Views of an uneasy economy and those living through it

Here was Chas Kaufmann's life before the Great Recession: $28,000 in restaurant tabs in a year, cruises, house parties with fireworks. His Mr. Gutter business was booming in the Poconos.

Now: "We mainly shop at Sam's Club and portion out our meals. We spend $4 to $5 a night on eating." He and his wife use space heaters in their elegant house and leave parts of it cold. The Hummer is gone; he drives a 2005 pickup. Tuesday, Kaufman said, he's voting for Mitt Romney.

Lower down the economic ladder, the recession put Simone Ludlow's life in a full circle. Laid off by an Atlanta hotel company in 2009, Ludlow, 32, bounced from job to job for two years, got by with a "very generous mother," still makes do by renting a room in a house owned by friends, and is back working for the company that had let her go.

Tuesday, she said, she's voting for President Obama.

For four years, the economy cut an uneasy path, knocked liberals and conservatives on their backs, plagued Republicans and Democrats. It was the worst setback since the Depression, and it didn't take sides.

The Associated Press asked people across the country to talk about their livelihoods before and after the December 2007-June 2009 recession. Their stories bridge the partisan divide, and suggest that many think neither candidate can work miracles.

"Our potential doesn't rely on an election and one man, or even a ballot," said Ben McCoy, 35, of Wilmington, N.C., creative director for 101 Mobility, a company that sells, installs, and services handicapped-access equipment. "I don't think either candidate for president has the conviction to go as far as we need to go to really get back to stability."

Economic well-being, for him, will come from personal decisions by his wife and himself, not Washington.

"We will roll up our sleeves and cut the family budget down to the core if we have to, where we know we're going to eat and we know the lights are going to stay on, and that's it. We'll do it. We won't laugh and dance about it, but we'll do it."

Around Charlotte, N.C., the recession played a cruel trick on Obama supporter Tamala Harris, wrecking the housing market just after she quit a job to go into real estate. It drove Romney supporter Ray Arvin out of business selling industrial equipment from North Carolina and cleaned out his retirement savings with not that many years left to start from scratch. Both have more hope than you might think.

Harris, 38, is back in Charlotte after getting her master's degree in business from the University of Rochester. She used loans and scholarships to advance her education and looks back on it all as a time that made her dig deep.

"It made me realize what was important. It's just not the material things and having things to improve your status," she said. "It was a wonderful time to realize when you don't have certain things, money is not coming or houses are not selling, who's really in your corner."

Arvin, 47, too, is starting over.

In 2001, he and his wife bought a small company that sold equipment to power utilities and the aviation industry. Business hummed until 2007, when five big customers filed for bankruptcy and the couple raided their retirement and savings accounts to keep the enterprise afloat. It sank in 2009.

Now, he travels five states as sales representative for a business supplying equipment to electric and gas companies, bringing home $50,000 to $60,000 after taxes and travel expenses.

"Am I doing better? Yes. But I've lost so much. I'm starting new. I'm confident in my ability to work hard and do well with what I do."

Gutter businessman Kaufmann, of Kunkletown, Pa., saw the recession coming - especially when he started noticing that nearly all his customers' checks were drawn on home-equity credit lines.

"How long do you think this is going to last?" he recalled asking his wife. "I said, 'I just did a homeowner, the wife lost her job, and without her job, he can't afford the mortgage.' That's when we started buckling down. I said, 'You know what? It's time.'

"What happened is, the banks overextended all these people. People were buying clothes, putting in in-ground pools, putting gutters up where they didn't need to be replaced. . . . You ride by those houses now, and they either have three feet of grass or the windows are boarded up."