Wednesday, October 30, 2024

Stressed about the election?

That anxiety has a cost.

If you're putting off a big purchase until after Election Day, you're hardly alone. Bloomberg Businessweek editor and writer Laura Bliss takes a look today at how anxiety about the outcome is affecting spending. Plus: One company that makes voting machines is confident its equipment is secure, and the Elon, Inc. podcast covers Musk's appearance at Donald Trump's New York rally. If this email was forwarded to you, click here to sign up.

Between the two assassination attempts, a last-minute candidate swap, whipsawing poll numbers and constant reminders of the stakes, the 2024 election season won't soon be forgotten—partly because it's been so stressful.

Some 69% of adults say the presidential campaign has been a significant source of stress in their lives, according to a recent report by the American Psychological Association based on a survey of a nationally representative sample of 3,305 people. That finding appears to be driven partly by the anxiety about the election's consequences: A majority of both Democrats and Republicans said they fear the election could mark the end of American democracy, and respondents from both parties reported roughly equal levels of stress about the future of the nation. More than 7 in 10 adults said they worried the results would bring violence.

It'll all be over but the counting after Election Day. Photographer: Anadolu

Stress and anxiety take a toll on the body, and to the extent that emotions affect how people work, spend money and save, they're economically significant as well. A recent Ipsos poll that surveyed about 1,000 US adults found that almost half say they're spending less (47%) and saving more (47%) because of uncertainty related to the election. Although history shows that macroeconomic spending levels are rarely affected by presidential races, news reports indicate that Americans are holding off on big-ticket items like houses and cars until after they know the results. (They could also be waiting on the Federal Reserve's next interest rate cut.)

Election stress can also affect productivity. In a 2022 study in Economics & Human Biology, Sankar Mukhopadhyay, an economics professor at the University of Nevada at Reno, used data from the Census Bureau's Household Pulse Survey to measure the mental health effects of the 2020 presidential race. Self-reported levels of anxiety and depression steadily rose as the election approached—surpassing even the peak anxiety recorded in the early days of the pandemic—and dropped afterward. "It was kind of surprising to see how big those effects were," he says.

Mukhopadhyay also found that mental health visits related to anxiety and depression, as well as prescription drug usage, followed a similar pattern. "How often you have to either see a doctor or take a prescription can reduce the amount of available time that you have for work," Mukhopadhyay says. These medications and visits aren't free, though he didn't try to add up the price as part of this study. Still, the increase in medical care "gives an idea about the real cost to the economy," he says.

Mukhopadhyay says he plans to conduct a similar analysis of the 2024 election, once the relevant Census Bureau data is completely available. But it shouldn't take an economist to suggest that you take any election anxiety seriously. The standard coping advice from psychologists is worth heeding: Stay connected with friends and family, keep your body active and, yes, take breaks from the news—especially before bedtime.

In Brief

  • Samsung's $122 billion wipeout shows the cost of sleeping on the AI boom.
  • Entry-level buyers have driven a co-op sales boom in New York City as mortgage rates fall from a peak reached this past May.
  • Customers spending big on plastic surgery are borrowing to pay their bills, and Wall Street is cashing in.

Voting Machine Makers Are Ready

Clear Ballot voting machines undergo a final inspection before they're shipped to counties across the US. Photographer: Philip Montgomery for Bloomberg Businessweek

Chip Trowbridge is confident his voting machines are secure, but he'll run the thought experiment with you. An assortment of the machines are resting on a counter at the downtown Boston office of Clear Ballot Group Inc., and Trowbridge, the company's chief technology officer, is facetiously pointing out the bonkers number of steps a bad actor would need to take to compromise one of its ClearCast computer scanners.

Any tampering would have to take place on-site, because the ClearCast systems aren't connected to the internet. Most arrive at county voting precincts in fastened containers or locked cages. "There's one 20-volt plug out the back, and that's it—no Wi-Fi, no Bluetooth, no Ethernet, no nothing," Trowbridge says. Republican and Democratic officials are supposed to set them up together by tearing security seals with identifying serial numbers and entering unique passwords after booting them up. Data is stored on three redundant drives, including two locked-in USB sticks, and any poll worker input on the devices (such as removing one of the sticks) is logged by the equivalent of an airplane's black box.

Then there's the paper trail. On Election Day, voters feed their handmarked ballots into the scanner, which is the size of a cash register and has a thick screen on top. It tabulates blackened ovals and captures a digital image of the entire slip for backup, then spits the ballot down into a bolted cabinet so it can be audited by hand if needed. The scanners are tested with sample votes beforehand, and often afterward, to ensure there are no discrepancies between digital counts and physical entries.

As Trowbridge entertains and ultimately shoots down increasingly absurd but-what-about-this scenarios, such as counterfeit ballots or malware-laced thumb drives, he stops short with a frank reminder: "We're already in crazy territory if any of this is happening."

Even as the voting system industry is besieged by conspiracy theories, the technology itself is extremely conservative. Austin Carr visits Clear Ballot to see just how slow, steady and paper-dependent the industry is: How US Voting Machines Became Safer Than Ever.

New From the Elon, Inc. Podcast

Photo illustration by 731. Photos: NASA (1), Getty Images (3)

This has been a huge week for Elon Musk: First, the Tesla stock rally, in reaction to a good earnings report, made him billions of dollars richer (at least on paper). Then, Musk continued his full-throated campaign for Donald Trump with a marquee appearance at Madison Square Garden, leading chants of "USA!" to adoring fans amid a rally that featured the most racially inflammatory language yet of the Republican's campaign. To discuss these developments, host David Papadopoulus is joined by Bloomberg reporter Esha Day, Bloomberg Businessweek senior writer Max Chafkin and Elon Musk reporter Dana Hull on the latest edition of Elon, Inc.

Listen and subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, iHeart and the Bloomberg Terminal.

Also, Bloomberg subscribers can listen now to the second episode of Citizen Elon, a miniseries within the podcast, about the how Musk came to embrace the "Trump trade."

Economic Report Card

2.8%
That's the robust rate at which the US economy expanded in the third quarter, as household purchases accelerated ahead of the election and the federal government ramped up defense spending.

Rain in Spain

"This is an unprecedented situation, nobody has seen anything like this."
Carlos Mazon
Valencia's regional president
Dozens of people died when eastern Spain was hit by one of the worst storms in decades on Tuesday night.

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