[Mb-civic] Undecided voters and an indecisive recovery Economist

Fri Oct 8 11:42:11 PDT 2004

Undecided voters and an indecisive recovery

Oct 8th 2004 
>From The Economist Global Agenda

The second presidential debate may be the first to address the economy. But
the economy is sending mixed messages

THE second presidential debate, to be held on Friday October 8th in St
Louis, Missouri, will take questions from voters who, after many months of
campaigning, have yet to make up their minds. The election, as so often in
the past, will be decided by the indecisive. These shilly-shallyers, it is
assumed, occupy the vanishing middle ground of American politics. But some
of them may be undecided whether to vote at all. Others may occupy isolated
niches of the political map that neither of the principal candidates has yet
to claim as his own. Which way should libertarians vote, for example? Or
fiscal conservatives, for that matter?

About 8% of likely voters are still undecided, according to the polls. But
Mark Penn, a pollster writing in the Washington Post, reckons many more
remain open to persuasion. Lots of people tell pollsters they have made up
their mind, only to change it a month or two later. To the shilly-shallyers,
we must add the flip-floppers.

 What will swing these voters now? John Kerry, the Democratic challenger,
has spent much of his campaign so far refighting the Vietnam war and
rethinking the war in Iraq. He may now switch the electoral fight to the
home front: health care, education and, particularly, the economy. For many
months, this seemed like treacherous ground for his opponent. But the
economy has been sending mixed messages. The recovery of output will be
three years old next month, but the recovery of jobs is still embryonic and
fragile.

Over the past year, the candidates have tracked the Bureau of Labour
Statistics (BLS) almost as closely as they have followed the polling
companies. According to the BLS¹s monthly jobs reports, the labour market
flopped for three years, flipped in the spring, then flagged in the summer.
On Friday, the bureau released its last jobs numbers before the election:
96,000 Americans were added to non-farm payrolls in September. The figure
for August was revised down slightly, from 144,000 to 128,000.

As Mr Kerry never tires of pointing out, George Bush is the first president
since Herbert Hoover to preside over a net decline in jobs. Even under his
father, who lost the 1992 election on the economy, the great American jobs
machine added almost 2.3m to the payrolls. As things stand, however, 821,000
fewer Americans are on the payrolls today than in January 2001, when Mr Bush
came to office. (This record may improve when the BLS revises its figures
next February.) Worse, over the past four years, the number of Americans
ready and able to work has grown by almost 3.7m. Thus, 5.4% of them are now
unemployed, compared with 4.2% when Mr Bush came to power.

 This is not an easy record to defend. But Mr Bush seems to be pulling it
off. According to pollster John Zogby, the president now holds a slight lead
among voters who deem the economy the most important issue in the election.
Though things are worse than they were four years ago, they are rather
better than they were last year, when unemployment peaked at over 6%.
Moreover, Mr Bush¹s serial tax-cutting has masked some of the pain, letting
Americans take home more money, even as their wages have stagnated.

 Paul Ashworth of Capital Economics, a consultancy, does not think the
economy will cost Mr Bush the election. The states that are really hurting
are not that closely contested in this election, he says, and the closely
contested states are not really hurting. In Mr Kerry¹s home state of
Massachusetts, the unemployment rate has doubled since Mr Bush took office.
But even if it had halved, Massachusetts would not vote for a Republican
president. Meanwhile, in New Mexico and Florida (the most closely contested
states in 2000) much of the rise in unemployment during Mr Bush¹s first
three years has now reversed itself (see chart).

Mr Ashworth concedes that Ohio and Oregon are doing badly: unemployment
rates have risen by more than the national average in these two states and
personal incomes have risen by less. In Ohio, indeed, unemployment has
actually risen in the past year. He also neglects Colorado, a state Mr Bush
won comfortably in 2000, but may lose this time to economic disgruntlement.
The economy may not be the national issue it was in 1992. But Mr Bush will
still hope the open-minded voters of Colorado and Ohio keep their
pocketbooks closed on election day.

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