When Americans go to the polls, they tend to vote with their pocketbooks. So for the next few months you’ll be hearing a lot about the country’s financial issues from the presidential candidates—and plenty of talk from both parties about how the other one is to blame. But even as the struggling economy figures to stand at the center of the race, two Drexel election experts say it wouldn’t be entirely true to say that voters will base their pick on the economy alone.
In a series of interviews with Drexel Magazine in late February, Bill Rosenberg, a professor of political science, and Paul Harrington, director of Drexel’s Center for Labor Markets & Policy, pinpointed several different economic sub-issues—and a few non-economic issues as well—that they believe will ultimately shape this election year.
Obama’s Economic Record (or lack thereof)
For the past three years, President Obama has wrestled with the worst economy in eight decades, and has claimed progress in bringing down unemployment and reviving the economy. In turn, Republican primary candidates say the President has failed; his successes, they say, haven’t been nearly enough.
But voters may not be swayed by rhetoric from either candidate. They may be watching the economic barometers instead.
“If the economy is bad, that would play well for the Republicans,” says Rosenberg. “They would say again that Obama doesn’t have business experience. But if the economy gets better, the Republican argument will get undercut.”
In fact, as of this writing, some parts of the economy were improving. Payrolls were up, the jobless rate was down. “If you look at the outlook, you would say the jobs numbers are turning toward Obama,” says Harrington. “While 200,000 new jobs a month isn’t a lot, it’s a lot better than we had been doing. If people look on that as an improvement, it may be enough to get the President reelected.”
But of course, the economy isn’t exactly booming. And as Rosenberg says: “Obama can’t run on a platform of ‘Are you better off now than you were four years ago?’ as Ronald Reagan did in the 1984 election.” Reagan carried 49 states on his way to a second term. But Obama simply can’t make the same claim.
“Obama could argue that we’re better off with him at the helm instead of somebody else,” Rosenberg says. “But a better option would be to say, ‘Look at what I said I would do, and look what I did.'”
In particular, Rosenberg says, Obama could point to the Dodd-Frank overhaul of financial industry regulation and the pullout of U.S. troops from Iraq, says Rosenberg. “He also got bin Laden, which was a really big thing.”
Unemployment
The army of unemployed Americans represents enough votes to swing the election, and neither party can afford to ignore them, says Harrington.
He estimates the Great Recession and the weak recovery have left the U.S. about 11 million jobs short of where it otherwise would have been. “We’ve got over four unemployed workers for every job opening,” he says. “And half those available job openings are part time.”
Harrington adds that the real unemployment rate, which counts the unemployed, part-time workers, and job-market dropouts, is between 16 and 17 percent. Troubling numbers for Obama, indeed.
Niche Economic Issues
While the economy is a front-burner topic for many Americans, no single economic issue dominates their concerns. For example, Harrington notes that voters are concerned over falling housing prices, manufacturing and other unskilled jobs lost to automation and the high cost of higher education. For that reason, the candidates are likely to tailor niche proposals designed to appeal to small groups of voters.
“The President is now talking about how to contain costs in higher education,” Harrington says. “So he’s trying to go after voters who are worried about the price of college for themselves or their kids.”
Niche issues could tip a state toward one candidate or another, and thus tip the election, says Rosenberg. No one wants to lose an election by a hairsbreadth, as Al Gore did in 2000. Had Gore notched a few hundred more votes in Florida, he would have carried the state and won the presidency.
Who will pay the piper when it comes to the federal budget defecit?
The next President and next Congress will have to confront long-running budget deficits and the absolutely staggering $15 trillion national debt, says Harrington. The battle to find solutions to the problem could spark some of the ugliest partisan squabbling the nation has seen in years.
“I’m reluctant to use the term class warfare,” he says. “But I think this is going to be a fight over whose entitlement programs get cut and whose taxes get raised. This will be the ugliest campaign in my lifetime.”
The Battle for Undecided Voters
To date, the Republican contenders have been too busy attacking each other in the primaries to focus on the fall campaign. But as the fall campaign begins in earnest, both parties will be expected to focus on the independents and swing voters who will help determine the outcome, says Rosenberg.
The independents are, as the name suggests, politically unaligned. The swing voters, by contrast, at least nominally identify themselves as Republicans or Democrats but could be convinced to switch sides. Rosenberg notes that Ronald Reagan’s success in attracting Democrats was key to his election triumphs.
Social Issues
While financial issues may top the list of voter concerns, non-monetary issues may surface, particularly on hot-button social issues.
For instance, Rosenberg cites two recent controversies that reignited the reproductive rights issue. One was the Susan G. Komen foundation’s short-lived decision to yank funding from Planned Parenthood. The second is Obama’s effort to force religious organizations to provide contraceptive coverage in their health insurance policies. Critics accused the President of trampling on religious freedom in that case, and he quickly sought a compromise; even the compromise didn’t please all voters, however, and so the issue may linger into the summer and fall.
Who does the public actually trust?
It sounds simple, but one of the most important issues in this election will be the public’s perception of the candidates, says Rosenberg. “They want to know who this person is, whether they are adaptable, and whether they can think on their feet,” he says. The long-term effort that’s required to win the nomination and the presidency allows the public time to find out, he says.
“It’s this incredibly frenetic pace where for almost two years the candidates are constantly traveling, sleep deprived and stressed,” says Rosenberg. “We have an opportunity to see how they do—how they’re going to confront issues and crises. And that’s a good thing. When they’re president, they’re going to be sleep deprived. And they’re going to have to confront new issues all the time.”
The Unexpected
Ultimately, the election could hinge on a sudden turn of events, says Harrington. He cites 2011 as an example of how quickly things can change.
“Economists thought 2011 would be a big year for the U.S. economy,” he said. “Then we had the Arab Spring, which jacked up oil prices, the Japanese Tsunami, which upset worldwide industrial supply chains, and the European sovereign debt crisis. By August, people thought the U.S. was on the edge of a recession. Then we had a good fourth quarter and no one knows why. So in this election, unknowns could undermine one side or another.”