I’m sick of hearing this nonsense. If you know American politics you know every election in the past century. The relevant question is: “Under what circumstances does an incumbent president lose an election?” The answer is: it has only happened twice in the past 70 years. One election was in 1980 when Reagan defeated Carter and one election was in 1992 when Clinton defeated George Bush Senior.

In the 1980 election, the GDP grew from $2.56 trillion in 1979 to $2.79 in 1980, a growth rate of 9%. Inflation that year was also 9%.

In the 1992 election, the GDP grew from $5.72 trillion in 1991 to $6.04 in 1992, a growth rate of 5.5%. Inflation was 3%.

So in both elections the outcome couldn’t have been due to bad economic growth. Weak, maybe.

It is possible that the reference to the “economy, stupid” is a reference to unemployment which declined from an average of 7.1% during Carter’s administration to 6.5 in the year before the election.

For Bush the unemployment rate rose from an average of 5.8% in the three previous Bush years, to 7.1% in the twelve months before the 1992 election.

Neither Gross Domestic Product nor unemployment seems to explain incumbent election outcomes. Marxists need to cry about these numbers. The numbers don’t support a Marxist view of the world.

More likely the reason an incumbent lost was political.

Carter entered the election with more than 50 Americans held hostage in Iran and he failed in his military attempt to free them. Reagan won in a landslide.

In Bush v. Clinton, Ross Perot was a third party candidate. Perot got nearly 20 million votes. He drew much more heavily from the Bush vote which ended up at 39 million votes compared to Clinton’s 45 million votes. The Democrats were 50% of the registered voters at the time, compared to 38% for the Republicans. We should also remember that Pat Buchanan gave the opening address to the Republican convention and declared that the Republican Party stood firmly opposed to abortion.

Bush lost because of politics.

It’s not “the economy,” stupid. It’s politics.