Seth Masket (whose book I was sent over the summer to read, but I have yet to get to it) looks at past mid-terms elections and the relationship between key economic variables and the fortunes of the president’s party. Interestingly, he notes no correlation between unemployment and seats won or lost since 1950:
This is an interesting and counter-intuitive finding—it certainly runs counter to conventional wisdom. Of course the one thing that this underscores is that presidents tend to lose seats in the mid-terms (only Clinton in 1998 and Bush in 2002 bucked that trend).
He hypothesizes in regards to employment:
It’s possible that unemployment fluctuations disproportionately affect people at the lower end of the income spectrum — people who aren’t terribly likely to vote in midterms and, if they do, are probably voting Democratic anyway.
He notes a similar finding for economic growth but does find a positive correlation between growth in real disposable income and seats won (or, more accurately, the severity of the losses). He has the scatterplots for both at his site (linked above).
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