What Have You Done for Me lately?

Will Republicans experience a "rare instance of economic accountability" in the next election? Larry Bartels thinks they might:

Inequalities, by Larry M. Bartels, Commentary, NY Times: The past three decades have seen a momentous shift: The rich became vastly richer while working-class wages stagnated. Economists say 80 percent of net income gains since 1980 went to people in the top 1 percent of the income distribution, boosting their share of total income to levels unseen since before the Great Depression.

Despite the historic magnitude of this shift, inequality has thus far had little traction as a political issue. Many Americans seem to accept the conservative view that escalating inequality reflects “free market” forces immune to amelioration through public policy. ...[This] assertion, however, is strongly contradicted by the historical record. ...

According to my analysis,... real incomes of middle-class families grew more than twice as fast under Democratic presidents as they did under Republican presidents. Even more remarkable, the real incomes of working-poor families ... grew six times as fast when Democrats held the White House. Only the incomes of affluent families were relatively impervious to partisan politics, growing robustly under Democrats and Republicans alike.

The cumulative effect of these partisan differences is enormous. ... If middle-class and poor people do so much better under Democratic presidents than under Republican presidents, why do so many of them vote for Republicans? One popular answer, advanced by Thomas Frank and others, is that they are alienated by Democratic liberalism on cultural issues like abortion, gay marriage and gender roles. This does not appear to be the case. ...

A better explanation for Republican electoral successes may be that while most voters ... do vote with their economic interests in mind, they construe those interests in a curiously myopic way. Their choices at the polls are strongly influenced by election-year income growth but only weakly related to economic performance earlier in the president’s term. And while Republicans have presided over dismal income growth for middle-class and poor families in most years, they have, remarkably enough, produced robust growth in election years.

Why have Republican administrations typically presided over strong election-year growth? The pattern probably reflects the fact that presidents have more clout early in their terms... Republicans have often used that clout to rein in inflation and social spending, producing or prolonging economic contractions that then wear off by the time of the next election. New or newly re-elected Democrats, for their part, have frequently stimulated the economy and expanded employment, producing economic booms that raise all boats in their second and third years but trail off as the next election approaches. As a result, even working-poor families have experienced stronger income growth under Republicans (1.8 percent) than under Democrats (1 percent) in election years.

This year looks unusual in this respect, with slow growth likely despite the infusion of substantial tax rebates from an election-year stimulus plan. If that slow growth produces a Republican defeat in November, it will be a rare instance of economic accountability for a party with a long history of delivering meager income gains for most American families.

No matter how much it might help Democrats, I'm not hoping for a recession. But if problems must occur, accountability would be nice.