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 Roman Genn |
 THE NATION
Good Economy, Bad Polls
Bush and the Republicans can’t seem to catch a break
RAMESH PONNURU
It seems to happen every week: Some new piece of good economic news comes out, and Republicans sink a little deeper in the polls. In late April, it was estimated that the economy had grown by 4.8 percent during the first quarter of the year. A few days later, new jobs numbers came out. It turns out that 5.3 million jobs have been created since August 2003. The unemployment rate is 4.7 percent — well below the average of each of the last three decades. The stock market continued to rise, and looked likely to hit a record soon.
The public responded to all this good news by turning a little more against President Bush. In a mid-April poll by Gallup and USA Today, 36 percent of the public approved of the president’s performance in office and 59 percent disapproved. In an early-May poll, approval had fallen to 31 percent and disapproval had risen to 65 percent. Bush’s 23-point deficit had widened to 34 points.
The ratings for the Republican-controlled Congress have been sinking too. From early April to early May, approval fell from 27 to 23 percent, and disapproval rose from 61 to 64 percent, according to a CBS/New York Times poll. Other polls showed that more Americans believed that the country was “off on the wrong track,” and fewer thought we were “heading in the right direction.”
In mid-April, Gallup found that only 25 percent of the public could be characterized as having “positive” views about the economy. It also reported that the public’s economic optimism has not recovered since the end of the Internet-stock boom. Most other polls yield similar findings.
In recent decades, the economy has usually been weak during midterm elections under a Republican president. Nixon faced a recession in 1970. Ford had to deal with a severe bout of stagflation, among other things, in 1974. Reagan’s first midterm election, in 1982, took place against the backdrop of the worst downturn since the Great Depression. The 1986 election, Reagan’s second midterm, was something of an exception to the rule, although growth dipped a little that year. The 1990 election, during the presidency of the first George Bush, came in the middle of a mild recession. And the economy and the markets were only beginning to recover from a recession in 2002. The economy this year is better than it was in six of those seven elections.
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