Mark Mellman: Why President Obama hasn’t been getting credit

If I were President Obama, I’d be enormously frustrated. The actual President Obama may be frustrated, too.

After all, the country has created more than 200,000 jobs each month for the last 10 months, and unemployment has dropped to a level that is lower than it was before the president was first elected in 2008.

Yet the president’s approval rating seems stuck in the low 40s, which caused his party grievous damage in the midterm elections. Only three of the last 18 midterm races featured lower presidential approval ratings than in 2014.

That matters in midterm election results.

No Democratic Senate candidate in an even moderately competitive race ran more than 9 points ahead of the president’s approval rating. On average, votes for Democratic Senate candidates were less than 4 points higher than approval for the president in that candidate’s state.

But why wasn’t that approval rating higher, given the economic news?

First, voters look at different, less positive data. As I’ve discussed here before, there is no consistent relationship between unemployment rates and electoral outcomes. We may lament that fact, but it is no less true for being lamentable. 

Voters do look at their lives. How much money are they bringing in, and what can it buy? The economic statistic that most closely reflects that reality is change in real per capita disposable income — how much money people have to spend after taxes and what they can afford to buy with it, given the cost of living. 

On that indicator, we have not been faring so well.

In nine of the last 13 midterms, the change in real disposable income was greater than it was this last year. While people are cheering presidents for growth, voters have experienced improvements in real disposable income three and four times greater than what they saw this year.

Another way of peering directly in the public’s pocket books is through real changes in median household income. Again, it’s not a good story.

Median income in October 2014 was 5.1 percent lower than when the recession began almost seven years agoand 6.2 percent lower than it was in January 2000.

In short, Americans are far worse off than they were 14 years ago, so joy about declining unemployment and rising stock markets is limited among the electorate as a whole, depriving the president of “credit” for a booming economy.

So reality is one central reason the president does not get credit for an improving economy.

Beyond the facts of personal economic life were the distractions.

In the weeks leading up to the elections, Pew surveys tell us 26 percent were following news on the economy very closely. A slightly larger 29 percent were following strikes on the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, and a vastly larger 49 percent were following Ebola news with that level of interest. By comparison, just 16 percent followed campaign news that closely. 

Beyond just distracting from good economic news, these events — unfairly, in my view — call into question the president’s leadership. Voters want their president to “take care” of things. 

When things seem so out of control — whether having to do with the economy or hemorrhagic fevers at home, or Russia’s Vladimir Putin and ISIS abroad — it suggests the president isn’t doing a good job. Few people stop to ask what he, or they, would do differently. They just think he should be keeping things in order. If he is not, the president is not doing his job well in the public mind.

So the president did not get the credit he deserved for economic improvement in part because the economy people live in has not improved enough to justify it. 

And even if the president tried to focus attention on his economic achievements, real events got in the way — real events that themselves reinforced doubt about the president’s performance. 

Mellman is president of The Mellman Group and has worked for Democratic candidates and causes since 1982. Current clients include the majority leader of the Senate and the Democratic whip in the House.