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$45 upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three-month plan only. Taxes and fees extra. Speeds lower above 40 gigabytes. See details. As in previous campaigns, it's the economy, stupid. We'll be looking at that this morning. First, though, it's the news, stupid. It is the economy, stupid. It's not the economy, stupid. It's national security, stupid. It's the hair, stupid. Not the economy, stupid. It's the hair.
Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk, and this is the first installment of our miniseries, Campaign Throwback.
Across three episodes, today and the next two Wednesdays, we're going to take a look back at campaign tropes from past elections, like it's the economy stupid, or soccer moms, or that question about which candidate you'd rather have a beer with. We'll ask where those tropes came from, whether they were actually true at the time, and if they still hold up today. In our first installment, it's the economy stupid.
New Hampshire, nine days before the first primary in our 1992 election of a president of the United States.
It is said here that people are angry. They're tired of recession and layoffs. The year was 1992, and incumbent George H.W. Bush was running for re-election and for a fourth consecutive Republican term in the White House. His opponents? Upstar Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton and independent billionaire candidate Ross Perot.
The economy was growing, but it was growing slowly. Voters didn't feel a lot of that recovery. That's Lynn Vavrick, political science professor at UCLA.
After contracting in 1991, the economy was in the green in 92, though unemployment peaked in the middle of the year at nearly 8%. And so there were these moments where George H.W. Bush was saying things, the economy's growing, why are we worried about it?
Leaning on those objective numbers, what the Clinton campaign recognized is that, yes, the economy was slowly growing, but it wasn't growing enough. It wasn't clear that things were better. And so I think they saw that as an advantage. They did. Specifically, Clinton campaign lead strategist James Carville did.
Why can't we attack George Bush? Why can't we talk about the lowest economic growth in the last 50 years? Why can't we talk about the best... That's Carville in the 1993 documentary, The War Room. That documentary memorialized Clinton campaign headquarters in Little Rock, Arkansas, along with an unassuming message meant to remind staffers of the three themes of the campaign—
On a whiteboard in the war room, it's clearly spelled out in capital letters. Rules. Change versus more of the same. The economy, stupid. And don't forget about health care. Stay focused. Talk about things that matter to people. You know? It's the economy, stupid. Okay? This is Carville Today. I am a huge believer in
in simple, repetitive, relevant communications. I just, just, bam. He's retired now, but still as outspoken as ever. It's not our job to be the smartest people in the room. It's our job to be the most basic, fundamental, repetitive people in the room. And so I had to remind people, don't be smart, be repetitive. I mean, I was almost running against IQ points.
Carville had been in the business for years, and when he joined the Clinton campaign, he knew that this was, in his words, a change election. We'd had 12 years of Republican rule. Governor Clinton was the first baby boomer, non-World War II veteran. We were trying to project that he's different. He's not like the rest of the politicians that you saw.
because we were pretty confident that the country was looking for a different direction. And so he chose those three messages, change versus more of the same, the economy stupid, and don't forget about health care, to keep his staff on task. The brevity was the point. You know, people come and say, well, you need to talk about historic preservation. Other people come in and say, well, we need to talk more about the environment. And these are all very legitimate things that a presidential campaign can talk about. But you've got to remember that
To choose to talk about one thing is also to choose not to talk about another thing. And that's the hardest concept to get across in political communications. The idea was to home in on the areas where Bush was perceived to be the weakest. And the campaign did just that. Let me tell you something.
My running mate Al Gore used to say that if they made a movie of George Bush's administration, it would be called "Honey, I Shrunk the Economy." Well, let me—I got an even better idea. I have worked for 12 years to be a job creator. I will not be a job destroyer. As simple as it may seem, that's where the economy stupid came from. Of course, it probably only became popular because it was associated with a winning campaign.
On this day, with high hopes and brave hearts in massive numbers, the American people have voted to make a new beginning. Some things, and you strive for this, some things are sticky. Some things are sticky for good reasons, some things are sticky for bad reasons. If I think about it, it's actually kind of sticky.
The phrase only grew in popularity after the 1992 election, and it even changed format. That's probably why you know it today as "It's the economy, stupid" instead of just "The economy, stupid." Well, Peter, we've all heard the expression "It's the economy, stupid." It's become almost a truism of politics. The number one issue people are concerned about is jobs, rising incomes, the overall economy. It is the economy, stupid. You know the expression?
from, I guess it was Bill Clinton. It's the economy, stupid. Well, it is the economy. It's much more prevalent today than it probably was in the middle of the '92 campaign.
And, you know, people don't even say it's the economy, stupid. You're talking to your friends about, oh, you know, should I wear this outfit or that outfit? And your friends will say it's the jacket, stupid. Like, it's just become a way people talk about obvious decisions because it was very clear. It's a shortcut that really does deliver a big punch. And it just works. Do you think that...
phrase made your career? I wouldn't want to have tried it without it. I'll put it that way. I don't know. One walk off home run does not make a Hall of Fame baseball player, but it's nice to think about. We'll be right back. Today's podcast is brought to you by Shopify. Ready to make the smartest choice for your business? Say hello to Shopify, the global commerce platform that makes selling a breeze.
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You're a podcast listener, and this is a podcast ad. Reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Lipson Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements, or run a reproduced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Lipson Ads. Go to LipsonAds.com now. That's L-I-B-S-Y-N-Ads.com. In 1992, one of the best-known election slogans of all time was born.
But was it accurate? Was it really the economy stupid that won Clinton the election?
Here's Colin Hendricks, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. In the post-war era, typically speaking, incumbent presidents who are seeking re-election, who are presiding over a broadly prosperous economy, are returned to office. And candidates who are presiding over kind of disastrous economic circumstances, like those facing Jimmy Carter in 1980, are turned out of office.
And that's a useful explanation for understanding why Bush Sr. might have lost in 92. Two years before the election, at the beginning of 91, he had just declared victory in the Persian Gulf War. I can report to the nation, aggression is defeated, the war is over.
In the month following, his approval rating hit a high of 89%, according to Gallup. It was the highest recorded approval rating of any president in the modern era at that point. It seemed a second term would be a foregone conclusion.
But at the same time, a recession was taking hold. Nearly half a million Americans without jobs filed new claims for unemployment benefits during the first week of December. 79,000 more than the week before. The only thing I have not done is put a sign on the front of the building of where I live saying, help me, please, I need a job. I really don't know what to do.
You know, I mean, I feel like a kid out here again. It was a sharp departure from the growth of the 1980s, which had been the longest peacetime economic expansion to date. And Bush's approval ratings dropped like a rock. By the beginning of 1992, he was in the low 40s.
When we look at our economy, we should resist the urge to exaggerate our problems. Bush wasn't totally wrong. Again, Lynn Vavreck. The economy was slowly coming back. No other nation sells more products outside its borders. Export's tremendously high. But...
This is sort of, I like to call it, leaning on Carville's phrase, it's the counterfactual stupid. When you have to say to people, oh yeah, I know it's not great, but it's better than it would have been if I hadn't been in office, which is a very tough campaign strategy to execute.
By July of '92, right after Clinton hammered home his economic message at that year's Democratic convention, Bush hit a term low of 29% approval, a 60-point drop from his Gulf War victory highs.
While GDP growth actually netted out at 3.5% for the year in 1992, things didn't really pick up until the second half of the year, and unemployment remained above 7% throughout. It was termed a jobless recovery.
In October of 1992, just a month before the election, 92% of respondents to an ABC News poll described the economic conditions as not so good or poor. Now, these economic challenges would have been difficult for any incumbent to overcome. But it's hard to say the economy was the only factor working against Bush. I would not discount Bush.
Bill Clinton as a campaigner. Some people are exceptional. The connection to people, right, is exceptional. Barack Obama, John Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton's in that category. Another factor in 1992 was independent candidate Ross Perot, although polling suggests that Clinton would have won even without Perot in the race. There was also the change factor.
We've had Reagan in 80, Reagan in 84, George H.W. Bush in 88. This is going to be the fourth Republican term. So all of those things are important. But the economy is more than a bit player in this play. So basically, it was the economy, stupid, in 1992 that played a key role in Clinton's success. Three decades later, does that same wisdom hold true? Is it still the economy?
Again, Colin Hendricks. Are we currently in a good economy? I guess it would depend on who you ask, but if you were to ask pretty much every macroeconomist in the United States, I think they would probably say that yes, we are in an incredibly strong economy. You know, unemployment is low, wage growth has been especially strong at lower and middle income levels, and inflation is starting to come under control. Is Biden getting credit for a good economy? No, he is not. No.
This has been a point of a lot of consternation, I think, for people in the Biden camp and has occasioned, I think, a lot of rethinking about some of the long-held tenets that political scientists have about the factors that shape political preferences and the factors that shape elections. So Biden has been a relatively unpopular president, despite the fact that the economic performance under Biden has been very strong.
Biden's approval rating has stayed in the high 30s and low 40s for much of his tenure. Some of this is probably explained by prices rising much faster than wages for the first two years of his presidency and the decades-high level of borrowing costs. But the
But Hendricks says this trend predates Biden. If you were to get into a time machine and go back to 2019, what you would find is that then-President Trump was also deeply unpopular, despite presiding over similarly kind of strong economic performance, looking at a variety of different indicators from employment to inflation to the stock market again. So it's not just that Biden in a post-pandemic situation
sort of racked by inflation kind of world isn't getting credit for strong economic performance. It's the fact that his predecessor was not getting credit for, you know, comparatively strong economic performance either. Why is that the case? This kind of traditional model of how we think about what it means to be a partisan is looking less and less like an expression of sort of values that people have. They're beginning to take on a much more kind of tribal kind of quality.
Vavrik expanded on why that sense of tribalism may be on the rise. People's partisanship has in some way become more salient to them, maybe because the kinds of worlds that the two parties want to build are very, very different now. The kinds of things we're fighting over, these person-based issues like immigration, like a religious test to enter the country, abortion,
Those issues are the ones that are this new dimension of conflict since 2016. In 1994, Pew found that roughly 20% of Republicans and Democrats viewed the other party as very unfavorable. Now, it's more than half of both Republicans and Democrats who feel that way.
Compare Biden's steady, if stunted, approval rating to that of George H.W. Bush, whose rating fluctuated 60 points.
That kind of change may well not be possible today because there aren't enough voters willing to change their minds. — I certainly think that a better economic performance is better for Americans, broadly defined. Now, whether or not that is actually going to turn the tide in the election is a different question.
Hendricks has looked at the data on intensifying partisanship over the last 30 years and concluded that voters now assess candidates through the lens of partisanship instead of assessing them on the basis of their economic performance. In his estimation, it's the economy, stupid, doesn't ring so true anymore.
Vavrik disagrees. When I teach my undergraduates about presidential campaigns, I always tell them, if your life depended on predicting the outcome of the next election and getting it right between the two political parties...
And you could only know one piece of information. What would you want to know? What I would want to know is the change in GDP between January and June of the election year. If you know the growth rate, you'll be right roughly seven out of 10 times.
Vavrik says, yes, today there are fewer voters who might be persuaded by the economy. But, she says, because our elections have become so close, the proportional impact of the economy is still the same. Hendricks isn't so sure. That perspective is premised in the idea that these folks who don't have these kind of really deep-seated, kind of virulent sort of partisan attachments—
are people who are primarily making their vote choice on the basis of economic performance. That, I think, is an open question. There may be some numbers from some political scientist somewhere that you can point to that would suggest, yes, sort of these vanishing kind of like marginal, independent, unaffiliated voters are hypersensitive to things like inflation or things like the unemployment rate. But he also says that those unaligned voters have views that crisscross the political spectrum—
and that the issue that ultimately rises to the top may not be the economy. Vavrik's claim isn't that economic performance is foolproof, but that it gets you there 70% of the time. What do they say in sports? Like, that's why we play the game. The best team on paper doesn't always win. This is why we're going to have the campaigns and hold this election.
The debate over whether it's still the economy, stupid, isn't settled. There have been many studies that are consistent with a breakdown in the traditional relationship between macroeconomic performance and electoral outcomes. But, you know, that's pushing against decades of not just received wisdom, but also careful scholarship that showed we need to be concerned about economic conditions.
What's a result in November of 2024 that would be a notch or a win for the theory that economic voting still lives, that folks are persuaded by economic performance? The standard interpretation is that the Biden administration would pick up some of those otherwise unaffiliated voters on the strength of economic performance. Vavrik says it still depends on growth in the first half of this year.
I would come down with the weight of history, which is that if we have 3% growth, that is more likely than not going to produce a win for the incumbent party. And with GDP growth slowing to 1.6% in the first quarter of 2024, that could be a big if.
Either way, for campaigns trying to win over voters, the draw of James Carville's famous 1992 slogan has faded little over the past 30 years. I will say anecdotally that based on my conversations with policymakers, people in the administration, people in previous administrations—
they are all still firmly convinced, you know, you need to be paying attention to the price of eggs and price of gas if you're president of the United States, because those are things for which the electorate will hold you accountable. Look at your grocery bill. When you go for groceries now, you're paying three times what you paid two years ago. Now our economy is literally the envy of the world. 15 million new jobs in just three years. A record. A record. A record.
But whether it's still as true as it was back then is at least up for debate. And if it's not, that would signify a pretty big change in electoral politics. If the economy no longer plays such a starring role in determining elections, that means politicians themselves may focus less on it.
less on something that has the possibility to unite people, a thriving economy, and more on the things that divide us. So maybe we should all hope that it is still the economy, stupid.
My name is Galen Druk. This episode was produced by Cameron Shortavian. Additional production help from Jayla Everett and Amira Williams. Cooper Burton fact-checked and Shane McKeon mixed this episode. Editing help from Laura Mayer.
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