It's Really, "Are We Better Off Now?"

"Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" is Ronald Reagan's famous campaign line from 1980, attacking incumbent Democratic President Jimmy Carter over the state of the economy. Of course, the answer was "yes," real per capita GDP had gone up during Carter's Presidency, though it was in a period of decline right around the election and the line probably helped Reagan win that election. Sensing that Barack Obama's greatest weakness is the continued mediocrity of the economy, Mitt Romney has taken to using the same line. The assumption seems to be that if you are better off than you were four years ago, you should vote for the incumbent, but if you're not better off, you should vote the incumbent out. Now, as I've seen Matt Yglesias point out in various posts and/or Tweets, that's a curious framework through which to view partisan electoral politics. Most of the most important aspects of individual-level well-being are not even plausibly under the control or influence of the President, or even the government, really, like romantic success or the lack thereof. Even when we narrow things down to economic well-being, there are vast amounts of idiosyncrasy and serendipity involved at the individual level. Whether I get hired, fired, promoted, or what depends at least as much on my own personal circumstances, choices, and attributes as it does the general macroeconomic climate. If I happen to have been promoted at my job because I'm really good at it, or because the guy in front of me got caught in a scandal or something, does it really make sense to interpret that as evidence that I should vote for the incumbent President?

In that light, I found this post from Dave Weigel interesting. First, as he points out, people's views of whether they're better off or not don't seem to be particularly objective or independent of partisan politics, since non-whites seem to think they are better off, whereas actual economic data begs rather strongly to differ. But what interests me is the gender gap in this question. Men split pretty damn evenly on whether or not they're better off, while a huge plurality of women say they're worse off than four years ago. I'm not entirely sure what the data are on that, though I think I remember hearing that the initial burst of recession was especially bad for men but that the recovery has helped women less than it's helped men. I'd just like to point out that women will be supporting the incumbent President in this election much, much more than men. So, something isn't working the way Romney thinks it ought to; shouldn't these women, who feel like things have gotten worse for them, be his natural constituency? I mean, it's not like the Romney campaign hasn't made that very argument on numerous occasions.

I think what's going on is that the more sensible way to interact with this question, as a matter of partisan electoral politics, is to ask whether we, as a nation, are better off now than we were four years ago. And it looks like people know it. This goes beyond the gender gap; looking at the regional data, one sees that the least happy regions are the West and the Northeast, while the South is feeling pretty good about itself. But, uh, the South ain't voting for Obama. I bet that if you asked people whether they think the country is doing better overall than it was four years ago, you'd see some rather different patterns here, and that that question would have more predictive power of people's voting intentions. Of course, one can bring a boatload of skepticism to the idea that answers to that question would be independent of people's partisan allegiances, and rightfully so. One way or another, though, it looks like voters are not taking up the Romney campaign's call to vote against Obama if your life has been rough over the last four years. Good for them.