Obama's approval drop not surprising

If you follow politics for long enough, you may notice that coverage of presidential approval suffers from a bizarre ahistoricism. Reporters typically have almost no understanding of the forces that drive presidential approval or the patterns it tends to follow during the course of a president's time in office.

That's why it's amusing to see so many people acting like it's news that approval of President Obama's handling of health care and overall job performance numbers are trending downward (particularly among independents and Republicans). Of course his numbers are going down! It's been a virtual certainty that this transition would take place since the day Obama took office. The only question was when it would happen and how far down they would go.

The reason is simple. Presidential approval tends to decline after the honeymoon period as the opposition party begins to be more critical of the president. These messages remind opposition party members and sympathetic independents why they dislike the president. As a result, his approval numbers go down. This decline was likely to be especially significant in Obama's case because his initial Gallup approval levels were the highest for any president since JFK.*

The same reasoning applies to approval of Obama's handling of health care, which has also declined. At first, Obama benefitted from what the political scientist John Zaller calls a one-message environment in which Congressional Republicans offered platitudes about their desire to work with him on health care. However, as the legislative process has moved forward, the GOP and its allies in the press have begun to aggressively attack his approach to the issue. As such, Republicans and sympathetic independents in the electorate are now more likely to tell pollsters that they don't approve of Obama's handling of the issue.

The upside for Obama is that these numbers don't seem to indicate anything specific about the prospects for his health care plan. It would be surprising if the public didn't start to split along partisan lines at this point given the nature of the proposal. There isn't much information here that the two parties couldn't have anticipated (though it would be helpful to put the numbers in context -- how do Obama's health care approval numbers compare to, say, Clinton's in July 1993?)

The downside, however, is that Obama's plan to rally the public to support health care reform in the coming weeks is unlikely to change these numbers, as Mickey Kaus reminds us:

When was the last time a President's campaign style attempt to sell a policy has actually succeeded in selling the policy? I can't remember it. I can remember lots of flops (e.g.,Bush on Social Security). Traditional trips to non-Beltway places like Cleveland get heavily filtered by the media, for example. Prime time news conferences don't get huge ratings, right?

In general, political scientists have found that presidential efforts to change public opinion on domestic policy initiatives are rarely successful. The combination of the media filter and the offsetting effects of opposition messages tends to neutralize White House sales campaigns.

In a highly polarized era, opinion on the president and his policy proposals is likely to be, well, highly polarized. Again, there's not a lot of news here. The media should instead be focusing on the Senate, which is where the fate of health care legislation will be decided.

* In an article for National Journal, Mark Blumenthal attributes the timing of the decline to the state of the economy. He may be right -- there's no doubt that economic perceptions influence approval. But it's hard to isolate one factor as the cause of Obama's decline in approval with such a limited amount of data.

Update 7/21 12:34 PM: The other reason it shouldn't be surprising that Obama's numbers are declining is that the aggregate preference of the electorate for more or less government -- what the political scientist James Stimson calls public mood -- tends to move in the opposite direction of a dominant governing party. His current plot of mood data for 1952-2008 illustrates the point:

As such, we should expect the public to move in a conservative direction over the next few years.

Update 7/21 2:14 PM: More ahistoricism from Drudge, who is claiming it's a "danger sign" that Obama's approval levels are less than Carter's were at this point in his presidency:

In fact, however, Carter was quite popular in the first year of his presidency -- more popular, in fact, than George W. Bush pre-9/11. I'm pretty sure Drudge didn't see that as a "danger sign" for Bush at the time.

(PS From a graphical perspective, note also how Drudge's extremely narrow graphic exaggerates the negative slope of Obama's approval trajectory.)

Update 7/21 3:48 PM: For more on Obama's declining health care approval numbers, see this new post from Gallup, which finds that more people disapprove of Obama (50%) on the issue than approve (44%). By contrast, the Post poll linked above finds 49% approve of how Obama has handled health care and 44% disapprove.

Comments

[Rob]

What you say all makes sense, but it's interesting to compare this post with an older post analyzing the Bush approval rating. In 2005 you approached the declining approval rating as a consequence of the Administration's screw-ups and mistakes (your choice of words), and you heaped scorn on conservatives:

Meanwhile, conservatives are desperately trying to point fingers elsewhere. . . . Constantly finding excuses for the administration's policy failures is an ugly habit of mind.

You even pointed out that "blaming the media for everything is a lazy excuse."

Here we are in 2009 and your analysis is quite different. Using highly loaded terms, you tell us that "the GOP and its allies in the press have begun to aggressively attack [Obama's] approach to the [health care] issue." (emphasis added)

I looked in your 2005 post for any statement about Democrats and their allies in the press aggressively attacking Bush; nope, not there.

[bnyhan]

"[A]llies in the press" above means conservative pundits -- apologies for being unclear. As such, there's no contradiction with the 2005 post.

[Rob]

I didn't mean to suggest a contradiction with the 2005 post, just a quite different approach and attitude. In fact, I believe the two posts are entirely consistent: Republicans bad, Democrats good.

[Bill Carson]

Rob- Good thing you're not in this guy's Dartmouth class. He's flunk you!

The fact is, it is news that Obama's poll ratings are falling. Just because Nyhan says that is not news to him, doesn't mean it is not news to other people. Nyhan neglected to mention that Republicans typically run into a strong headwind of media attack from the get-go, like Bush. Obama, on the other hand, has benefited from the media lap-dogs. So when a guy who has a strong media shield, who has been lauded as a type of new messiah, stumbles, that is news! I doubt this Nyhan guy was writing six months ago that something like 38% of voter would "strongly disapprove" of Obama by mid July, 2009. No one expected that!

So the news is that the incompetent fool who had millions literally worshiping him would stumble so badly and make so many mistakes in such a short period of time.

We can only hope he's another Carter and we'll be rid of him soon enough. Yeah, I want him to fail, but hey, he's doing that without any help or push from my side!

[shampoovta]

Obama's approval drop not surprising,.. not to me that is for sure. F-ing wings made of wax idiot.

[David]

Bush was far more unpopular in Sept., 2007 than Obama is today. (Approval Rating minus Disapproval Rating of -15% for Bush then vs. +11% for Obama now.)

I believe this difference was entirely caused by how the media covered these two President. My evidence is that Obama has been a worse President than Bush by objective criteria.

Bush's unemployment rate in 2005 was a disappointing 5%; Obama's is twice as bad at nearly 10%. Bush's irresponsible budget deficit was over $300 billion, but Obama's is over $1.8 trillion -- around six times as bad.

It's true that Bush's war in Iraq wasn't going well in 2005, but Obama's war in Afghanistan isn't going well today. BTW in support of my thesis regarding the media, note how differently they covered American soldiers deaths in Iraq in 2005 vs. how they cover such deaths in Afghanistan today.

[Dero]

Well I'd imagine the difference is in the amount of deaths which was a hell of a lot more in Iraq in 2005 and 2006 than it is or ever has been in afghanistn.

Plus Bush had Katrina and the Schiavo overreach to deal with.

I grow tired of this tit for tat stuff. It should be obvious that Obama doesn't own the unemployment rate anymore than he owns a deficit whose fiscal year starts before he was even in office (FY 2009 started last october... it was already projected at 1.2 trillion).

Go find someone else to cry to about the mean old liberal media.

[IdahoMulato]

Afghanistan is no Obama war. He's just trying to get thigs better there. You cannot say Obama would have started this war in the first place. The rightwing war mongers have brought all these problem the economy is facing. Period!