politics

It’s Summertime, and the Fishin’ Is Easy

June 24, 2004

Yesterday, CNN featured on its main page a Mark Gongloff-penned piece trying to hang President Bush’s chances of being reelected on … the stock market. The story discussed a report arguing that the stock market’s staggers over the past four years — a protracted plunge, followed by a halting recovery — signal big trouble for Bush the candidate.

The “proof”? In six out of the ten elections lost by the incumbent party over the past 104 years, the Dow Jones industrial average gained less than 20 percent over the four years before the election. In the other four elections, according to the report, there were “poor” stock returns in the year before the vote — although what “poor” means we never learn. (And as Gongloff points out, in three of those years returns were positive.) Still, the report concludes that the market’s performance spells trouble for Bush, what with the Dow still down 5 percent from where it was on Election Day 2000, and up only 5 percent since the first Tuesday of November 2003.

Now, we understand that there are enough variables in a presidential election that it is inevitable that irrelevant and/or contradictory patterns can and will be teased out of the data. And we also understand that things slow down in the summer and reporters turn to casting into unlikely streams for something, anything, to write. But stories like this, which often confuse correlation and causation, are especially exasperating.

CNN seems to know it has something pointless on its hands. The sheepish subhead that some editor put on the story is an acknowledgement upfront of the useless exercise to follow:

“If history is any guide, Bush needs a summer rally — but history may not be such a great guide.”

The author also seems aware of the flimsiness of his premise. Gongloff points out that many voters are only vaguely aware of the market’s performance — they tend to focus more on pocketbook issues like their own wages and the prices of consumer products. And he quotes an economist that says the market, as an indicator, is “totally trumped by other factors right now.” He even admits that it “seems unlikely that the stock market’s performance alone would be a good predictor of the election’s results.”

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It almost seems as though the writer and editor agree with us: It’s ridiculous to suggest that the performance of one aspect of the economy has been significant enough to sway elections for over a century, particularly when you factor in the huge number of variables that influence an election and the small sample size of this study.

So we’re left pondering two questions: How did this non-story get posted in the first place? And what’s next — analyses of the significance of the candidates’ astrological signs?

–Brian Montopoli

Brian Montopoli is a writer at CJR Daily.