them from most voters.
Their agenda for 2012 is an even more extreme version of the one Bush pursued while in power — tax cuts for the rich, combined with a much stronger dedication to slashing spending, especially on “entitlement programs” on which many Americans depend. As conservative commentator Ross Douthat conceded earlier this week, “Americans don’t yet trust the Republican party given how little the party seems to have learned and changed since 2008.”
This extremism also explains many of Romney’s failings. Given his contempt for almost half of the electorate — which he nakedly expressed in that now-famous video — it is hardly surprising that so many voters find him empty and insincere. And what strength Romney may have had among independents and swing voters was further undermined by the necessity to pander to extremists in his party to defeat the likes of Rick Santorum and Gingrich during the primaries.
For Obama and the Democrats, these developments are good news in the short term — but they should not feel too comfortable about their prospects longer term. The public won’t accept stagnation and insecurity — let alone more recession — forever, and if Democrats can’t stop the suffering, who knows what kind of extremism voters may turn to down the road? David Goutor is an assistant professor in the School of Labour Studies at McMaster University.