In the presidential campaigns of 1932 and 1992, Democratic challengers opposed Republican incumbents. In 1932, the slogan that was intended to keep the 1992 challenger's campaign staff focused – i.e., “It's the economy, stupid!” – would have been redundant. No alert observer could entertain any doubt that the economy was the central issue in Franklin D. Roosevelt's first campaign for the presidency. The wreckage wrought by three years of depression had a distressing immediacy in the form of mass unemployment, idled industrial capacity, collapsed farm prices, real estate foreclosures, and bank failures.

It is now a part of the conventional wisdom that a president running for reelection is in trouble if the “economic discomfort index” – defined as the sum of the unemployment rate and the inflation rate – is in double digits. (In the environment of 1932, it would have been fitting to rewrite this formula by substituting the deflation rate, which was then responsible for major economic distress, for the inflation rate.) By these standards, contemporaries might easily have concluded that the Hoover administration's economic performance meant that it was automatically doomed. Before the fact, however, the electoral result was less than self-evident. The electorate clearly had ample reasons to reject the party in power. But observers at the time also had valid grounds for wondering what a Democratic administration would bring. Only four times in the preceding eighteen presidential contests had the Democrats won control of the White House.