Since Bill Clinton won the White House in 1992, his adviser James Carville’s famous dictum that pocketbook issues drive voting has endured as an electoral truism. To get a sense of how voters are feeling about their finances in this year’s election, we looked state by state at six economic indicators since President Trump took office. The numbers point to a close race: For example, Michigan—a key battleground state and one of 11 decided by less than five percentage points in 2016—is in the bottom quartile in income growth (3.8% annualized vs. a national average of 4.1%) but just above the mean in property value gains. Ohio’s homeownership growth (5.1%) doubled the average while its employment figure (1.7%) lags badly. The new economic X-factor? Coronavirus fallout.
Sources: Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment change (Jan. 2017–Dec. 2019); Tax Foundation, combined state and average local tax rate (Jan. 2017–Jan. 2019); Census Bureau, homeownership rate (Q1 2017–Q4 2019); Federal Housing Finance Agency, seasonally adjusted property price (Q1 2017–Q4 2019); Bureau of Economic Analysis, personal income and real GDP (Q1 2017–Q3 2019)
A version of this article appears in the April 2020 issue of Fortune with the headline “Will It Be ‘the Economy, Stupid’?”
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