US election campaign: the key issues

Economy

It's the economy, stupid – or is it? You have to go back more than 70 years to find a president who retained his job when so many of his compatriots lost theirs. Economic gloom made short work of Jimmy Carter and George Bush Sr. But Barack Obama's record is not all bad – and that might be good enough to save him, says Larry Elliott

Barack Obama should be toast. Under his stewardship, the US economy has suffered its feeblest economic recovery since the second world war. Living standards for the average American have fallen since he arrived at the White House almost four years ago.

Despite his rallying call to the struggling and the dispossessed in 2008, poverty is rising and the gap between rich and poor has grown. History shows that the last incumbent president to win an election with the unemployment rate above 8% was Franklin D Roosevelt.

If the race for White House is about the economy – and American voters routinely say it is – Mitt Romney would be winning the election by a country mile and Obama contemplating joining George Bush Sr and Jimmy Carter as one-term presidents of the modern era.

Polling by the Pew Research Centre shows that only 41% of Americans say their own personal financial situation is excellent or good, while consumer confidence is lower than it was when Gerald Ford lost to Carter in 1976 and when Carter was turfed out by Ronald Reagan four years later. The last time Americans felt this gloomy was in 1992, and Bill Clinton won.

The fact that real median incomes, a benchmark of how well the middle classes are doing, have dropped by 4.7% since Obama became president has allowed Romney to ask the question so tellingly posed by Reagan against Carter: "Are you better off than you were four years ago?"

If the well-off in the US were asked that question, the answer would be yes. The top 5% of earners, those making $186,000 (£115,000) or more, took 22.3% of national income in 2011, up from 21.3% in 2010.

Income inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient, is greater than it has been since records began in 1975, making the US the fourth most unequal country in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development after Chile, Mexico and Turkey. All this has got the pollsters scratching their heads.

Bruce Stokes, fellow of the Pew Institute, said: "Back in the spring, my assumption was that if unemployment remained above 8%, the president was going to lose. It has remained above 8% but despite that the president retains a great deal of public support, and that has grown in the last month."

Obama has been helped in recent weeks by some tentative signs that the economy is on the mend. The recession in the real estate market – the worst the US has ever endured – appears to be at an end, with housing starts, home sales and property prices all on the rise.

Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, has lifted share prices on Wall Street by announcing that the US central bank will continue to use monetary stimulus until there is clear evidence of sustained growth. An easing of the eurozone crisis has calmed fears that the economy might plunge off a cliff in the runup to election day.

There is, though, perhaps more to it than that. Analysts at Capital Economics say that the darkest days for the US economy were in the months between Obama's election victory in November 2008 and his inauguration in early 2009 and that the economy is in much better shape now than it was then.

"At the end of 2008, GDP was falling at an annualised rate of 9%, over 700,000 jobs were being lost every month and the banking system was in meltdown," Capital Economics said.

Polls show that many voters still blame Bush and the Republicans for the current weakness in the economy, while at the same time giving Obama credit for rescuing the US car industry when it was faced with bankruptcy.

Even this, however, does not appear to be the whole story, as voters in the swing states appear to be planning to vote for Obama while at the same time believing that Romney would be just as good, if not better, at handling the economy.

According to Stokes, the explanation may be that Obama is well ahead when it comes to other issues, such as healthcare and national security, and is also seen as a more likable candidate.

Romney's only hope in the remaining weeks of the campaign is to make Obama's handling of the economy the key election issue. If he fails to do so, Obama looks likely to be re-elected.

Health

Obama's healthcare reform was arguably the biggest domestic achievement of his presidency, requiring Americans to buy health insurance and making sure people with pre-existing conditions got insurance. Republicans denounced the act as unaffordable, a violation of individual freedom. Romney pledged to repeal the care act in its entirety but now says there are a things he would keep – including allowing young adults to stay on parental policies until they are 25. In a trip to the US, the Guardian's health editor, Sarah Boseley, found plenty of beneficiaries of the Obama reforms

Dawn Josephson, who lives in Jacksonville, Florida, fell foul of an insurance trap. In 2008 her son, Wesley, then two, woke up one morning with just the white of one eye showing and the iris of the other hardly visible. It was sudden-onset strabismus, caused by lack of co-ordination between eye muscles and the brain. His eyes were no longer focusing on the same point.

They were paying $800 (£495) a month for health insurance for their family of four, with an excess of $1,500, and they were liable for 20% of their costs after that.

Wesley had a surgical procedure costing about $8,000, although there was no overnight stay. With lab tests, the bills probably came to $12,000.

"About two months later, we got a nice little note from our insurance company saying, 'we are now terminating this policy and we have nothing else to offer you'," she said. "My husband and I are self-employed, so we have to get our own policy. We found another for about the same rate, but because Wesley had this pre-existing condition, anything relating to the eye was not covered. We were still going to the doctor every two months, paying anything from $600 to $1,000 for doctors' bills."

The local Nemours children's hospital offered a payment scheme, so they ran up bills and paid a small monthly amount towards them.

"Around April 2010, we said, 'we can't do this any more, there has got to be an alternative'," she said.

An insurance agent found the family a cheaper policy, which at least saved them money for Wesley's bills.

When Josephson called the insurance company to check on the policy, she was told everyone was covered, including Wesley. Josephson could not believe what she was hearing.

"For a split second I thought they made a mistake – just shut up and take the policy," she said. "Then she said to me, 'we are no longer excluding pre-existing conditions for children'."

On 23 March, Obama had signed the affordable care act into law. Wesley Josephson had just become one of the first beneficiaries.

Foreign policy

Foreign policy did not figure much in the campaign, until the killing of the US ambassador to Libya this month. Since then the gloves have come off, writes Julian Borger, the Guardian's diplomatic editor

Mitt Romney said very little about foreign affairs on the stump but he seized on the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi as an emblem of America's place in the world under Obama. He claimed that the US response to the wave of attacks on American diplomatic mission had been to apologise for the amateur video that had triggered them.

It turned out he has his timings wrong and that a statement by the US embassy in Cairo condemning the video for its cynical portrayal of the prophet Muhammad had preceded the attacks.

But the Romney campaign pressed on with the theme, seeking to cast the administration as apologising for American values abroad.

The president appeared to slip in a television interview aired in which he described the riots as "bumps in the road" on the way to a functioning democracy.

Romney responded quickly saying: "These are not bumps in the road, these are human lives."

The theme resonated because of popular perceptions of what was widely seen as ingratitude among the new north African democracies for American support for the Arab spring.

The Republican vice-presidential nominee, Paul Ryan, claimed this week that the riots over the anti-Muslim video were a demonstration of how the Obama foreign policy was "blowing up in our faces".

Ryan compared the scenes from north Africa to the 1979 Iranian revolution, implying a comparison between Obama and the Democratic president at the time, Jimmy Carter, the personification among American conservatives of weak, unpatriotic, leadership.

Obama has sought to counter that narrative with his emphatic celebration of those values in this week's speech to the UN general assembly.

On the bigger picture, that is some polling evidence that Obama has the edge.

A new YouGov poll, seen by the Guardian, shows that, while a large majority of Republicans see their country locked in a zero-sum struggle with Islam, Americans as a whole rejects that view by 47% to 39%. Almost half those polled believe "it is possible for the west and Muslims to coexist in peace".

Obama's UN speech mentioned in passing what the White House believes are its principal achievements abroad – the killing of Osama bin Laden, the withdrawal from Iraq, and the planned pullout from Afghanistan.

The first aspect inoculates Obama from Republican attacks for lack of resolve over the other two. The slayer of America's enemy number one cannot easily be accused of being weak on security. Moreover, there is no political advantage to be gained in a war-weary America by arguing that the White House is cutting and running from foreign conflicts.

Immigration

Immigration reform is one of the top issues for Latino voters. Most of the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the US are Latino. Obama won their overwhelming support in 2008, and polls show he should repeat this in November. Although he failed to deliver on his promise to introduce immigration reform, he has taken action, bypassing Congress, to give the children of some illegal immigrants relief from the threat of arrest. He has also promised reform in a second term. But as Ewen MacAskill and Ed Pilkington report, there is still a long way to go to prevent immigrants from falling foul of individual states taking matters into their own hands

Latinos living without immigration papers in Arizona have begun bombarding helplines and lawyers' offices with requests about how to provide for their children should they be arrested under the controversial new police power that came into effect last week.

A phoneline hosted by the Arizona branch of the American Civil Liberties Union received almost 4,000 calls in two days, many from anxious parents who fear their children could be left abandoned should they be picked up under the "show-me-your-papers" provision.

Hundreds have been asking for help setting up a power of attorney, which gives a relative or friend who has US citizenship the right to care for minors in such an eventuality.

"People are terrified. They fear that they will go to the store to buy groceries and won't get home, and their kids will be left alone at school," said Luz Santiago, a pastor in Mesa. She said she had personally handled about 50 requests for power of attorney so far.

The "show-me-your-papers" clause is the most deeply contested of the provisions of SB 1070, an Arizona law passed in 2010 that has set the benchmark for a wave of hardline immigration laws clamping down on undocumented families in several states.

Under its terms, police are required to investigate the immigration status of anyone they come across during their normal work and whom they suspect of being unauthorised.

The law was snarled up in legal challenges that went up to the US supreme court. In June, the court struck down several elements of the legislation but allowed the clause to go ahead pending local Arizona court approval.

That approval was granted this week and the provision is now in effect.

Residents of Phoenix, the capital of Arizona, are braced for the rule change, having witnessed the impact of heavy-handed policing for years under Joe Arpaio, who calls himself "America's toughest sheriff".

Groups working with undocumented Hispanics are more concerned about other smaller towns, such as Flagstaff and Prescott, which have large Latino populations but no experience of police officers acting as immigration agents.

Tucson, Arizona's second-largest city, is calling a forum next Tuesday in which community leaders will meet the police chief, Roberto Villasenor, to discuss the implementation of the clause.

Regina Romero, who sits on the city council and convened the meeting, said the clear fear was that police would be drawn into racial profiling. "We live 45 minutes from the Mexican border, so who else other than Mexicans are you going to be picking up? You are not going to be looking for Canadians in this part of the country," she said.

Alessandra Soler, head of the ACLU in Arizona, said that there was already evidence that Tucson police were making contact inappropriately with US border patrol officers even for such mundane issues as help with translation.

"It's extremely problematic when you have local police contacting border patrol when there is no good reason."

The ACLU and other groups have an outstanding civil rights action against SB 1070 still lodged with the state's appeal court. That legal attempt to put a stop to "show me your papers" will continue to pass through the courts, and the intention of opponents of the provision is to beef it up with real examples of racial profiling.

Lydia Guzman, director of the hotline, said the aim now was to chronicle the impact of the law. "The supreme court has given us the green light to present to the courts victims of racial profiling, so that's our challenge: show me the victims."

The gender gap

Polls show women could be a crucial issue for the Democrats, with Romney lagging 20 points behind Obama with women voters, writes Karen McVeigh

Democrats tend to do better among women voters than Republicans, but even allowing for historical precedent, Romney is performing terribly with a demographic group whose votes can be decisive in swing states.

The latest polls suggest that the gender gap this year could hit historic levels, with Romney trailing Obama by some 20 points among women nationally, and even more in some key battlegrounds.

There are many policy related reasons behind the antipathy towards the Republicans among female voters. Women are more likely consider healthcare and social issues as important to their voting choice.

But Romney has said that if elected he will repeal Obama's Affordable Healthcare Act, and social issues have persistently intruded on his campaign's attempts to focus on the economy.

One of the defining Democrat attacks on the Republican candidate and his party has been over its "war on women", for policies on equal pay, domestic abuse, abortion and contraception.

The drive by Republican lawmakers to cut funding for Planned Parenthood, the nation's largest provider of cancer screening to women with low incomes, has alienated some female voters, as have attempts to restrict access to abortion.

Romney has flipped his position on abortion, running as pro-choice in Massachusetts, before changing it to anti-choice when running for presidency in 2008.

By picking Paul Ryan, one of the most staunch anti-abortion conservatives as running mate, Romney has alienated moderates. That tension was further exposed in August amid the furore over the "legitimate rape" comments of Senate candidate Todd Akin.

Campaign finance

Court rulings have given corporations and the super-rich a greater role in the elections than ever, writes Ed Pilkington

Super Pacs sound like a new child's toy. In fact, these new entities, arising from two court rulings, form the single most important innovation of the 2012 election cycle and are pumping a torrent of private and corporate money into the race.

Formed in the wake of two controversial court rulings in 2010, Citizens United v FEC and Speechnow.org v FEC, Super Pacs – based on the traditional political action committees but able to engage in unlimited political spending outside campaigns – allow corporations, for the first time in more than 40 years, to use their financial muscle to influence an election.

Super Pacs cannot directly fund candidates but they can support them with their own message.

Collectively, Super Pacs have already spent $270m this year. The Republicans have the edge on spending, with billionaire donors such as Sheldon Adelson and Bob Perry wading in with tens of millions of dollars. The Republican Super Pac effort is being closely co-ordinated by George Bush's former svengali, Karl Rove.

Obama has a Super Pac that supports his candidacy, Priorities USA, but it has raised $43m to the $97m raised by Restore Our Future, the Super Pac which backs Romney.