Editor's Introduction

In late summer of 2008, there were clear objective signs of a weakening economy. Industrial production was negative (−1.5 in August), inflation was creeping up (+5.4 in August), the unemployment rate was rising (6.1% in September). Housing starts were at a near-record low, with mortgages getting hard to come by, and hard to pay for. Consumer sentiment, as measured in public opinion surveys, was dropping to levels not seen since the 1980s.Footnote ¹ But there was no talk of an “economic crisis,” and reported conditions still did not qualify officially as a “recession.” The disintegration of Wall Street financial giants, which began in September, quickly accelerated the scale of the perceived, and actual, decline. “At that point,” as Campbell (Reference Campbell2009, 13–14) puts it, “the economy was in crisis, perhaps teetering on the brink [of] a deep recession or even a depression,” with the stock market experiencing about a 25% drop in value over one month. By October 3, a $700 billion Economic Stabilization Act had passed through Congress, and was signed by President Bush. Despite this unprecedented emergency measure, the stock market continued to tumble. During the 2008 presidential campaign, at least one voter saw the electoral relevance of these economic struggles. Francine Caruso wanted a president who would “fix the economy.” Francine, an administrative assistant who lost her job, couldn't sell her home, and watched her husband postpone retirement, declared that Obama and McCain “need to stop knocking each other and tell us what they can do for us” (Amon Reference Amon2008). Our overarching question, in this collection of articles, is how other voters linked the economy to their 2008 candidate choice.

These timely and well-crafted research articles demonstrate why the economy made such an important difference for the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States in 2008. The data analyzed are national and individual, macro and micro, time series and survey, with the object of explaining candidate approval and candidate vote. Linn, Moody, and Asper draw especially on the forecasting literature, in order to model candidate support in daily Gallup tracking polls. In this unique set of 304 faux elections taking place prior to the actual contest itself, they find Obama approval heavily influenced by a deteriorating economy, as measured by the daily Dow Jones index. Erikson, examining macro and micro evidence, finds for the conventional wisdom that the economy matters greatly in presidential elections. He goes on to explore who the economic voters are, and their psychological mechanics. He concludes with insightful notes joining the economy to macro-partisanship. Holbrook bears down on the early-released American National Election Survey data, in an examination on the connection between sociotropic retrospective evaluations and the 2008 vote, compared to previous contests. He finds that, while the economic vote coefficient was not higher than usual, the concentration of economic pessimism in the electoral was. The unusual number of voters seeing the economy in terrible shape yielded the important aggregate electorate shift in Obama's favor. Finally, Lewis-Beck and Nadeau explore a nation-wide October 2008 Comparative Campaign Analysis Project survey, containing an unprecedented battery of economic items. They discover that, while traditional economic voting, based on valence issues, worked for Obama, especially critical was economic voting based on position issues, such as tax equity.

Of course, there are limits to the economic explanation for the Obama triumph. The diffusion of economic responsibility, away from attribution directly to the president himself, may have actually blunted the ultimate effect of economics on the vote. Unfortunately, this topic is difficult to investigate, because very few studies, for very few elections, have measured economic responsibility attribution. Further, a neglected factor that could have blunted the economic effect, strong as it appears to be, is racism. This question has been actively elsewhere (Lewis-Beck and Stegmaier Reference Lewis-Beck and Stegmaier2009; Lewis-Beck and Tien Reference Lewis-Beck and Tien2008, Reference Lewis-Beck and Tien2009a, Reference Lewis-Beck and Tien2009b). While not explored here, a perhaps telling example can be reported from the Lewis-Beck and Nadeau study. Among those claiming the economy was “worse,” McCain vote intentions were three times that of the Obama vote intentions. That fact seems difficult to account for, according to the accepted tenants of economic voting theory. We leave that knotty problem for subsequent work.

Symposium Authors

Stephanie Asper is an undergraduate political science major at the Pennsylvania State University. She can be reached at sla5014@psu.edu.

Robert S. Erikson is professor of political science at Columbia University. His research on American elections has been published in a wide range of scholarly journals. He is coauthor of The Macro-Polity (Cambridge University Press), Statehouse Democracy (Cambridge), and American Public Opinion (Pearson). He is the former editor of the American Journal of Political Science and Political Analysis.

Thomas M. Holbrook is the Wilder Crane Professor of Government at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. He has published extensively on campaigns and elections and is currently studying U.S. mayoral elections.

Michael S. Lewis-Beck is F. Wendell Miller Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of Iowa. His interests are forecasting, elections, political economy, and quantitative methodology. Professor Lewis-Beck has authored or co-authored over 150 articles and books, including American Voter Revisited, Forecasting Elections, Economics and Elections: The Major Western Democracies, The French Voter: Before and After the 2002 Elections, and Applied Regression: An Introduction. He can be reached at michael-lewis-beck@uiowa.edu.

Richard Nadeau is professor of political science at the University of Montreal. His interests are elections, public opinion, and political communication. Professor Nadeau has authored or co-authored over 100 articles, chapters, and books. His work has been published in major journals including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, Electoral Studies, Public Opinion Quarterly, and Political Communication. He can be reached at richard.nadeau@umontreal.ca.

Suzanna Linn is a professor in political science at the Pennsylvania State University. Her research focuses on the dynamics of public opinion. She can be reached at slinn@la.psu.edu.

Jonathan Moody is a current graduate student in American politics at the Pennsylvania State University. His research centers around agenda setting, campaigns, the media, and political communication. He can be reached at jwm284@psu.edu.