The big question in this presidential election has been which candidate – President Barack Obama or challenger Mitt Romney – can do the best job fixing the ailing national economy.

But new research suggests that nearly half of all Americans think neither candidate will have much effect on their personal financial situation.

The new survey, released Monday by Bankrate.com, finds that 45 percent of adults nationwide don’t think the choice of president will make much of a difference to their finances.

Another 29 percent said they thought their personal situation would be better under Obama, while 20 percent said their personal situation would be better if Romney wins the election.

The survey of about 1,000 people, which was conducted Oct. 4-7 and has a margin of error of 3.7 percent, shows a significant shift in favor of Obama since June.

Back then a similar Bankrate poll found respondents were equally split, at 21 percent, on whether they’d be better off financially with Obama or Romney. In the June poll, slightly more people also said it didn’t matter much to their personal finances who won.

The pessimism about the ability of the president to affect one’s personal finances is surprising, said Erik Snowberg, professor of economics and political science at the California Institute of Technology.

“I’m surprised because they’re right,” said Snowberg, who has done extensive research on people’s perceptions of the economy and their voting habits.

He said research has shown that the president’s party affiliation has a minimal effect on the stock market, a key vehicle for improving financial measures like retirement savings. Politics also don’t seem to make a huge difference in moving the unemployment rate, he added.

Still, the Bankrate poll did show a contradiction: Despite their skepticism about whether the president can help them personally, more than six in 10 people said their personal economic situation is a key factor in their voting decision.

Claes Bell, a senior analyst for Bankrate.com, said he thinks there is widespread pessimism about whether anything will help after five years of difficult economic times.

“I think people are maybe feeling a little bit discouraged at this point and wondering whether either candidate has a policy prescription that’s going to work, or even if a policy prescription can do anything at all to improve the financial position of the average American,” he said.

Those who said they were doing better financially than a year ago were more likely to say they’d do better under Obama. Those who reported being worse off financially than a year ago were more likely to say they’d do better under Romney.

“You’re seeing the effects of people’s own personal financial outcomes influencing their vote,” Bell said.

Snowberg, the Caltech professor, said that when pollsters ask about economic issues like this so close to the election, people’s more general feelings about the candidates tend to come through.

“They know that what you’re actually asking them is a political question and so they answer them as if you’re asking them, ‘Do you like Obama or Romney better?’” he said.

Snowberg doubted that last Friday’s unemployment report, which showed a substantial drop in the unemployment rate to under 8 percent, is having a big impact on people’s feelings.

His research has shown that people tend to judge the employment situation based on their own experience, rather than more general data. For example, they tend to think the unemployment is higher if they are unemployed themselves, or if they are in a group, such as low-skilled workers, that has more trouble finding work.

“Really what matters for people is how they perceive the economy is going,” he said.

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The U.S. economy generated a paltry 80,000 jobs in June, showing that the nation's job-creation machine is stumbling even as voters' attitudes about the economy begin to gel ahead of the November election.

The unemployment rate is unchanged at 8.2 percent, the Labor Department reported Friday.

Job-creation has stumbled since March amid worries about consumer spending, the debt crisis in Europe and stagnation in Congress.

"There's just not a lot of momentum in the economy," said Sam Bullard, an economist at Wells Fargo  in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Mitt Romney, the Republican challenger to President Barack Obama, is focusing his campaign on the weak jobs market that has dogged the presidency.

"The president's policies have not gotten America working again and the president is going to have to stand up and take responsibility for it," Romney said at a news conference in New Hampshire after the jobs report was released.

Later, at a campaign stop in Poland, Ohio, Obama told the crowd in the crucial swing state that while private sector job creation was headed in the right direction, more needed to be done to help the economy grow faster and create more jobs.

"I want to get back to a time when middle class families and those working to get to the middle class have some basic security. That's our goal," he said.

Related story: Just four more jobs reports until the election

The details of the report were unsettling. The government said the economy created 1,000 fewer jobs during April and May than previously estimated.

The somber report might push the Federal Reserve closer to taking new actions to lower borrowing costs to encourage companies to increase hiring. Analysts polled by Reuters expected an increase in payrolls of 90,000 jobs.

Slideshow: Bad jobs reports

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Debt woes have bogged down much of Europe, sending some countries into recession. The eurozone crisis in turn has dulled economic growth around the world from China to Brazil. A survey on Monday found U.S. manufacturing contracted for the first time in nearly three years in June.

Europe is not the only worry weighing on the U.S. outlook. Washington plans enough belt-tightening at the start of 2013 to easily send the economy into recession. Cautious observers wonder if lawmakers can avoid this "fiscal cliff."

"Firms are saying, 'Is there really a reason to ramp up hiring right now?'," said Bullard.

Job creation averaged 75,000 per month during the second quarter, compared with an average increase of 226,000 in the first quarter. Part of the slowdown could be because mild weather led companies to boost hiring in the winter at spring's expense.

But recent weakness in everything from retail sales to business sentiment suggests something more fundamental is at play.

"We're not expecting things to take off in the second half of the year," said Sara Klein, an economist at Moody's Analytics in West Chester, Pennsylvania. "Weather wasn't the only factor." 

Until recently, the United States had been a relative bright spot in the global economy, especially in manufacturing. Most economists still expect lackluster growth over the rest of 2012 rather than a slip toward recession.

But economic weakness abroad has lately become a formidable hurdle, as Obama has acknowledged, and global policymakers are acting like a storm is brewing.

China, the European Central Bank and the Bank of England all eased monetary policy on Thursday, raising speculation they had coordinated their action.

The Fed eased policy further last month, but the recent run of weak data has fueled speculation the U.S. central bank could deliver more stimulus when its next meeting concludes on Aug. 1.

Even though June's pace of hiring was decidedly weak, the Fed might not want to unveil bold new measures now because the real storm could be months down the road.

"Hiring isn't as strong as earlier this year ... but not to the point where you see obvious need for Fed action," said Cooper Howes, an economist at Barclays in New York.

Reuters contributed to this report.

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Republican Scott Walker will remain governor of Wisconsin after winning a fiercely-contested recall by a wider margin than expected, prompting GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney to declare that the results "will echo beyond the borders of Wisconsin." NBC's Peter Alexander reports.

Organized labor is staring down the prospect of a bitter disappointment in Wisconsin on Tuesday, where union members are working furiously to unseat Republican Gov. Scott Walker and replace him with a Democratic challenger. NBC's Peter Alexander reports. 

The conventional wisdom among many political pundits is that President Barack Obama faces an uphill re-election battle in large part because unemployment seems stuck at historically high levels. Economists who have studied the impact of the job market on past elections beg to disagree.

It’s true that no president since Franklin Roosevelt has been elected when the unemployment rate was over 7.2 percent. That was where the jobless rate stood in 1984, when Ronald Reagan won a second term, beating Walter Mondale in a landslide, with 59 percent of the popular vote.

The jobless rate stood at 7.4 percent when George H.W. Bush lost his 1992 re-election bid against challenger Bill Clinton; it was at 7.5 percent in November 1980, when Jimmy Carter lost his job to Reagan.

If that were the only statistic that mattered, Obama indeed would have his work cut out for him.

Though the job market began gradually improving in the second half of last year, employment growth remains sluggish. The jobless rate dropped by a sharp 0.5 percentage point in the last three months of 2011 but currently stands at 8.5 percent and is expected to show little or no improvement when the government reports updated January data on Friday. Some forecasters caution the rate might even rise again this year as “discouraged” workers, who are not included in the official "headline" rate, begin looking for work again and raise the count of those considered unemployed.

But a high unemployment rate, by itself, isn’t necessarily a problem for an incumbent president, according to Ray Fair, a Yale University economist who has analyzed the impact of the economy on presidential elections back to 1916.

“What the data show is that it’s the change in the economy, primarily in the year of the election, that matters — not the level,” he said.

So far, the trend is moving in the right direction. But it could easily be derailed by this fall.

Fair’s current forecasts show a very close race. But his models show that Obama still stands a good chance of re-election even with a relatively modest drop in the unemployment rate by November.

“When they go to the booth, voters would see this as a positive sign: Obama’s got the economy growing again,” said Fair. "Even though the unemployment rate is higher than full employment, the trend is good and things are improving.”

Reagan’s 1984 re-election is a good example of that scenario: at 7.2 percent in November, the jobless rate was down more than a full percentage point from a year earlier as the economy continued to shake off the lingering impact of the 1980-1982 recession that sent the jobless rate soaring to 10.8 percent.

To capitalize on the high level of unemployment, GOP presidential hopefuls have hammered Obama's economic record, blaming a variety of White House policies for the weak job market. Front-runner Mitt Romney has tried to make the case that, if elected, the former Massachusetts Republican and Bain Capital president would apply his business experience to do a better job putting Americans back to work.

But for all the money spent on political advertising, the airtime devoted to debates and the miles logged in campaign jets and busses, the GOP attacks and Romney’s 162-page policy proposal may not mean much, say some analysts.

The correlation between economics and presidential elections is so strong, they say, that most of the attention on wider issues and policy differences -- from fiscal matters like taxes and the deficit, to social issues like income inequality and immigration -- have very little impact on voters’ final decision.

“Political scientists don’t tend to think the specifics of the challengers platform matter all that much,” said Brendan Nyhan, a government Professor at Dartmouth College. “Incumbent re-elections are primarily a referendum on the incumbent and specifically on their economic record. If the economy is strong, the challenger may try to shift onto some other issue, but that rarely works.”

Even as the economy continues to muddle through at a relatively weak growth pace, Obama may also be in a position to play a few important cards not available to his Republican challenger.

Incumbents have long used the power of the White House to enact programs and policies that help give the economy a jolt in the months before voters go the polls. Richard Nixon famously pressured then-Federal Reserve Board chairman Arthur Burns to cut interest rates to help spur the economy in the months ahead of his successful 1972 re-election despite widespread opposition to his administration’s Vietnam War policies.  

That’s increased the stakes in the ongoing debate over extending payroll tax cuts and long-term unemployment insurance. Both measures, if enacted, would improve American households' spending power and improve their sense of personal financial well-being. If Republican’s succeed in block or paring down those measures, the impact on consumer spending could create a further drag on the economy just in time for the campaign’s home stretch this fall.

Those two pocketbook helpers, though, may be Obama’s last chance to give the economy the momentum he’ll need to fend off voters’ money malaise, according to Mark Zandi, an economist with Moody’s Analytics and former advisor to 2008 GOP presidential hopeful John McCain.

“It’s going to be difficult to pass any legislation at this point in time for it to flow through to the economy,” he said. “It takes time -- not weeks, but the next quarter or two. So time is running out to make a difference.”

President Barack Obama's claim that his economic policies are helping put Americans back to work got a shot in the arm Friday when government data showed the nation's jobless rate dropped to the lowest level in three years.

"We have made real progress," Obama said Friday after the latest employment report was released. "Now is not the time to stop." 

The government reported Friday that the job market expanded at a healthy clip in December, pushing the unemployment rate to 8.5 percent. The news followed a series of reports pointing to a broad pick-up in economic growth.

Private employers added 200,000 workers last month, the Labor Department said. It was the biggest gain in three months and a much stronger showing that the 150,000 gain economists had expected. November's jobless rate was revised up a notch to 8.7 percent, easing widespread concerns that the sharp drop from October was a one-month fluke.

With the presidential campaign gaining momentum, the data gave the White House a welcome reprieve from the grim economic data that has dogged his presidency. What Obama needs going into the election cycle is for the good news on the job front to continue or even accelerate.

"When we took over the administration, we were losing 800,000 jobs, hemorrhaging jobs, with major losses just short of a depression," said Labor Secretary Hilda Solis. "Now we see a better trajectory where we're moving in the right direction. I believe the public is supportive of the kinds of solutions that the president is talking about, but we need to do more."

Republicans wasted no time downplaying the impact of the president's economic policies.

"I can't give Washington, either Congress or the administration, any credit whatsoever," said Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn. "We just have not done things that need to be done. This (improvement is coming from) the private sector and its resiliency, in spite of the fact we've had very bad behavior out of Washington."

Vote: Do you see signs of improvement in the labor market?

It's also far from clear that the improvement in the employment data will continue for the next 10 months. Most economic forecasters see economic growth slowing in 2012. The outlook is clouded by the ongoing debt crisis in Europe, which is expected to slip into recession even if a wider financial disaster can be averted. 

The decline in the headline jobless rate could stall even if the U.S. economy continues to heal. The rate has fallen partly as a result of a decline in the official size of the workforce. If so-called "discouraged" jobless workers see better odds of getting hired, begin looking again and then get counted as having re-entered the workforce, the decline in the unemployment rate could slow or reverse course.  

If that happens, Friday's upbeat news could be long forgotten by election day.

"If I were sitting in the White House, I would look for the unemployment rate to bump up a little bit now rather than the spring or summer if people are coming back into the labor force," said Matt McDonald, a Republican economic strategist.

The Obama administration used the upbeat report to prod Congress to continue policies that include extending last year's payroll tax cut and long-term unemployment insurance benefits. After deadlocking for weeks, Congress agreed in December to continue those policies for only two months.

"It is critical that we continue the economic policies that are helping us to dig our way out of the deep hole that was caused by the recession that began at the end of 2007," said White House Chief Econmist Alan Krueger.

Republican opponents argue that the cost of those policies, and the impact on the federal budget deficit, outweigh any stimulus that increased spending gives the economy. Even Obama supporters note that there's not much more the White House can do to boost growth and create jobs.

"I searched all around in the basement," said Austan Goolsbee, Obama's former chief economist. "There's not a big lever down there you can flip and get everything going."

Though the jobs numbers are moving in the right direction, most voters think the country is on the wrong track, according to the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, conducted in early December. Only 22 percent believe the county is headed in the right direction; some 69 percent told pollsters the U.S. is headed in the wrong direction.

"People are still feeling like labor market is hurting and they're right," said Stanford economist Ed Lazear, who served as chief economist for George W. Bush. "Even if things are getting better, when you're at 8.5 percent unemployment, this a very different labor market than we saw in 2007 when the unemployment rate was 4.4 percent. So it's no surprise that people still feel like the labor market is struggling even if the moves are in the right direction."

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