234 PART THREE • insTiTuTions of AmERiCAn GovERnmEnT
“Going Public.” Since the early 1900s, presidents have spoken more to the public and
less to Congress. In the 1800s, only 7 percent of presidential speeches were addressed
to the public. Since 1900, 50 percent have been addressed to the public. Presidents fre-
quently go over the heads of Congress and the political elites, taking their cases directly
to the people. This strategy, dubbed “going public,” gives the president additional power
through the ability to persuade and manipulate public opinion. By identifying their own
positions so clearly, presidents can weaken the legislators’ positions. In times when the
major political parties are highly polarized, however, the possibility of compromise with
the opposition party may actually be reduced if the president openly “nails his colors to
the mast.”politics and economics
A presidential campaign adviser once coined a memo-
rable saying: “It’s the economy, stupid.” He meant that
the state of the economy would determine the outcome
of the election. Since then, political scientists have con-
stantly argued over how much of an effect the economy
has on presidential elections.Obama’s PrOsPects in 2012
The recovery from the Great Recession of 2008 and
2009 was painfully slow. The unemployment rate,
which peaked at 10 percent in 2009, remained above
8 percent through most of 2012 and was still well
above 7 percent on Election Day. Many observers, espe-
cially Republicans, concluded that such rates spelled
doom for President Obama’s prospects. One pundit
observed, “No president since Franklin Roosevelt has
won reelection with unemployment over 7.5 percent.”
This statement, while true, is trivial. Since
Roosevelt’s time, Jimmy Carter was the only elected
president ever to run for reelection with unemploy-
ment that high. Indeed, much of the problem in devel-
oping an economic model to predict election results
is that we have so few cases. Only eight elected presi-
dents have sought reelection since 1944.the DifficuLty in making
accurate PreDictiOns
Clearly, voters do judge incumbent presidents in
part based on the current state of employment.
Surprisingly, the unemployment rate itself has no
predictive power. It doesn’t matter whether unemploy-
ment is high or low, but whether it is getting betteror worse. Ronald Reagan won reelection in 1984 with
an unemployment rate of 7.3 percent because the econ-
omy was visibly improving.
Several years ago, political scientist Douglas
Hibbs developed a model to predict presidential elec-
tions using growth in per-person income and the num-
ber of military deaths. The model seemed to explain
almost 90 percent of the variation in presidential elec-
tion results from 1952 through 1988. Yet Nate Silver,
statistics guru at the New York Times, noted that the
Hibbs model has performed badly in recent years and
it is almost worthless in explaining election results
before 1952.
In early 2012, Silver publicized his own simple
gauge of Obama’s reelection chances. If the economy
created an average of 150,000 net new jobs per month,
Obama should win. Silver also admitted, however, that
historically, such economic variables only explained
about 40 percent of an incumbent’s vote.
In the end, the economy created an average of
157,000 jobs in the nine months leading up to the
election. That figure would appear to predict a nar-
row Obama victory. In fact, Obama’s margin over
Republican Mitt Romney was almost 4 percentage
points of the popular vote. That margin suggests that
Obama had other advantages working for him. Some
observers concluded that Republican budget propos-
als had alarmed many independent voters.fOr criticaL anaLysis
Why should the economy be so important in determining how
people vote?THE EConomy And THE RACE foR PREsidEnT
Copyright 2014 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).
Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.