The Insanity of an Economically-Determined Electoral World

In his morning "Wonkbook" post rounding up interesting political happenings from recent times today, Ezra Klein spends the first paragraph talking about Andrew Sullivan's recent article praising and defending the Obama Administration. Then he says this:

But Obama's reelection won't be decided in the pages of newsweeklies. It will be largely decided by the state of the economy. And the state of the economy will largely be decided by events in Europe. And Europe's not looking so good.

Now, I'm not here to quibble with the factual accuracy of that statement. If we interpret the word "largely" loosely, then it's basically true: Nate Silver's analysis at FiveThirtyEight suggests that macroeconomic performance may account for about half of the variance in Presidential election results, and Europe will certainly be quite important to American economic performance in 2012. No, my point is different. This idea, that Presidential elections are determined largely or almost entirely or, at the extreme, entirely by crude macroeconomic results, may be true, but if it is true it tells us some very bad things about our voters.


Suppose that I'm one of the voters who will, in this hypothetical future, decide to vote against Barack Obama, and/or for Mitt Romney, because the European debacle has dragged down American growth. What in the world am I thinking? Is there any sense in which the screwing-up of European policy-makers ought to make me like President Obama's policies or economic management skills any less well? Or to revise my anticipation of Romney's policies and management in a favorable direction? Well, certainly not the latter, right? Romney has nothing to do with this. Unless you think Romney would have some great plan for forcing Europe to behave itself, which by the way he doesn't. As for Obama, it's obvious, at least I think it's obvious, that standard domestic policy tools just don't affect the decisions of European leaders and central bankers. So would the claim be that he has somehow bungled our foreign policy, and thus caused the European problems?

No, of course, it's nothing like that. The claim is simply that people have a mindset to vote against the incumbent when things are bad, and vote for the incumbent when things are good; since the bad things happening in Europe will probably make things worse here, they ought to incline people against voting for the incumbent. But this is madness! In a certain kind of world, it would make sense to base one's vote largely on the economic results a President had delivered. That world would probably feature more-or-less non-partisan elections, a lack of Presidential term limits (so that you could keep someone around as long as they kept doing their job), and a clear connection between a President's economic management ideas and the performance of the economy, which might mean, you know, ditching that whole "separation-of-powers" thing. We're not in that world, but if we were, acting like an economically-determined voter would make sense.

In the actual world it makes much less sense. If elected President in 2012, Barack Hussein Obama will (Congress willing) look to pass a major energy law, possibly of the cap-and-trade variety, aimed at curtailing greenhouse gas emissions to slow the progression of man-made climate change. He will look to craft an immigration reform law that extends aid to a particular downtrodden minority, and will probably also make America somewhat more open and inviting to foreigners. He might also be looking to strengthen the health-care law he passed in 2010, and will seek to restructure the tax system in a way that places more burden on the very wealthy and less on the middle class.

If elected President in 2012, Willard Mitt Romney will spend a fair amount of time trying to repeal a health-care law inspired by his own efforts as the Governor of Massachusetts. He will certainly spend lots of effort on shifting the tax burden away from the very rich, and also trying to cut programs that provide for the poor. As the critical window to move on global climate change passes us by, he will do nothing.

These are very different programs. There might be a few people who are more-or-less indifferent between them, either in the "middle" or on some kind of eccentric fringe, like the libertarians. But by and large, you'd think people would know whether they wanted the nation to be pursuing the Romney agenda or the Obama agenda. Even if we were talking about a surprising underperformance by the American economy that really was largely the result of poor central macroeconomic management, it would make fairly little sense to vote against Obama when you otherwise favored his agenda over Romney's.

But it's even more insane if the poor American economy is caused by an external, out-of-our-hands negative shock like Europe! It would be like holding Pearl Harbor against Franklin Roosevelt (unless one believes the rumors that FDR knew about the impending attack, and did nothing because he wanted to motivate our entry into the way; mutatis mutandis for Bush and 9/11). A group of foreign leaders have conspired to sabotage our economic performance! That's what's going on here. Note, also, that the claim is not that the European troubles will make Romney's "Obama wants to turn America into Europe" line suddenly devastating; the claim is that such trivialities as, you know, actual campaigns don't matter very much. The claim is just that people will see the economy sucking, that a great many of them will know that it's all Europe's fault and not Obama's, and will vote for Romney anyway, despite disagreeing with him on the issues. Seriously, people? Is this really the world we live in?