CHARLOTTE, N.C. — When Ronald Reagan asked voters a week before the 1980 election whether they were better off than four years earlier, he turned a race that had been nip-and-tuck for months into a landslide victory — and showed how a pointed question can be a lethal political weapon.
Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential nominee, speaks often of that election in meetings with donors and other supporters, citing it to reassure those who are alarmed that he has not been able to build a lead against a president burdened with a listless economy, ballooning federal debt and a jobless rate deep in the red zone for an incumbent.
But if Romney believes the “Are you better off?” question will be political kryptonite for President Barack Obama, he will have to reckon with an economic scorecard that is more mixed than he and other Republicans are claiming on the campaign trail. U.S. voters, too, have more complicated feelings about their fortunes, and those of their children, than they did when Reagan first posed the question.
“People are not better off than they were four years ago, in the sense of where the economy is today compared to where it was,” said Kenneth S. Rogoff, a professor of economics at Harvard, ticking off statistics from the unemployment rate to housing prices. “But certainly, things could have been a lot worse. You can decide whether the glass is half-empty or half-full.”
The half-full argument, which the Obama campaign will promote at the Democratic convention here this week, holds that the economy is far stronger than it was at the depths of the recession in early 2009 when it was bleeding 800,000 jobs a month. Tepid though it may be, the pace of this recovery is on a par with the aftermath of other post-World War II financial crises, like those in Asia and Latin America.
Voters seem squarely on the half-empty side. Only 20 percent of those surveyed think their financial circumstances are better now than four years ago, while 39 percent think they are worse off, according to a CBS News poll conducted in August. That is just as pessimistic as during the financial meltdown a month before the 2008 election.
Moreover, 47 percent of those polled in April by The Times and CBS News think things are likely to get worse rather than better for the next generation of Americans, while only 24 percent think things will improve. That is also worse than when Obama took office, when 32 percent said the future would be worse.
But, as pollsters note, Americans have consistently expressed pessimism about the future. In three decades of polling by The Times and CBS News, only during the last year of Bill Clinton’s presidency did a solid plurality — 44 percent — voice optimism about the next generation.
Even in the final year of Reagan’s presidency, in July 1988, 59 percent of people said the future would be “bogged down” by troubles rather than brighter.
Those numbers belie Romney’s claim, in his acceptance speech in Tampa, Fla., that “for the first time, the majority of Americans now doubt that our children will have a better future.” They also offer Obama a line of counterattack.
The enduring pessimism, Obama’s advisers say, reflects a deeper sense of grievance on the part of the middle class, which has seen incomes stagnate since the 1970s, even during times of prosperity. The campaign hopes to exploit those feelings by presenting Obama as a great defender of the middle class against the predatory policies of Republicans.
