It’s the economy, stupid

"It’s the economy, stupid,” was a useful slogan for the 1992 Bill Clinton campaign. Of course, it wasn’t really true. The Clinton campaign was about much more than the economy. It was about “ending welfare as we know it,” for example, and putting government on the side of those who “work hard and play by the rules”—all of this part of a broader redefinition of the Democratic party away from the failed liberalism of Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis. And the collapse of the Bush administration in 1992 was also, as it happens, about much more than the economy, which was in fact coming back strong in the fall of that year.

Since then, we’ve seen an epic Republican collapse in 2006. That happened despite pretty good economic growth in the preceding two years. Its cause was some combination of the Bush attempt to institute private Social Security accounts, Hurricane Katrina, Harriet Miers, Tom DeLay, Donald Rumsfeld, immigration, and God knows what else—but not particularly the economy. The repudiation of the Democrats in 2010, for that matter, was fundamentally  about Obamacare, the size and scope of government, and particular Obama policies like the stimulus and cap and trade. It wasn’t primarily a referendum on “the economy, stupid.”

Nonetheless, the slogan has become a talisman, evoked by unimaginative political consultants and reached for by cautious candidates, in pursuit of an easy, safe, cookie-cutter campaign strategy. But it’s not safe. The belief that voters react in a simple-minded way to their current economic well-being leads campaigns and candidates to counterproductively dumb their message down. It’s also condescending, and voters often see it as such.