(Fox Business) There is a significant effect between the performance of residential real estate, the largest asset class in the U.S., and voter behavior during an election year, according to authors of the “Housing Performance and the Electorate,” study.
Some argue that presidential “election outcomes in ‘swing’ counties are particularly vulnerable to the local real estate economy,” according to the authors, which evaluated heterogeneous county-level housing market performance on voter behavior in the six presidential elections between 2000 and 2020.
In the study, the authors discovered that counties with “superior house price performance” in the four years leading up to an election are more likely to “vote-switch” to the incumbent party.
Conversely, people who lived in areas with “relatively inferior house price performance” during that same four-year span were more likely to switch their vote from the incumbent to the challenging party, the authors noted.
New single-family homes under construction in a development in Amagansett, New York, US, on Wednesday, May 22, 2024. (Bing Guan/Bloomberg via Getty Images / Getty Images)
Based on the study, Realtor.com analyzed the outcome of the upcoming election could be partly influenced by home prices in swing counties of the seven battleground states:
Here are the seven states, according to Realtor.com:
- Arizona
- Georgia
- Michigan
- Nevada
- North Carolina
- Pennsylvania
- Wisconsin
Realtor.com Senior Economic Research Analyst Hannah Jones underscored that home prices can have an impact on elections due to the fact that a “large majority of a homeowner’s wealth is in the home they live in,” and the fact that the majority of voters are also homeowners.
“Home values and housing affordability loom large in the minds of homeowners, especially around elections,” Jones said.
