Deep within Tuesday’s election results is some surprising insight about the way Americans are thinking about the economic conditions affecting them.
For all the sense of economic discontent brewing in the country, at the broadest level, their vote was for the status quo: President Obama will remain in the White House, the Senate will continue to be led by a comfortable — but not overwhelming — Democratic majority, and the House will stay in the hands of a large GOP majority. By sifting through exit polls, we uncover some of the specifics that lie beneath those big calls. Here are the conclusions one can draw from that polling; some of the details fly in the face of what economists think they know about what is going on in the world.
Graphic
See how much voter groups have shifted in the 2012 exit polls, compared to 2008.
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Associated Press
The Obama administration made a directive in April to cancel discretionary bonuses because of automatic spending cuts.
Howard Schneider
Invests in mitigation as Asian cities, African farmland are seen at risk over the next 10 to 20 years.
Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Worry and speculation have consumed investors since Chairman Ben Bernanke spoke to Congress last month about the Federal Reserve’s drive to keep long-term interest rates at record lows.
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This recession was different. There was an interesting debate during the campaign over whether the nation’s economic recovery under Obama should be judged against the standard of other recoveries from deep recessions in the United States (as a number of economists supporting Republican rival Mitt Romney argued), or against the standard of economies trying to claw back from financial crises (as those more sympathetic to Obama argued).
The benchmark one chooses makes a big difference in whether one views the slow recovery under Obama as a crushing disappointment caused by a failed president or whether it’s on the right course, given the difficult circumstances that Obama inherited last Inauguration Day.
Presumably, very few voters spent the run-up to the election re-reading Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff’s findings on international financial crises, and most probably missed the debate that played out in economics blogs and newspaper opinion pages. But it appears that voters were sympathetic to the president on this crucial question.
One of the exit poll questions asked whether voters blame the nation’s economic problems on Obama or George W. Bush. Almost four years after Bush left the White House, 53 percent of voters blamed him, vs. 38 percent for Obama. Even 12 percent of Romney voters blamed Bush for the nation’s economic problems. It’s possible that those views reflect more on the two mens’ personal qualities than on an implicit judgment about whether the slow recovery was a direct result of the policies that preceded it. But the data suggest that voters were willing to hold this recovery to a different standard, given its origins.
Inflation is a big problem. To economists, inflation is the dog that didn’t bite. Despite fears among commentators that the Federal Reserve’s easy-money policies would spark rising prices, the consumer price index rose 2 percent over the past year, exactly what the Fed aims for. And investors are pricing in only 2.07 percent annual inflation on bond markets over the next five years.
Don’t tell voters that. About 37 percent named rising prices as the biggest economic problem, basically tied with the 38 percent who cited unemployment. (The other options were taxes, with 14 percent, and housing, with 8 percent.)
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