Can John McCain win if U.S. has recession?

DALLAS (Reuters) - If the U.S. economy falls into a recession, can presumptive Republican nominee John McCain possibly win the presidential election in November?

Analysts and historians say not likely -- just ask Jimmy Carter or Herbert Hoover, sitting presidents who lost re-election bids in 1980 and 1932 against the backdrop of shrinking economies.

Past economic slumps have dashed the hopes of both incumbent presidents and the nominees of the party in the White House. The effects can linger after the recession ends, as George H.W. Bush found when he lost to Bill Clinton in 1992.

One exception was Harry Truman's successful re-election bid in 1948, which occurred just as a recession was starting to bite -- but that is widely regarded as one of the biggest electoral upsets in U.S. history.

The economy is the one issue that everyone has a stake in and therefore an opinion on, making it pivotal at the polls. Last year the U.S. economy grew by 2.2 percent, its slowest expansion since 2002, and many economists forecast a recession this year as a crisis in the housing industry spreads.

A recession is typically defined as two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth or contraction.

This suggests that the November election should be all but in the bag for whomever wins the Democratic nomination, be it Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama -- not least because President George W. Bush and his Republican Party will be widely blamed for any economic pain Americans feel.

"A bad economy is more likely to help the Democratic candidate for a couple of reasons. First, Bush is in charge and he's a Republican and people tend to blame the president and his party for their economic problems," said Andrew Kohut, president of the non-partisan Pew Research Centre.

"The Democratic Party also has a better image for coping with economic issues," he said.

A March 19-22 Pew survey of 1,503 Americans nationwide found just 11 percent rated the economy as excellent or good, down from 17 percent in early February and 26 percent in January.

GLIMMER OF HOPE?

Americans were less dour about their own affairs. About 47 percent viewed their own personal finances as excellent or good, while 51 percent rated them poor or fair.

But some analysts say general perceptions about the economy have more influence on voting than personal ones.

"People care about their pocketbooks but research shows people vote more on the general state of the economy than their own personal economic circumstance," said David Epstein, a political science professor at Columbia University.

He said this could be because people worried a sagging economy would eventually pull down their lifestyles, pensions or businesses.

If the U.S. economy does fall into recession it may not even be declared until after the election, but the historical record suggests a downturn will be bad news for McCain.

Ray Fair, an economist at Yale University, has developed an econometric forecasting model for presidential elections using data going back to 1916. It suggests that if the U.S. economy on a per capita basis declines by 1.5 percent in the first three quarters of 2008 then the Republican candidate in a two-way race will garner less than 46 percent of the vote.

"I think if there is a recession then it is highly unlikely that the Republicans will win," he told Reuters.

U.S. history is littered with the political corpses of presidencies or White House bids slain by downturns.

A recession that took hold in April 1960 hurt Richard Nixon, a sitting vice president and nominee for the incumbent Republican Party, in his run for the White House against Democrat John Kennedy.

Democrat Jimmy Carter's attempt at a second White House term in 1980 floundered as a bruising recession kicked off in January, handing the presidency to Ronald Reagan. Hoover had no chance in 1932 during the "Great Depression."

The recession that wounded George H.W. Bush started in mid-1990 and had ebbed when he came up against Clinton -- but memory of it had not.

And Republican Warren Harding snatched the White House from the Democrats in 1920 against the backdrop of recession.