Accountants and the 2024 election

April 15, 2024 2:33 PM

With tax season officially closed, accountants can now look forward to the second-most important part of 2024: election season.

Both of the main political parties have more or less settled on their candidates — the same two who faced off in 2020, Donald Trump and Joe Biden — and both men's camps have already begun laying out their positions and their priorities, including around taxes. There's still a long way to go until November, however, and we can expect much more detail to emerge over the next several months.

At this stage in the campaign, accountants' preferences in the presidential race are fairly evenly split (much as they were in 2020), though overall the profession generally leans Republican in its political preferences.

One thing that unites accountants — and much of the rest of the country — is a general sense of dissatisfaction with the current state of our political system.

(For more details, see our feature story on accountants' concerns for election year.)

As noted above, things are pretty much neck and neck when it comes to accountants with declared preferences in the presidential race — but almost a third of those polled are still up in the air, split evenly between those who prefer not to answer and those who are undecided.

With the 30% of undeclared and undecided accountants still up for grabs, it's hard to predict how much 2024 will look like the final result of 2020, when the profession split more or less evenly between Trump and Biden.

Regardless of their individual choice for this year's specific presidential candidates, the profession shows a marked preference for Republican leadership in the Oval Office and Congress.

As far as their firms' interests are concerned, accountants want Congress and the next administration to focus on the economy, the national debt and tax reform; this aligns mostly with their personal opinions of what's important, except they rate immigration much more highly as an issue from a personal perspective than from a business perspective (52% versus 35%).

Like much of the country — and regardless of their party preferences — accountants are highly dissatisfied with the country's current political climate.

That overall dissatisfaction is no doubt informed by how many accountants are concerned about the integrity of the 2024 election — with two-fifths (42%) of the respondents saying they are "not very" or "not at all" confident in that integrity — though here again opinions are split, with a quarter saying they are "somewhat confident," and almost a third (32%) reporting they are either "very" or "extremely" confident.