Obama honeymoon watch V

Back in December, I predicted that Barack Obama's approval ratings could go as high as the low 70s by his inauguration. He didn't quite get there, but his approval is in the low- to mid-60s after a week in office.

These are still striking numbers. For instance, Obama's initial Gallup approval rating of 68 percent is the highest of any president since Kennedy, as Nate Silver's graph illustrates:

With that said, however, Silver's argument that "it is hard to mount a credible argument that Reagan began his term with more political capital than Obama" is bizarre.

Unlike Obama, Reagan unseated a first-term incumbent. He also received more electoral votes and a greater share of the two-party presidential vote than Obama did. The fact that Obama "won a lot more popular votes than Reagan did" and "his margin of victory was larger than Reagan's in absolute (rather than percentage) terms" is an irrelevant consequence of population growth. (By Silver's logic, almost any contemporary election would be considered more decisive than, say, Andrew Jackson's 1832 landslide because of the larger absolute margin in the popular vote.)

Even more importantly, 1980 is one of the three previous contemporary elections that was widely perceived as a mandate election in Washington (along with 1964 and 1994) -- a perception that caused Democrats to change their voting behavior in Congress in the election's aftermath. There's no perception of such a mandate this time around and Republicans are responding accordingly by opposing Obama's stimulus plan. In short, Obama may have a honeymoon in presidential approval, but he doesn't have a mandate.

Comments

[lowellfield]

You need to think hard about what picking a fight with Nate Silver over statistics is going to get you.

[Jinchi]

I think your argument - Obama doesn't have a mandate because Republicans don't act like he does - is a silly one. The electorate decides whether a mandate truly exists, not the opposition party.

Republicans are waging a P.R. battle against a popular president after having suffered huge losses in the last 2 elections. They're taking a (probably correct) gamble that forceful opposition is their best chance at keeping any political power. This is a strategic decision and has nothing to do with whether they believe Obama has any mandate.

If they've gambled wrongly, expect them to lose even more seats in 2010.

[David]

One reason Reagan had more of a mandate than Obama is that Reagan represented smaller government and a more belligerant military. These were positions he had long espoused. When he won, he had a good claim that the electorate had given him a mandate for those approaches.

By comparison, Obama had a left voting record, but ran as a moderate. He didn't campaign on increasing the size of government. His campaign didn't focus on adding $850 of deficit spending to an already record-breaking deficit in order to give pork to Democratic constutiencies.

Whether or not it's good politics for the Reps to oppose this so-called stimulus package, it's good government for them to do so.