History Shows Presidents Get Re-Elected When Unemployment Is High _ So Long As It's Falling

[Douglas Carpenter]

2. well it is not particularly rational - but it is the swing voters who will primarily vote

according to the economic trend right at the moment and that is what will sway an election - not whether the candidate is liberal or conservative or centrist or left-wing or right-wing. As Brian Griffin famously said, “independent swing voters are the biggest idiots on earth.” They are certainly not people who are very interested in politics. But this class of disinterested voters will hold the balance of power in elections. People who are clearly politically definable are probably pretty much loyal to one party or the other.

All polls showed Mondale trouncing Reagan in a landslide from late 1982 even up until September of 1983. Equally peculiar - when Reagan defeated Mondale in 49 out of 50 states in November 1984 - polling indicated that most of the public were in far more agreement with Mondale than Reagan on the issues. An incumbent heading into reelection just wants to make sure that the economic feeling in the air is one of Spring Time in American not the winter of discontent. While the challenger to incumbency needs the opposite. This will count far more in determining who actually wins the election than whatever positions the candidate will take or whatever strategy the candidate’s campaign advisors put together.