Ezra Klein of The Washington Post teams up with George Washington University Professor John Sides in a column today to explain that the economy will be closely linked to electoral outcomes this fall:
...The job of governing is different than the job of getting reelected. What do you do when good politics and good governance point you in the opposite directions?
But maybe we don't have to choose. For decades now, political scientists have been building election models that attempt to predict who will win in November without making any reference to candidates or campaigns. They can generally get within two percentage points of the final vote, and they don't need to know anything about the ads, the gaffes or the ground games to do it. All they really need to know about is the economy.
While predicting Congressional elections is indeed very difficult, MPN's own model to project voter turnout in 2010 is similarly based largely on economic conditions. One of the key variables -- the state unemployment rate -- accounts for a sizable and statistically significant share of the explanatory power in the model. Here are the results from our analysis.
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