Though it doesn't seem to make much sense, the actual state of the economy has more influence on presidential elections than midterm elections. However, "people's assessments of how the economy is doing are equally related to vote choice in both midterm and presidential elections." The author of this article argues that something is "mucking up" the link between the real economy and people's perceptions of it. She looked for data to find a correlation between the real economy growth and election outcomes from 1948-2012. From this she found a "correlation between growth in gross domestic product in the first six months of a presidential election year and two-party vote share for president is 0.64…but in midterm elections over the same period, the correlation between G.D.P growth and the number of seats the president's party gains or loses in the Senate is 0.03," which is almost insignificant. So the objective economy is a much stronger factor in choosing a president than voting for members of Congress.
When looking at data from the American National Election Studies, that began in 1980, the author found that "the correlation between the share of people who think the economy has gotten better and vote outcomes in presidential elections is just 0.4. In midterm years, the correlation between sanguine assessments of the economy in the [American National Election Studies] and Senate seat loss is also 0.4." She explains that people's perception of the economy are strongly correlated with their party affiliation. A study show that about 24% of Americans believe the economy has improved over the last year. If that is broken down based on party affiliation, 43% of Democrats think the economy has improved, while only 8% of Republicans agree (about 20% of Independents agree as well). This shows that partisanship is the filter that "mucks up" the link between the state of the economy and election outcomes. The author said it best: "If you're in the incumbent president's party, your lenses are more likely to be rose-colored, and if you're not, your lenses tend to be very dark--regardless of how the economy is actually performing!" Of course, this makes a lot of sense looking at are political system but it is a frustrating reality.
Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/04/upshot/the-economy-and-voters-perception-of-it-are-two-very-different-things.html?ref=business&_r=0&abt=0002&abg=0
This makes a lot of sense because for most people, when they look at how the world is they find what they want to find. And this has become even easier in the modern age where there are so many sources of news and ideas. Republicans will go to Republican sites that will tell them that the Democrats are wrong and the same is true for the Democrats. For a large majority of people, facts don't matter. All that matters is keeping their perception of reality alive.
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