Brendan Nyhan

Props to David Carr for this mocking attribution of a silly blind quote from a representative of Sarah Palin about her new TV show:

“It’s not the kind of thing that’s going to excite you guys on the East Coast, but everyone else is dying to hear stories like these,” said one of her representatives who was not authorized to speak on the record but was authorized to slam the East Coast.

Back in October, I noted that the GOP’s brand (as measured by its favorable/unfavorable ratings) was in much worse shape than any opposition party at that stage in the previous four midterm election cycles. That stigma, I suggested, might limit Republican gains in the November midterm elections relative to a 1994-style scenario.

Things have changed, however. In a column for Roll Call, Stuart Rothenberg flags a new NBC/WSJ poll (PDF) suggesting that the Democratic brand has lost most of its advantage relative to the GOP.

Unfortunately for Democrats, their own brand has fallen like a rock.

In April, almost a year ago, the Hart/McInturff poll found 45 percent of Americans with a positive view of the Democratic Party and 34 percent with a negative view. In the most recent Hart/McInturff survey, the Democratic Party’s positives have sunk to 37 percent and its negatives have risen to 43 percent. Yes, those numbers are slightly better than the GOP’s (31 percent positive/43 percent negative), but not enough to help Democrats in the fall.

Here’s how the net positive numbers (% positive-% negative) for Democrats and Republicans have changed over the course of Obama’s presidency:

Perceptions of the GOP have only improved a bit, but the negative press and opposition party criticism faced by Democrats have apparently taken their toll. Since my original post in October, the difference in net positive numbers between the parties has closed from 27 points to 6 — a decline that coincides with the most intense stage of the health care reform debate.

As a result of this change, the difference between the major party brands no longer appears to be unusual for this stage in the midterm election cycle (polls in the chart were the closest available):

I interpret this shift as reflecting the underlying fundamentals of the election cycle, which favors the GOP (a Republican takeover of the House is a realistic possibility). The question now is whether the Republicans will continue to gain ground. In 1994, the GOP opened up a major lead in perceptions of the party relative to Democrats between June and October:

I still don’t expect a 1994-style landslide in November, but it seems clear that the Democratic valence advantage that might have helped prevent such an outcome has evaporated.

Update 4/1 2:56 PM: This graphic from USA Today is especially ominous for Democrats’ chances:

[Cross-posted to Pollster.com]

A week ago, I pointed out the political difficulties that repealing health care reform would pose for the GOP. Looks like they’re starting to catch on:

Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC): “It may not be total repeal at the end of the day. It may be a series of fixes over the course of this bill getting enacted that allow us to change and possibly bend that cost curve down.”

Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN): “The fact is [repeal is] not going to happen, OK?”

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), the National Republican Senatorial Committee chair, said something similar before backing away under pressure. And Mark Kirk, a Republican Senate candidate in Illinois, is backing away from his initial support for repeal.

It’s only a matter of time before more Republicans concede the point — the political costs of full repeal are insurmountable.

Update 4/2 8:21 AM: See TPM’s Christina Bellantoni for more details on what she calls the “repeal back-down.”

The Brookings Institution’s Jonathan Rauch argues in favor of divided government, which he argues will force the parties toward the center (via Brad DeLong):

The most important political change of the past half century is the Democrats’ and Republicans’ transformation from loose ideological coalitions to sharply distinct parties of the left and right. In Washington, the parties are now too far apart ideologically for either to count on winning support from the other side.

However, the country’s biggest problems are too large for one party to handle, at least in any consistent way. The Democrats did pass health reform on a party-line basis, a remarkable accomplishment, but they did it by the skin of their teeth and with a Senate supermajority which has evaporated. That is not a trick they can keep performing.

Under those conditions, the only way to achieve sustainable bipartisanship is to divide control of the government, forcing the parties to negotiate in order to get anything done. That pulls policy toward the center, which encourages reasonableness.

This is an argument I expect to hear a lot from centrist pundits in the coming months, but it’s highly oversimplified.

Imagine that Republicans take back control of the House in November. It is true that this arrangement would force more compromise on must-pass budget and appropriations bills. However, many of the “remaining challenges” that Rauch describes as “daunting” — “the economy (especially employment); financial reform; energy and the environment; above all, an impending fiscal train wreck” — are likely to be more, not less, difficult to address with a Republican House.

Here’s why. Under the gridlock zone model of Congress, legislative action on any issue is currently impossible when the status quo lies between the filibuster pivot in the Senate (i.e. the 41st most conservative senator) and the veto pivot (the most liberal Democrat whose vote would be needed to override an Obama veto) — a filibuster blocks any move to the left, and an Obama veto blocks any move to the right. Here’s a figure illustrating the idea from Keith Krehbiel’s Pivotal Politics:

If the new median voter in the House or the new filibuster pivot in the Senate is more conservative than the current filibuster pivot, then the “gridlock zone” expands to the right, blocking action on more issues even if those proposals would move the policy status quo toward the center. The relevant change in policy is likely to be more gridlock, not more policy compromise on important issues.

Rauch also advances the silly claim that Obama would benefit politically from divided government:

In the face of those challenges, here is a two-word prescription for a successful Obama presidency: Speaker Boehner.

…To regard the prospect of a House turnover this fall as a calamity for Democrats is understandable but short-sighted. Speaker Gingrich made it possible for Bill Clinton to leave office with glowing approval ratings by allowing him to govern from the center of the country, instead of the center of his party. Speaker Boehner would do the same for Barack Obama.

But I’ve argued, it wasn’t Newt Gingrich who “made it possible for Bill Clinton to leave office with glowing approval ratings”; it was the booming economy. Clinton’s move toward the center after 1994 may have helped increase his 1996 vote totals and approval ratings, but the long economic expansion that took place during his time in office was the driving force behind his political success.

Likewise, while Obama might realize some benefit from moving toward the center, divided government isn’t necessary for such a move, and it would drastically limit his ability to enact his policy agenda in Congress. It’s hard to see how a GOP takeover of the House or Senate would be a net win for the President.

[Update: Added last paragraph for clarity.]

This passage from the New York Times report on yesterday’s Crist-Rubio debate is a case study in why I avoid debate commentary:

[Crist] looked most frustrated, frowning noticeably and complaining, when the Fox News moderator, Chris Wallace, cut him off from talking about his mixed record on taxes. Mr. Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, looked most flummoxed on the issue of immigration, when Mr. Wallace said he had taken a tougher line as a Senate candidate than as speaker of the Florida House.

Nothing says hard news like interpretations of facial expressions!

From my Twitter feed:

–The most cynical editorial of all time?
-As James Taranto points out, ABC News distorted Sarah Palin’s “crosshairs” graphic by suggesting she put Dems’ pictures inside
-Orrin Hatch is a giant hack — he and other leading Republicans previously supported an individual mandate for health insurance
-Gallup finds no Obama approval from health care reform, contradicting Bill Clinton’s prediction of a ten-point increase
-Marc Thiessen is the Betsy McCaughey of torture apologists
-The fantasy of a third party president is back — too bad it’ll never happen
–Yet more GOP incoherence on health care reform repeal, which is still likely to fail

Paul Waldman responds to my op-ed on Tapped:

Near the end of the piece, Nyhan says, “Even after the insurance expansion is complete, it’s not clear that direct contact will correct the public’s mistaken beliefs — remember the town hall participant who told a Republican congressman last summer to “keep your government hands off my Medicare?” This is a valid argument – but only to a point. Let’s keep in mind that the subjects on which Nyhan has tested this effect are remote. The deficit may be a real thing, but to an individual it’s an abstract calculation. Saddam’s phantom weapons existed half a world away and we never saw them in the first place. So it can be easy to convince ourselves they were there all along, but were spirited away to Syria (the Hannity explanation.)

Health care, on the other hand, is something we actually experience. Nyhan correctly points out that many of the provisions of reform won’t take effect for years, but once they do, people will have direct, personal experience with them. It will be awfully hard to tell people that, for instance, the insurance exchanges represent an assault on their freedom if they’ve actually visited their state’s exchange and liked what they found. You can tell people that if a reform passes a government bureaucrat will be getting between them and their doctor, but it’s much harder to tell them that a government bureaucrat is currently getting between them and their doctor if things between them and their doctor seem to be going just fine.

There are certainly opinions that won’t be dented by the success of reform. But let’s think again about that senior citizen telling government to keep its hands off his Medicare. He may be more distrustful of government than progressives would like. But one thing you can say about him is this: he loves his Medicare. Republicans know that, which is why they pretend they favored Medicare all along. If the same ends up being true of the system this reform puts in place, then that will be more than enough to celebrate.

This sort of scenario is plausible post-2014, but it will take time (most people don’t interact with the health care system all that often). For instance, Pollster.com’s Mark Blumenthal (who is a friend and allows me to cross-post to his site) discusses the lag in public support for the Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit:

[I]n the immediate aftermath of passage in early 2004, the Kaiser Family Foundation found that seniors were mostly negative about the new law (17% rated it favorably, 55% unfavorably). Their impressions did not begin to turn for more than two years when seniors finally started receiving their drug benefits.

While, as Brendan notes,”the most far-reaching changes” of the new law ” won’t take effect until 2014,” there are narrower benefits that will begin this year, including a special insurance pool for those denied insurance due to pre-existing conditions, some insurance subsidies for small business, the closing of the Medicare Part D “donut hole” for seniors and a provision allowing young adults to remain on their parents’ insurance policies until age 26.

In short, it took two years for public opinion to improve for a benefit that was essentially free — though selecting plans was confusing for many, seniors received a major new benefit without accompanying tax increases, etc. The post-2014 reforms will include relatively more pain (mandates, tax increases, plan changes) and relatively less gain (especially for higher-income Americans), so I’d expect any subsequent increase in public support to take longer than Part D.

Also, it’s worth remembering that the onset of the mandate will generate lots of ill will that will probably prime people to find reasons to dislike the system. Blumenthal notes that many Americans hear horror stories about health care via their social networks, but they’re also likely to hear negative anecdotes about reform in the same way.

Ultimately, I do think the reforms will survive efforts to repeal them and become relatively popular, but it will probably take years.

Via my friend Ben Fritz, a Los Angeles Times reporter tries and fails to convince a protestor that health care reform has no public option:

Outside the fieldhouse, Mike Moehlenhof, a 24-year-old college student majoring in accounting, carried a “tea party” sign. Asked about the new law, he said he was displeased that it contains a “public option.” Told that it does not, he said he wasn’t convinced.

“It’s a major expenditure that for me as a young man, I’ll have to pay for for the rest of my life,” Moehlenhof said.

Someone else I know just overheard a similar conversation in which two conservatives complained that everyone was going to be forced onto the public option by health care reform. Pollsters: Can someone do a poll on how much of the public thinks the public option was in the final bill?

(For more on how and why this happens, see my op-ed or my article on the difficulty of correcting misperceptions.)

From my Twitter feed:
-NYT’s Tom Friedman suggests redistricting reform will reduce polarization but the evidence isn’t clear
-NYT op-ed claims primary reform is a “fix” for polarization but political science research finds modest effects
-Contrary to online speculation, Gallup finds no Obama approval bump from health care reform
-Gallup poll allegedly showing a “turnaround” in opinion on health care reform had never been asked before (so there’s no direct comparison) and was only in the field for one day
-Health care reform vote breakdowns by presidential vote share and rural population in their district
–Dan Gillmor: “WashPost’s Kurtz thinks he’s defending recent health care journalism, but this is actually an indictment”

I have an op-ed in the New York Times today on myths about health care reform — here’s how it begins:

At the White House signing ceremony for health care legislation on Tuesday, President Obama declared, “In a few moments, when I sign this bill, all of the overheated rhetoric over reform will finally confront the reality of reform.” For Democrats nervous about political fallout from the bill in the November midterm elections, it’s reassuring to imagine that the myths about the legislation — that it provides free coverage to illegal immigrants, uses taxpayer money to subsidize abortions and mandates end-of-life counseling for the elderly — will be dispelled by its passage.

But public knowledge of the plan’s contents may not improve as quickly as Democrats hope. While some of the more outlandish rumors may dissipate, it is likely that misperceptions will linger for years, hindering substantive debate over the merits of the country’s new health care system. The reasons are rooted in human psychology.

The piece discusses a forthcoming article in Political Behavior on correcting misperceptions that I co-authored with Jason Reifler — here’s the abstract:

An extensive literature addresses citizen ignorance, but very little research focuses on misperceptions. Can these false or unsubstantiated beliefs about politics be corrected? Previous studies have not tested the efficacy of corrections in a realistic format. We conducted four experiments in which subjects read mock news articles that included either a misleading claim from a politician, or a misleading claim and a correction. Results indicate that corrections frequently fail to reduce misperceptions among the targeted ideological group. We also document several instances of a “backfire effect” in which corrections actually increase misperceptions among the group in question.

Update 3/25 10:38 AM: Per PM’s comment below, here’s President Obama expressing the claim referenced in the op-ed that personal experience will change people’s perceptions of reform:

And now that this legislation is passed, you don’t have to take my word for it. You’ll be able to see it in your own lives. I heard one of the Republican leaders say this was going to be Armageddon. Well, two months from now, six months from now, you can check it out. We’ll look around –- (laughter) — and we’ll see. (Applause.) You don’t have to take my word for it. (Applause.)

Update 3/26 3:12 PM: My friend Chris Mooney comments on his blog:

Nyhan goes on to talk about how we ideologically filter information to support our political presuppositions–e.g., conservatives will hold on to lies about “death panels” long after the bill’s passage.

It’s a great piece, but it is missing, I think, an important angle. I believe the Internet makes this problem of misinformation and ideological filtering a lot, a lot worse. I wonder what Nyhan would say to that.

I agree completely — increased media choice allows people to more easily avoid information they don’t want to hear. There wasn’t room to discuss it in the op-ed, but I have a longer academic piece coming out soon that discusses this issue in somewhat more detail.

[Note: I’ve removed an update responding to Paul Waldmann and posted it separately above.]