Another look at the economy: Were conditions worse in battleground states?
James Gimpel
Posted: 12.31.2008 / 9:10 AM PST
In postmortems on the 2008 election, few people have contested the idea that the widespread economic downturn played a big role in shaping the vote.
Several specific economic travails appeared to be significant in turning voters away from the Republican Party. The burst of the housing bubble led to record numbers of mortgage foreclosures. Unemployment reached levels not seen since the early 1990s, and gasoline prices soared to historic highs.
But it shouldn’t be assumed that because a particular location was hit hard by economic calamity, there would be a massive political shift toward the party out of power. Moreover, even if locales experienced only a modest downturn, there could still be a substantial change in political support.
One way of exploring this issue is to look at the battleground states in the 2008 election. Were the economic conditions worse in these places than in nonbattleground states?
The findings could help answer whether economic conditions clinched the election for Barack Obama. They could also help explain why some places that had been safe for Republicans became battlegrounds this time around.
Before going further, however, here are a few caveats. First, economic conditions themselves are geographically variable. Although gasoline prices soared almost everywhere, the foreclosure crisis registered at high intensity in California and a handful of metropolitan areas outside the Golden State. And unemployment inevitably hits some sectors of the economy – and therefore some places – more than it does others.
While economic indicators for the United States overall can be ominously portrayed in various media reports, these circumstances may seem distant and less real if they are not reflected in local layoffs or foreclosed mortgages.
Second caveat: Economic unease does not lead to a wholesale disregard for customary voting patterns – namely, partisan identification. California, for instance, is a very safe Democratic state in good times and in bad.
In another example involving the second caveat, a large number of people hit by foreclosures were middle- and lower-income minorities living in the Western states and Florida. Many of them would not have supported the Republican ticket even in good times.
To be sure, battleground status is not always simple to define. From one election to the next, a few contested states appear quite consistently, such as Florida, Nevada, and Ohio. But states do drop out and drop in, depending on the candidates and the issues.
Even within an election year, states that appear to be battlegrounds in June are sometimes no longer hotly contested in October.
Still, this year, a number of states appeared on most lists by late summer: Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin. Some might argue for the addition or subtraction of a state, but this is a useful list for the purposes of this exercise.
Specifically, a comparison of gasoline prices, foreclosure rates, and unemployment levels between states that witnessed a lot of campaigning and those that saw little or none reveals some remarkable patterns and nonpatterns.
First, by November, foreclosure numbers were considerably higher in battleground states. Even though foreclosures were concentrated in the most urban parts of these states, the political battlegrounds overall had accumulated nearly twice as many foreclosures as those that were not (1.7 million compared with 869,000). And the foreclosure rate (accumulated foreclosures per 1,000 households) ran more than twice as high in the battleground states as in the nonbattlegrounds (29.2 to 12.9).
Without question, then, battleground states fared considerably worse in terms of the housing crisis than safe states did – even when California’s sky-high foreclosure figures are included in the mix of safe states.
Gasoline prices soared to more than $4 per gallon in June and July. But both the exact price and the practical effect varied by region because of factors like state tax rates on gasoline, pollution control regulations that raise costs, distance from suppliers, and local consumption habits.
By October, however, gasoline prices had dropped – and it turns out that those prices were not, on average, much different in the battleground states ($2.93) than in nonbattleground states ($2.95). In fact, the average gasoline price in US counties dropped an average of 85 cents or 86 cents from July to October, regardless of how closely contested the area was politically.
The unemployment rate, it turns out, was about one percentage point higher in October in the battleground states (6.7 percent) than in the nonbattlegrounds (5.6 percent). Contrary to conventional wisdom, however, unemployment remained persistently high throughout the year in the hard-fought states, whereas the safe states saw a creeping increase from July to October.
By Election Day, the battleground states had recorded 340,000 more jobless claims than the nonbattleground states. This is in spite of the fact that collectively, the battleground states contain considerably fewer voters and 12 percent less people.
For the record, all these battleground states, except Missouri, went for Mr. Obama.
The figures here raise intriguing questions for further discussion and investigation. For one, perhaps battleground states fit that classification, in part, because they were more economically vulnerable than the less competitive states. While this generalization is not true of California, a state that was obviously very economically vulnerable, it might hold for the rest.
Indeed, California aside, the contested states may have the weakest economies. It could be argued that Indiana, North Carolina, and Virginia were added to the list of battleground states in 2008 because their economies were weakening.
