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One may decide to ask what the real incentive with which a person can be determined to vote for one presidential candidate or another is. Is it the U.S. foreign policy, including here the intervention in Iraq, is it national and individual security, or is it economic policy and welfare? According to the Stanford University Research Lab, there are two main issues that interest the U.S. citizen: terrorism-defense and economy. In this sense, it is easy to understand why former President Clinton has given John Kerry two major advices: "1. Focus on the economy. 2. Elections are about the future not the past."

It is no wonder this was coming from Bill Clinton since, in spite of the turmoil in his private life and some questions regarding his individual morality, he was successfully elected for two consecutive mandates simply because he carried the Americans through the most prosperous economic period in the history of the U.S., with an economic growth hardly to be matched in the following years.

As such, we may understand that one of the most important voting incentives relates to economic issues and to ways in which the president can promulgate and sustain policies by which he will be able to increase overall level of welfare for a large number of citizens. The role of the economy, from an electoral point-of-view and not only, is to best provide for its people. Indeed, we are expecting the coming president to represent the larger mass of citizens, people who will benefit from health care and educational policies, among others.

This does not need to be regarded as a populist approach, but rather from a marketing perspective. If we consider the marketing objective of satisfying the customers, then the citizens of the United States are the customers that need to be satisfied with the economic policies, governmental projects and spending. This can only be done if we include a large category of consumers/citizens into the reachable category.

We may acknowledge the fact that, from an economic perspective, we have two possible approaches. One would mean governmental intervention in the economy, to the extent to which it may correct the macroeconomic deficiencies that are due to appear in any economy. A simple example in this sense is the control of the interest rate. Indeed, the period of recession following the attacks on the 11th of September brought about an economic recession characterized by a lower economic growth, decreasing demand and individual spending, etc. In this sense, lowering the interest rates would have influenced the individuals to turn to investment instead of saving, giving the low rate return for bank deposits. The second approach lets macroeconomic deficiencies regulate through their own invisible hand mechanism.

However, there is also an additional way that the state and the government can play on the economic stage, through public and governmental spending and state-financed projects. This generally happens in areas of social concern, where it is believed that state intervention can best adjust income disparities and ensure that everybody has a fair chance.

Examples in this sense are public projects in health care, social security or education. The problem with such projects, and in general, with governmental spending, is that these projects tend to create rather large budget deficits, because of high costs, and this is one of the things that John Kerry is accusing George W. Bush of: a high budget deficit created during his presidency, a deficit which is deemed to bring more problems for the U.S. than the spending has done so far.

A democratically election will be an election where people vote for the person that most represents their interests. As we have seen previously, there are two primary causes for concern among the American public: individual security and individual prosperity, translated as the terrorist threat and economy. Both presidential candidates are relying on measures and policies in these two areas in order to win on their side the undecided part of the population.

Additionally, a democratic election is not only about Election Day, when everything is actually decided, but also about the economic programs that the candidates present in the presidential campaigns and public debates. So far, there have been three debate between John Kerry and George W. Bush and the split in ideological economic conceptions were quite clear. On one side, John Kerry criticized the present presidency for the tax cuts and costly governmental projects, which generated a large budget deficit. On the other hand, George W. Bush accused John Kerry of not having a true economic program and clear ideas about the next four years.

George W. Bush is likely to have imputed several policies which were adopted during his presidency that benefited a small minority of powerful businessmen, who, as a coincidence, were also some of the most important providers of funds for the President's current campaign. We may debate how these measures have impacted the overall American citizen, following the statement we have previously argued that the main goal of national economy is to bring prosperity to the citizens.

Perhaps the most important and the most debated was the tax cut policy. In general, tax cuts are efficient governmental measures that the state may approve in order to restart the economy in a period of stagnation or recession. So, in this sense, the period was optimal, as the U.S. had been encountering slow economic growth after 2001. However, there was the general sensation on behalf of the public that tax cuts were directed and benefited large industrialists, people who openly supported George W. Bush and who would later finance his campaign.

This was not entirely untrue. If we refer to another controversial issue, trade and trade restrictions, the U.S. is known for high level restrictions in the steel industry. This is correlated with the need to protect national producers from outside, perhaps cheaper, competition. Or these national producers were generally the large companies that also benefited from the tax cuts.