Democratic strategist James Carville said it best in 1992: “It’s the economy, stupid.”
Goldman Sachs says an incumbent president’s chances of getting reelected all boils down to one key thing: whether the U.S. economy slides into a recession.
“This far in advance of an election, we have previously found that ‘fundamentals’ outweigh polling in predicting outcomes,” Goldman Sachs political economist Alec Phillips and economist Tim Krupa wrote in a recent research report.
Polls taken a year before an election have shown an average absolute error —the statistical gap between predicted and actual outcomes — of 10% since 1948, the researchers wrote.
Unless there’s a recession, President Joe Biden will likely emerge as the winner under this theory, Goldman said, without calling out the 2024 candidates by name. In the post-World War II era, the incumbent has always won, except when…
