A lot of people seem to take it as a given (or at least extremely likely) that Trump will be reelected. But why? As I showed in my previous post, there seems to be no significant incumbency advantage when it comes to the presidency, and presidential approval (which for Trump is dismal) is extremely well correlated with the final vote margin, regardless of the challenger:
I also included my full datasets in that post, so you should feel free to explore for yourself.
As an added bonus, you may also be interested in seeing how presidential elections compare to their reelections. Here are all of the postwar reelection runs (8 of them):
The conventional wisdom, though, is that in a “strong economy” presidents are typically much more likely to win reelection. I’m going to argue that the conventional wisdom has causality backwards.
First, we need to figure out what people mean when they talk about the economy. Consider a couple of measures of economic prosperity, the growth of the stock market (I use the Dow Jones), and the inflation-adjusted GDP:
Each of these measures are taken for the year preceding a reelection. What you’ll notice is that GDP growth does, indeed, seem to be a pretty strong predictor of candidate success, but by historical standards, Trump’s economy is not particularly strong in this regard. (Also, as a side note, I excluded the 1980 election from the dataset because it produced a consistent, but exaggerated result. All metrics were abysmal, and Carter was unpopular and lost. That’s pretty much all you need to know.) . The stock market, on the other hand, seems not to matter at all.
We can also look at negative indicators like inflation and unemployment:
It may not look like it to the naked eye, but there is a measurable correlation: low unemployment and inflation do, indeed, correlate to higher popularity and electoral margins.
The short version of this is that, indeed, typical measures of economic prosperity by and large point to both popular incumbents as well as electoral victories. But, and this is important:
No single economic indicator comes close to predicting electoral margins as well as net approval.
Even if we combine parameters — a combination of GDP and Unemployment (the two most significant estimators) — the economic forecast falls short of just looking at the job approval numbers of a candidate.
So here’s the bottom line:
- By and large presidents who have strong economies tend to be reelected.
- BUT, they tend to get reelected because they are popular.
- Popularity is a better indicator than the economy in terms of electoral outcomes.
- The economy is strong, but Trump is unpopular, ergo, he’s in big trouble in November.