Given the findings about possible non-random discrepancies in Research 2000 polls that were published yesterday on Daily Kos and similarresults from Nate Silver, I've added the following disclosure to previous posts that cite Research 2000 polls:
[Update (6/30/10): Serious questions havebeenraised about the validity of Research 2000's polls. The results discussed below should thus be viewed as potentially suspect until the matter is resolved.]
More work is needed to fully analyze these results (the planned lawsuit by Daily Kos may also reveal relevant evidence), but the disclosure seems necessary given the cloud of suspicion around Research 2000 at this point.
Jonathan Chait had a great post a couple of weeks ago that's worth revisiting because of what it tells us about how pundits reason about politics.
As Chait noted, political scientists have established that presidential election outcomes are largely a function of the state of the economy, particularly in an election year (the same principle applies to presidential approval). And yet pundits routinely invent elaborate narratives to "explain" these outcomes in terms of strategy, tactics, personality, etc.
One case in point is the Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan, who blunders into this issue in a revealing passage from a recent column:
The president is starting to look snakebit. He's starting to look unlucky, like Jimmy Carter. It wasn't Mr. Carter's fault that the American diplomats were taken hostage in Tehran, but he handled it badly, and suffered. He defied the rule of the King in "Pippin," the Broadway show of Carter's era, who spoke of "the rule that every general knows by heart, that it's smarter to be lucky than it's lucky to be smart." Mr. Carter's opposite was Bill Clinton, on whom fortune smiled with eight years of relative peace and a worldwide economic boom. What misfortune Mr. Clinton experienced he mostly created himself. History didn't impose it.
But Mr. Obama is starting to look unlucky, and–file this under Mysteries of Leadership–that is dangerous for him because Americans get nervous when they have a snakebit president. They want presidents on whom the sun shines.
But as Chait points out, there's nothing mysterious about it:
Toward the end of the first paragraph, Noonan wanders toward the basic reality of the situation -- people liked Clinton because the economy was booming -- before returning to the familiar embrace of mysticism (Americans get "nervous" when the president appears "snakebit.") Rather than seeing this as demonstrating a basic correlation, she calls this the "Mysteries of Leadership."
The same principle applies to Obama. It has nothing to do with being "snakebit"; he is presiding over a weak economy, a context which magnifies all of his political difficulties.
It turns out that Noonan has made similar claims before. Here, for example, is a June 2009 column in which she briefly acknowledges that the state of the economy may be hurting Obama but then argues that his real problem is the lack of what she calls "The Sentence":
Something seems off with our young president. He appears jarred. Difficult history has come over the transom. He seemed defensive and peevish with the press in his Tuesday news conference, and later with Charlie Gibson on health care, when he got nailed by a neurologist who suggested the elites who support a national program seem not to mind rationing for other people but very much mind if for themselves.
All this followed the president's first bad numbers. From Politico, on Tuesday: "Eroding confidence in President Barack Obama's handling of the economy and ability to control spending have caused his approval ratings to wilt to their lowest level since taking office, according to a spate of recent polls." Independents and some Republicans who once viewed him sympathetically are "becoming skeptical."
You can say this is due to a lot of things, and it probably is, most especially the economy, which all the polls mentioned. But I think at bottom his problems come down to this: The Sentence. And the rough sense people have that he's not seeing to it.
The Sentence comes from a story Clare Boothe Luce told about a conversation she had in 1962 in the White House with her old friend John F. Kennedy. She told him, she said, that "a great man is one sentence." His leadership can be so well summed up in a single sentence that you don't have to hear his name to know who's being talked about. "He preserved the union and freed the slaves," or, "He lifted us out of a great depression and helped to win a World War."
But again, this is silliness. If the economy was strong, public perceptions about "The Sentence" wouldn't be a political problem. What was Bill Clinton's "Sentence" in his second term? (Indeed, Noonan has argued that Reagan "knew, going in, the sentence he wanted, and he got it" and yet his approval ratings still declined substantially when the economy was bad in 1982.)
The underlying problem is that Noonan and other pundits have strong professional incentives to construct these ad hoc explanations, which emphasize their own expertise in narrative construction and dramatize politics for public consumption. Until more pundits recognize the potential advantages of incorporating political science into their work, mysticism and superstition will continue to dominate.
From my Twitter feed:
-A new 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair poll finds24% 13% of Americans still believe Obama wasn't born in US (update: and 11% aren't sure)
-Insanely bad job loss chart on Fox News -- somewhere Edward Tufte is crying...
-A smart post on the economic incentives for "objectivity" that the Weigel debate has been missing (more on this later)
-Interesting quote: "One cannot both be a progressive and be opposed to pension reform"
-NYT's Adam Liptak draws on research by political scientists and legal scholars in Kagan confirmation story
-Steve Forbes pushes the myth that tax cuts increase revenue -- a claim that was repeatedly rejected by Bush administration economists -- in a Wall Street Journal op-ed
Charles M. Blow, the "visual Op-Ed columnist" for the New York Times, has discovered a magical ability to plumb the inner workings of President Obama's psyche:
On the other side stands Obama — solid and sober, rooted in the belief that his way is the right way and in no need of alteration. He’s the emotionally maimed type who lights up when he’s stroked and adored but shuts down in the face of acrimony. Other people’s anxieties are dismissed as irrational and unworthy of engagement or empathy. He seems quite comfortable with this aspect of his personality, even if few others are, and shows little desire to change it. It’s the height of irony: the presumed transformative president is stymied by his own unwillingness to be transformed. He would rather sacrifice the relationship than be altered by it.
As Bob Somerby points out, it's a close approximation of the faux mind-reading style pioneered by Maureen Dowd. Like her, it may make him rich and famous, but as a matter of fact it's baseless speculation. As such, I've added my own suggestion for the appropriate visual to accompany the column above.
At the end of last week, the disclosure of off-the-record emails sent by Washington Post blogger Dave Weigel created a controversy that led to his resignation from the newspaper. One such email quoted by the Daily Caller stated the following:
“Tangentially related: Betsy McCaughey showed up at Grover Norquist’s conservative meeting today, massive spiral-bound health care bill in hand, and shook with rage as she promised that the ‘war’ was not over.”
“I’m still smiling.”
In a post defending Weigel, former RNC staffer Liz Mair describes how two high-profile conservatives replied to an RNC email citing McCaughey by arguing that she was not a credible source or deserving of coverage (a position I've repeatedlyadvocated):
Let me say straight off that there are a wide array of people who cover health care policy who are not liberals who do not view [McCaughey] as a credible individual and relish moments where she is discredited or undercut in some way, even if they disagree with a particular policy outcome or proposition. Let me tell you how I know this. When I worked at the RNC in 2008, I sent something out that cited McCaughey, and I directed it to a whole slew of bloggers who write on health care and health care policy, including many from actual medical and medically-oriented publications such as Web MD, and many who had expressed private and public support for much of what John McCain was advocating in terms of health care reform. Surprise, surprise, I got several emails back, including from two people who, if I disclosed their names (and I won't because their comments were made off-the-record, and unlike JournoList members, I respect that), would be immediately recognized as conservative, about McCaughey and how she was not a credible source who should be quoted by X, Y, Z publication, and how health care debates would be better if she lost and/or disappeared.
This is an encouraging sign. Let's hope these conservatives find the courage to speak up publicly soon.
From my Twitter feed:
-Chris Mooney on why scientists struggle to correct public misperceptions, and how they can do better
-A politician I can get behind: "Gnarr ... ruled out any party whose members had not seen all five seasons of 'The Wire.'"
-The best initial post on Weigelgate -- read Conor Friedsdorf on the problems with the precedent that is being set
-CJR's Greg Marx on the unsupported narrative of the oil spill taking down Obama's approval ratings
-Kudos to NYT's Michael Luo for a midterm elections story that is well-informed by political science
-How could requiring the disclosure of content of meetings between lobbyists and government officials possibly work? Disclosure requirements will always be circumvented.
-MoveOn.org has erased "General Petraeus or General Betray Us?" ad from their website -- see the original here
-Classy DSCC fundraising appeal calls Carly Fiorina, Rand Paul, and Sharron Angle a "veritable 'Axis of Palin'"
-Richard Cohen demands more demonstrative body language from Obama -- another great use of WP op-ed space
-New study finds that 97% of the most active climate researchers believe in climate change caused by human activity
-The swing against the party in power is a natural part of politics, not a failure for liberals as David Brooks suggests
The narrative that President Obama's approval ratings are being heavily damaged by the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is quickly overwhelming the critical faculties of the media.
Last week, I laid down a marker on this point, noting the potential appeal of the spill as a journalistic narrative to dramatize Obama's political difficulties. It appears that process is already well underway.
For instance, a story by Mark Murray, the deputy political director of NBC News, wrote an article on a new NBC/WSJ poll for MSNBC's website headlined "Poll: Spill drags the president's rating down." Murray's lede states that "Two months of oil continuing to gush from a well off the Gulf Coast, as well as an unemployment rate still near 10 percent, have taken a toll on President Barack Obama and his standing with the American public." However, given the relative stability of Obama's numbers, Murray resorts to hyping small changes:
In the poll, Obama’s job-approval rating stands at 45 percent, which is down five points from early last month and down three points from late May...
What’s more, Obama’s favorable/unfavorable rating is now at 47 percent to 40 percent, down from 49 percent to 38 percent in early May and 52 percent to 35 percent in January.
What's left unsaid is that the changes in favorability and approval from the most recent NBC surveys asking those questions are within the poll's margin of error.
Similarly, Chris Matthews claimed on Hardball Tuesday that Obama's approval ratings "have been falling steadily since that oil rig blew up in the Gulf of Mexico two months ago" and that "his disapproval ratings [are] well above his approval ratings":
That was President Obama just last week calling upon Americans to seize the moment in that Oval Office address. The president‘s poll numbers, however, have been falling steadily since that oil rig blew up in the Gulf of Mexico two months ago. Is this just a blip on the screen for him, or has the president lost his political touch?...
Let‘s take a look at the president‘s poll numbers in the Pollster.com trend line. These are a combination of all the polls. They show his disapproval ratings well above his approval ratings.
There may well have been a small downturn in Obama's numbers in recent weeks. But as Media Matters points out, Matthews' claim that Obama's poll numbers have been "falling steadily" since the spill is overstated. Excluding Rasmussen polls, which often dominate the Pollster.com ratings due to their frequency and have a pronounced pro-GOP house effect, the shift in Obama's ratings since the spil on April 22 is on the order of 2-3 points, which is only clearly visible if we zoom in closely on the data:
In the broader view, however, the change (if it is real) is very small:
In addition, any change in Obama's approval ratings is not necessarily the result of the oil spill -- the economy (for instance) or many other factors could also affect his ratings.
In short, given what we know at this point, a more appropriate headline for reports on Obama's approval numbers is the one used by Pew: "Obama's Ratings Little Affected by Recent Turmoil." That may not be "news," but it's what the evidence tells us.
Update 6/25 11:47 AM: CJR's Greg Marx independently wrote an excellent post on the same theme, which includes a very nice useful interview with Pollster.com's Charles Franklin (a University of Wisconsin political scientist):
The point is not that Pew is right and the NBC poll is wrong, but that both data sets are legitimate—so journalists should include both, and be circumspect about sweeping conclusions. Any given poll contains uncertainty, so “until we see several of them moving in the same direction, it’s pretty hard to be sure that you’re picking up true change,” said Charles Franklin, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin and co-founder of the polling aggregation site Pollster.com.
Media institutions have an obvious incentive to play up the polls they pay for. But “a story written entirely from the point of view of either of those two polls would be misleading to readers,” Franklin said. A more accurate story would present the fuller range of data—which remains, at the moment, ambiguous.
To be fair to NBC’s journalists, the Pew poll hadn’t yet come out when they started reporting on their numbers. But they didn’t need it to offer more perspective. Franklin passed on via e-mail the chart below, which shows the trend for every pollster who has conducted surveys before and after the oil spill (click the image for a larger version as a PDF):
There’s a considerable amount of variation there. Taking a comprehensive view, “the trend lines do show some modest long-term decline,” according to Franklin. But while supposition that the spill might become a drag on the president is reasonable, “statistical tests show little evidence that the decline is specifically after the oil spill—rather, [we see] a continuation of a very slow decline since the first of the year.” What you’d need to see to make claims about the spill’s impact is not a downward trend after that point, but a worsening trend—and while it might show up eventually, “I just don’t think the evidence is there yet.”
Update 6/28 7:34 AM: See also Frank Newport at Gallup:
On Monday of this week I reviewed these data and concluded: "No Sign That Obama's Overall Job Approval Rating Has Been Significantly Affected."
Based on weekly Gallup averages, here's what I said:
There is less evidence that the oil spill has affected Obama's standing in the public's eye from a comparison of his weekly overall job approval average before the BP spill on April 20 with his average after the spill. Obama's ratings have been slightly lower in the last four weeks than they were in the four weeks prior to that, but his average in either time period is not much different from his 48% average in the four weeks immediately prior to the spill . . . However, weekly trends in Obama's overall job approval rating show no significant impact from the oil spill; his weekly average now is little different from what it was in the weeks prior to the spill.
Now. That was through last week; Obama's weekly job approval average for June 15-21 was 47%. This week, so far, Monday through Thursday, Obama has been averaging 45%. If this lower trend continues through the weekend (by no means guaranteed), then we will report a dip by next week.
But, by this point in time, it's getting more and more difficult (and it never was easy) to establish causality between changes in Obama's approval rating and the oil spill. There are other variables coming into play as each day goes on. In particular, this past week we have the firing of Gen. Stanley McChrystal (and we'll have some specific data on the public's reaction to that on Monday), plus the tentative passage of a new financial reform bill much pushed by the Obama administration. Either could be affecting Obama's job approval rating -- along with economic news, the Dow, and a host of other variables not as dramatically obvious as the oil spill.
As noted, the further away we get from the April 20 oil spill, the lower the certainty with which we can attribute changes in Obama's job approval rating to it -- or any specific event.
But the data to date do show little evidence of a dramatic drop in Obama's job approval rating immediately after -- or two months after -- the BP oil platform explosion and the beginning of the oil leak/spill.
Last week, I criticized Matt Bai's claim that it was an "ominous sign" for Democrats that President Obama's approval rating is under 50%.
Writing in The Hill, top Democratic pollster Mark Mellman goes even further, calling 50% approval a "magic number" for midterm elections:
[P]erhaps there are some magic numbers after all.
Take the effect of presidential approval on midterms. We graph the relationship between a president’s approval rating and his party’s gains and losses in midterm elections, thinking of the result as a smooth relationship. The lower the president’s approval rating, the more seats his party loses.
But the pattern is not really so linear after all. There is a sharp discontinuity at 50 percent. Presidents whose approval rating is at 50 percent or above have lost, on average, just 11 seats in the House, while presidents under the 50 percent mark have lost an average of 33 seats.
Averages can obscure as much as they reveal, so pick apart the numbers. No president with an approval rating under 50 percent has lost fewer than 15 seats. The next smallest number is 26. Even a president just below 50 percent can lose a lot. When Democrats were punished with the loss of 52 House seats in 1994, President Clinton’s approval rating rested just under the 50 percent threshold, at 48...
So where does President Obama stand? Last week Gallup put his approval at 45 percent, this week at 49. The Pollster.com weighted average of all polls says 46 percent. In short, for now, the president is hovering just below what may prove to be a magic number for Democrats in 2010.
Unlike Bai, Mellman brings historical evidence to the table, so let's consider his argument. He acknowledges the seemingly linear relationship between presidential approval and changes in House seats for the president's party in midterm elections. However, he argues that there is a "sharp discontinuity at 50 percent" in which "[p]residents whose approval rating is at 50 percent or above have lost, on average, just 11 seats in the House, while presidents under the 50 percent mark have lost an average of 33 seats."
First, let's replicate Mellman's numbers. (He appears to be excluding the replacement presidents -- Truman in 1946 and Ford in 1974 -- so I do the same here.) Using a cutpoint of 50 percent, I find that presidents with greater than 50 percent approval in the most recent Gallup poll before Election Day lose an average of ten seats and those below 50 percent lose an average of 33.5 seats (these slight discrepancies are likely the result of how different sources calculate seat change).
The problem is that the choice of 50 percent is arbitrary. For instance, presidents with approval ratings above 45 percent lost an average of 15 seats, while those below 45 percent lost an average of 33 seats -- results that aren't that different from Mellman's original numbers. Going the other direction, any cutpoint from 51 percent to 56 percent will yield the same results as 50 percent because there are no presidents who had approval ratings in that range in the data.
If you prefer graphical evidence, here is the data with a standard linear fit:
If we instead use a more flexible local polynomial fit to allow for nonlinearity, the predicted values show an inflection point around 50 percent approval, but the 95% confidence intervals reveal a great deal of uncertainty in that estimate -- hardly enough to justify a claim of a "sharp discontinuity":
With so few data points, it's very difficult to demonstrate a non-linear relationship. Absent further evidence, we can't be confident that a discontinuity exists at 50 percent.
It's also hard to believe the claim of a discontinuity in the context of the upcoming midterm elections. Given the state of the economy and the generic ballot, it's clear that Democrats are likely to lose a substantial number of seats regardless of whether Obama's approval rating is 49 percent or 51 percent on Election Day. Does Mellman believe otherwise?
Update 6/24 4:16 PM: To illustrate the point a bit further, I created a simple simulation of a linear relationship between approval and seat change that produces data approximately similar to what we observe above:
Over 1000 iterations of the simulation, the average outcome for presidents below 50 percent approval was a 12 seat loss while the average outcome above 50 percent approval was a 29 seat loss. In other words, it is very easy for a linear relationship to produce the sort of outcomes that Mellman describes.
In a post yesterday, NYU journalism prof/blogger Jay Rosen argued for more fact-checking in political journalism, citing a Greg Sargent post reporting that the AP's fact-checks are the most popular articles that the wire service publishes:
Fact checking is good journalism. Journalists should take a lesson from the success of the fact-checking site, Politfact.com. I have already written extensively about this one, so there is no need to repeat myself.
But don’t do it unless you are willing to do what Politifact does: tell us when a political actor is lying, or speaking falsely. Drop the pretense that there must be deception in equal measure on both sides of the partisan ledger—a lie for a lie, and untruth for an untruth—just because we, the journalists, need to show how even handed we are. The AP has started doing it, and as Greg Sargent reported, “Their fact-checking efforts are almost uniformly the most clicked and most linked pieces they produce. Journalistic fact-checking with authority, it turns out, is popular.”
I agree with the sentiment, but Rosen is overstating the case -- if fact-checks were unambiguously popular, they'd be a far more common practice. However, based on my experience with Spinsanity and research on correcting misperceptions, I'd expect that the online popularity of fact-checks is in large part driven by bloggers and readers who want to see their political opponents be discredited. As Jason Reifler and I showed (PDF), people aren't generally receptive to corrections of politicians on their side of the political spectrum. This isn't a direct problem for the AP, which provides content to other outlets, but a newspaper or website runs the risk of antagonizing half of its audience with each fact-check. That's the principal reason the practice is so rare.
(For more on how economic incentives shape news content, see Jay Hamilton's excellent book All the News That's Fit to Sell.)
Reading the opening of David Remnick's book The Bridge
last night, I was struck by how small a role race has played in Barack Obama's presidential campaign and time in office relative to what we might have expected a few years ago. His popular vote total in 2008 was very close to what the leading models forecast, and his approval trajectory in office is very similar to his predecessors. Obama's status as the first black president has of course manifested itself in all sorts of ways, but the basic electoral mechanics of presidential voting and approval are operating seemingly unchanged. That normalcy is itself a triumph for our democracy.
Mark Blumenthal quoted me in a blog post at Pollster.com (where I frequently cross-post) commenting on Nate Silver's pollster ratings -- here's what I wrote:
It's not necessarily true that the dummy variable for each firm (i.e. the "raw score") actually "reflects the pollster's skill" as Silver states. These estimates instead capture the expected difference in accuracy of that firm's polls controlling for other factors -- a difference that could be the result of a variety of factors other than skill. For instance, if certain pollsters tend to poll in races with well-known incumbents that are easier to poll, this could affect the expected accuracy of their polls even after adjusting for other factors. Without random assignment of pollsters to campaigns, it's important to be cautious in interpreting regression coefficients.
Silver has expressed bewilderment at the criticism he has received and the lack of competing measures, writing that "the task is not inherently more daunting than, say, trying to determine which are the most skilled baseball players are based on their batting averages." As the comment above suggests, I think this is incorrect.
The problem is that polling isn't like baseball. The performance of hitters is measured hundreds of times per year in a wide range of contexts that the hitters generally do not select (setting aside platoons, pinch-hitting, etc.) and it is relatively easy to adjust for external factors such as stadiums, opposing pitchers, defense, etc. By contrast, pollsters must be hired by candidates or assigned by staff to poll in specific races. In addition, their performance (as measured by forecasts of election outcomes) is measured very infrequently -- only fifteen firms in Silver's ratings have a sample size of more than fifty polls -- and is subject to inherent sampling error. For all of these reasons, it's not clear that we can distinguish between the performance of most pollsters without a heroic level of belief in our modeling assumptions and a neglect of the error associated with the projected ratings.
From my Twitter feed:
-A high point in the history of fact-checking: Politifact investigates Snooki's claims about the health care reform tanning tax (for the record: true)
-TNR's Jon Chait on the "postmodern scandal" of BP's CEO watching a yacht race -- an entirely image-driven faux controversy
-I'm not sure why Eliot Spitzer is seen as a "potentially tangy" choice to host an 8 PM show on CNN -- won't the scandal make him more risk-averse?
-CJR's Greg Marx provides the missing political science for McClatchy's story on Trent Lott and polarization in Congress
-Kevin Drum cites public opinion in a post titled "Why Congress is at a Standstill," but the filibuster is more important
-It's horrifying that Utah's Attorney General live tweeted an execution
-Politico details Darrell Issa's aspirations to be the Dan Burton of the next Congress if the GOP takes back the House
At work in this liberal panic are two intellectual vices, and one legitimate fear. The first vice is the worship of presidential power: the belief that any problem, any crisis, can be swiftly solved by a strong government, and particularly a strong executive. A gushing oil well, a recalcitrant Congress, a public that’s grown weary of grand ambitions — all of these challenges could be mastered, Obama’s leftward critics seem to imagine, if only he were bolder or angrier, or maybe just more determined.
This vice isn’t confined to liberals: you can see it at work when foreign policy hawks suggest that mere presidential “toughness” is the key to undoing Iran’s clerical regime, or disarming North Korea. But it runs deepest among progressives. When Rachel Maddow fantasized last week about how Obama should simply dictate energy legislation to a submissive Congress, she was unconsciously echoing midcentury liberal theoreticians of the presidency like Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who often wrote as if a Franklin Roosevelt or a John F. Kennedy could run the country by fiat. (They couldn’t.)
For those who aren't familiar with the Green Lantern Theory of the PresidencyTM, here's my original definition:
During the Bush years, [Matthew] Yglesias coined the Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics* to mock conservatives who believed that "[t]he only thing limiting us is a lack of willpower" in foreign policy. What he identifies here is nothing less than a Green Lantern theory of the presidency in which all domestic policy compromises are attributed to a lack of presidential will. And, like the Green Lantern theory of geopolitics, this view is nonfalsifiable. Rather than learning from, say, the stimulus vote that Obama faces severe constraints in the Senate, liberal GL proponents have created a narrative in which all failure and compromise is the result of a lack of presidential willpower. (Hamsher, for instance, claims that "The failure to establish a public option to control medical costs and increase competition is President Obama’s failure alone.") It's a fantasy world...
* Here's Yglesias explaining the Green Lantern reference:
[T]he Green Lantern Corps is a sort of interstellar peacekeeping force set up by the Guardians of Oa to maintain the peace and defend justice. It recruits members from all sorts of different species and equips them with the most powerful weapon in the universe, the power ring.
...[The ring] lets its bearer generate streams of green energy that can take on all kinds of shapes. The important point is that, when fully charged what the ring can do is limited only by the stipulation that it create green stuff and by the user's combination of will and imagination. Consequently, the main criterion for becoming a Green Lantern is that you need to be a person capable of "overcoming fear" which allows you to unleash the ring's full capacities...
As liberal discontent grows toward President Obama and Congressional Democrats, TNR's Jon Chait hasbeendocumenting a resurgence of what I call the Green Lantern theory of the presidency. In this fantasy world, all legislative obstacles can be overcome through the sheer exertion of presidential will. As such, when Obama fails to overcome the sixty vote requirement for legislative action in the Senate, Green Lantern-ites conclude that he must not have tried hard enough. If you accept the false premise that the president is all-powerful, it's totally logical!
From my Twitter feed:
-TNR's Jon Chait slams Peggy Noonan's retreat to the "familiar embrace of mysticism" as an explanation for presidential popularity
-Emory's Alan Abramowitz shows that Democrats have fewer marginal seats to defend than in 1994
-NYT's Ross Douthat on how members of the cult of the presidency demand the appearance of action from Obama on the Gulf spill
-As predicted, repeal of health care reform is a non-starter so far -- proposal to roll back individual mandate loses 230-187 in House
-Kevin Drum takes down an insipid psychoanalysis of the Tea Party movement -- highly recommended
-Things I hate: Disproportionate coverage of televised speeches like Obama's -- they don't matter (much)
-Great news for making gay rights a bipartisan issue
-John Boehner -- yet another high-ranking Republican who denies that tax cuts reduce revenue and increase deficits
-If you went to a college like Swarthmore and you're not following feministhulk on Twitter, you are missing out
-People are way too carried away with conspiracy theories about the Democratic Senate primary in South Carolina -- remember all the nonsense about Ohio and Florida in 2004? Time to slow down
Two important points of followup on Tuesday's post about how Matt Bai overhyped President Obama's approval rating as "ominous" for Democrats:
1. First, as Emory's Alan Abramowitz correctly pointed out in an email to me, "Seat exposure and the midterm dummy variable predict substantial Democratic losses regardless of what happens to either the generic ballot or Obama approval." See, for instance, Abramowitz's statistical model of House seat swings, which predicts a 38 seat loss for Democrats on the basis of those two factors alone.
2. Second, Rahm Emanuel seems to have bought into the hype about the president's approval rating as the overriding factor in midterms. In Bai's article, he is paraphrased as follows:
For every point that Obama’s approval rating dips below 50 percent, Emanuel said, there are probably four or five more House districts that will swing into the Republican column, and vice versa.
These results are not corroborated by the statistics. Controlling for other factors, Abramowitz's model predicts that a one point decrease in Obama's net approval (approval-disapproval) is associated with a .22 seat shift toward Republicans. (He indicates by email that the coefficient for raw approval is less than 0.5.) Even the simple slope in a bivariate plot is far less than 4-5 seats per point of approval. Unless there's some massive non-linearity around 50% approval, Emanuel's estimate is off by an order of magnitude.
In the wake of President Obama's speech to the nation about BP and the Gulf last night, it's worth noting that his approval ratings have not beenaffected by the spill so far. The speech is unlikely to have a significant effect either.
I'm laying down a marker on these two points because of the likelihood that a post hoc narrative will be created in which the Gulf spill and/or the speech played a major role in Democratic losses in the 2010 midterms or a subsequent Obama defeat in 2012. This is precisely what happened after Jimmy Carter's so-called "malaise" speech, which is frequently used to "explain" Carter's subsequent defeat in 1980. Here, for example, is a random Omaha World Herald editorial from 1995 I found in Nexis:
A few commentators seized on Clinton's rumination and compared it to Jimmy Carter's 1979 "malaise" speech. Carter's call for America to shake itself out of a national malaise and regain its self-confidence was perceived by some people as a whiny effort by a president searching for something to blame for his low ratings in the polls. It's believed that in appearing to rebuke the public, Carter alienated voters, contributing to his election defeat in 1980.
In reality, Carter's approval ratings after the speech, while low, were generally stable until the Iranian hostage crisis. His defeat can easily be explained by the state of the economy, which was terrible:
Remember, dramatizing an event (e.g., Carter's defeat) is not the same thing as explaining it. It's not clear that the malaise speech had a significant effect on Carter's fortunes, and so far there's no evidence that the oil spill or last night's speech have had a significant effect on Obama's.
In the New York Times Magazine, Matt Bai suggests it is "an ominous sign, historically speaking, for a majority party" when "the president's own approval ratings fell below 50 percent":
[President Obama] continued to go out and shake his head disbelievingly at "the culture of Washington," which to the Democrats in the House sounded as if he were saying that his own party was the problem, as if somehow the Democratic majorities in Congress hadn't managed to navigate the bulk of his ambitious agenda past a blockade of Republican vessels, their ship shredded by cannon fire. And all this while the president's own approval ratings fell below 50 percent -- an ominous sign, historically speaking, for a majority party...
Just about every strategist of either party in Washington will tell you that the best indicator of whether the voters are growing less skeptical — and, thus, of whether Democrats can survive the November elections intact — can be found in the president’s approval rating. There is a political theorem that illustrates this, supported by data from past elections and often repeated by Democrats now, and it goes like this: If the president’s approval rating is over 50 percent in the fall, then his party will suffer only moderately. If his rating is under 50 percent, however, then the pounding at the polls is likely to be a memorable one.
I'm not sure why Bai thinks Obama's approval numbers are so ominous. Using USA Today's presidential approval tracker, I made this chart showing approval ratings to this point in each of the last seven presidencies:
Obama's approval trajectory (in purple) is tightly clustered with five of the last seven presidents. Only two of those seven -- George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush -- had significantly higher approval ratings at this point, and neither is an especially compelling counter-example: Bush 43's approval ratings were artificially inflated by 9/11, and Bush 41 was not re-elected. It's not clear that there's anything ominous about Obama's standing at this point.
If Bai is instead referring to the fortunes of the president's party in midterm elections under unified government, then there are only three relevant first-term examples in the contemporary era: Carter (1977-1978), Clinton (1993-1994), and Bush 43 (2001-June 2002). Of those, Democrats suffered moderate damage in 1978 with Carter around 50 percent; the Republicans won a landslide victory in 1994 with Clinton in the mid-40s; and Republicans picked up seats in 2002 when Bush's approval ratings were still extremely high.
Finally, if Bai is referring to midterm elections more generally, I'm not sure what makes 50 percent so magical. The president's approval ratings are an important factor, as this Nate Silver graph shows, but it's not clear that it matters whether Obama is slightly below 50 percent or not -- he's likely to lose seats either way (as most presidents do):
In reality, other factors such as slow jobs growth and the generic ballot are far more ominous for Democrats than Obama's approval rating.
One of the ironies of the Obama presidency is seeing Democrats use the same tactics they once decried from the Bush administration (attacking dissent, etc.). The latest example comes from Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who said the following on Fox Business:
WASSERMAN SCHULTZ: On the pace that we’re on, with job creation in the last four months, if we continue on that pace, and all the leading economists say that it is likely that we will, we will have created more jobs in this year than in the entire Bush presidency.
But as former Bush administration official Keith Hennessey points out, Wasserman is cherry-picking the start date for Obama administration job creation in a misleading way:
Ms. Wasserman Schultz is picking her timeframes carefully, in particular by ignoring the four million jobs lost during the first 11 months of a Presidency that is so far 16 months old.
Even today, after five straight months of job growth, three million fewer people are working than when President Obama took office. That’s hardly something to brag about...
Let’s look at how Ms. Wasserman Schultz justifies her claim. As always, you can click on the graph for a larger view.
You can see two yellow dots in January 2001 and January 2009, and a thin yellow line extended so we can measure the difference between the two. The red arrows show that, if you measure only endpoint to endpoint, 1.1 million net net jobs were created during the Bush Administration (I’m using the payroll survey in all cases).
But this analysis misses most of the story. We can see a steady employment decline from early 2001 through mid-2003, followed by a steady, strong, and sustained period of job growth for almost four years. This 46 month period is the second longest in recorded history for sustained job creation in the U.S., and more than eight million jobs were created during this period (the white arrows). A mild recession began in late 2007, followed by a severe contraction in the second half of 2008 and continuing into the Obama Presidency.
Compounding the chicanery, Ms. Wasserman Schulz measures the Obama job creation beginning with the first pink dot in December 2009. Her conclusion is based on the orange arrows and her guess about how they will grow throughout this year. She’s ignoring the four million decline in employment from January 2009 (despite the stimulus), and she’s ignoring that we’re still three million jobs shy of where we were when President Obama took office. If she were to apply the same methodology to President Obama as she did to President Bush, she’d be comparing +1.1 M (Bush) with –3.0 M (Obama). But that wouldn’t look quite as good for her case.
Wasserman's approach is likely to be quite familiar to Hennessey given how often the Bush administration used similar tactics. For instance, the Treasury Department released this graph attributing 2003-2005 jobs growth to the second Bush tax cut:
As I pointed out at the time, the graph ignores previous job losses from 2001-2003 while taking credit for job creation starting at the lowest point on the graph:
It's exactly what Wasserman Schultz did. Expect other Democrats to follow her lead.
Update 6/15 4:47 PM: In comments, Hennessey defends the Bush Treasury graph:
I argue that Rep. Wasserman Schultz's specific claim is misleading. The Bush-era Treasury chart does not purport to make any claims about the history of employment during the entire Administration. It is instead attempting to show the timing correlation between the tax cuts and the return of employment growth. The Treasury chart supports the argument, "The 2003 tax cuts contributed to the strong employment growth that began a few months after those tax cuts became law." If one were also to include the prior 2.5 years of employment history, it would only reinforce that argument. I don't have a problem with advocates choosing timeframes to make their case. I do have a problem with advocates using timeframes to lead listeners to an incorrect policy conclusion. I think Rep. Wasserman Shultz's statement does this. Some of that may be in the eye of the beholder, but I believe there are objective standards against which claims can be measured. I don't see how the Treasury chart is similarly misleading. If there's an argument that it is, I'd like to hear it. Thanks.
The argument against the Treasury chart is simple -- the headline for the graph states "Jobs Rebound and Unemployment Falls as Bush Economic Policies Come into Effect." However, the graph omits the 2001 tax cut and starts the timeline two years into Bush's term, falsely suggesting (a) that the 2003 Bush tax cut was the administration's first economic policy enactment; (b) that it took effect almost immediately (while the 2001 tax cut took years to have an effect); and (c) that the 2003 tax cut drove jobs growth starting in the fall of that year. I don't think any of those claims are defensible.
[Updated below with more details on Clinton's win in 1996]
I take it as a given that most journalists know very little about political science. But I still assumed that almost everyone has a basic understanding of the relationship between the state of the economy and presidential election outcomes. Apparently Fred Barnes missed the memo.
As Jamison Foser points out at Media Matters, Barnes published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal yesterday that repeatedly suggests the key to Obama's re-election is cutting spending:
If Mr. Obama wants to avert a fiscal crisis and win re-election in 2012, he needs House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to be removed from her powerful post. A GOP takeover may be the only way...
Over the past 50 years, it should be no surprise which president has the best record for holding down discretionary spending. It was President Reagan. But who was second best? President Clinton, a Democrat. His record of frugality was better than Presidents Nixon, Ford and both Bushes. Mr. Clinton couldn't have done it if Republicans hadn't won the House and Senate in the 1994 election. They insisted on substantial cuts, he went along and then whistled his way to an easy re-election in 1996...
Mr. Obama's re-election to a second term is heavily dependent on his ability to deal effectively with the fiscal mess.
The suggestion that Clinton had "an easy re-election" due to spending restraint is implausible. Here's a plot of changes in non-defense discretionary spending (Barnes's preferred metric) for recent first-term presidents (see methodological notes below for details):
The relationship between spending restraint and vote share is entirely driven by Reagan's 1984 landslide (an outlier on both dimensions). When it is excluded, there is no relationship between the variables.
By contrast, the relationship between economic growth and presidential vote share is extremely strong and robust to the exclusion of any single president. Here, for example, is the same set of presidents with their vote share plotted against the Douglas Hibbs measure of weighted per-capita growth in disposable personal income (drawn from his Bread and Peace model):
As I've previously noted, Clinton's move toward the center (which included an emphasis on deficit reduction) may have helped somewhat to boost his margin above what we would have otherwise expected, but the driving force in 1996 (as in every election) was the state of the economy.
Similarly, it's hard to imagine Reagan being re-elected based on his record of spending restraint if the economy was in the tank. The fiscal year 1982 budget cut non-defense discretionary spending substantially, but it wasn't enough to protect Reagan during the recession of 1981-1982, which pushed Reagan's approval numbers down to 35% by January 1983. Once the economy bounced back, however, approval rebounded in time for him to crush Mondale in 1984.
Barnes may wish that presidents were re-elected based on spending restraint, but that's just not the world we live in. Obama's fortunes will rise or fall depending on the state of the economy.
Update 6/10 9:33 AM: To reinforce the point that we don't need to use the Clinton's move to the center (which Matthew Yglesias emphasizes), here are plots from two other prominent forecasting models showing how closely Clinton's popular vote totals can be predicted using economic conditions alone.
First, here's a plot from a 2008 article by Alan Abramowitz predicting vote share using GDP growth in the second quarter of a presidential election year:
Second, here's a plot from a 2008 article by Tom Holbrook predicting vote sharing using average satisfaction with personal finances in the summer of a presidential election year:
In both cases, the actual outcome is quite close to the predicted value from a simple linear fit.
Update 6/10 12:07 PM: Jonathan Bernstein objects to the claim that Clinton moved toward the center after 1994. I'll certainly agree that the difference between Clinton pre- and post-1994 is overstated, but there is at least some evidence to support the claim that he moved rightward. Most notably, see this figure from Michael Bailey which uses Supreme Court cases as a bridge to compare the preferences of the president with those of Congress and members of the Court (click the graphic for a larger version):
[Methodological notes: Spending levels are drawn from the historical tables for the FY2010 budget and are in constant dollars (Table 8.2). I compare spending in the fiscal year beginning before the president takes office (e.g. fiscal year 1969 for Nixon) to the fiscal year that ends just before the president is up for re-election (e.g. fiscal year 1972 for Nixon). I start with fiscal year 1974 for Ford (since he took office in August of that year) and end with fiscal year 1976 (excluding the transition quarter in 1976).]
In an op-ed published in late March, I predicted that misinformation about health care reform would persist after its passage:
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...
Surprisingly, however, DNC pollster Joel Benenson suggests in a new memo (PDF) that "misinformation about President Obama’s health care reforms" is "giv[ing] way to Americans’ real-life experience with it" (via Mike Allen):
However, none of the poll results cited in the memo pertain to misinformation, and I haven't seen any surveys that show a decline in misperceptions about reform. While it appears to be true, as Benenson argues, that a narrow majority of Americans oppose repealing the law, it's not clear that this finding has anything to do with a decline in misinformation. Indeed, his proposed mechanism ("real-life experience" with reform) is implausible since most of the changes in the law have not yet taken effect. Absent further evidence, the claim appears to be pure partisan bluster.
From my Twitter feed:
-I love that Larry Kudlow's radio promo says he was a mid-level bureaucrat under Reagan. Don't change the channel -- he worked at OMB 25 years ago!
-Elevating the discourse, Charlie Rangel refers to "terrorists" on Wall Street, Joe McGinniss compares Sarah Palin's tactics to those of "Nazi troopers," and Chris Matthews calls Palin's post about McGinniss a "fatwa"
-A proposal to ban serial dissemblers from Sunday shows (similar to my "naming and shaming" idea)
-Sestak from way back: Historian K.C. Johnson shows that LBJ (like Obama, Reagan, etc.) used appointments to influence candidates
-Slate's Chris Beam parodies what news coverage would be like if written by political scientists (perhaps the first parody of political scientists ever to appear in a mainstream press outlet)
-Even by White House press briefing standards, Robert Gibbs attempting to prove Obama's rage about the Gulf oil spill was pathetic
-Topping Krugman's classic "Shape of the Earth: Views Differ" faux headline, CNN searches for an upside to the Gulf spill
-Must-read Greg Marx story in CJR on political science as an "untapped resource" for journalists (note: I was interviewed)
-Results from a Slate experiment showing how easy it is to manipulate political memories:
-In a new ad, Mickey Kaus randomly bashes unions without explaining what their failings have to do with labor policy or Barbara Boxer -- it's a total non sequitur
-Correlation/causation alert: "Skinny People Shop at Whole Foods"
I'm sympathetic to Ross Douthat's argument that a center-right version of Newsweek could be a force for good, but his suggestion that Newsmax (a bidder for the newsweekly) could carry out that strategy is lunacy:
If Meacham had wanted to play to what seems like Newsweek’s business strength — its large audience outside the Acela corridor — he would have tried to tilt the magazine toward the center-right rather than the center-left, in the hopes of becoming the go-to outlet for the millions of Americans who think that the elite media is too liberal but find Rush Limbaugh too conservative...
Meacham didn’t do any of this, but maybe a Newsweek owned by Newsmax would. True, the Newsmaxers are hard right, not center-right: They’re more Rush than Rauch, more Levin than Labash. But they’re also insisting that if they buy the magazine, “Newsweek would continue in its mission to objectively report the news and provide analysis from a wide spectrum of perspectives.” This sounds like a philosophy that would be compatible with a gradual rightward shift for the newsweekly, rather than a sudden wrench into Sarah Palin territory. And that shift might — might! — be what it takes to save Newsweek from extinction.
Unfortunately, Newsmax's claims about how it would operate the magazine are cheap talk -- they have every incentive to try to appear respectable at this point in the process. The reality is that the magazine has a longhistory of using nasty rhetoric and promoting misinformation. Among other examples, here's what we wrote at Spinsanity about the Deck of Weasels cards sold by Newsmax during the Iraq war:
The most explicit comparisons [to Iraqi leaders depicted on the now-famous deck of cards issued by the Pentagon to troops in Iraq to help them identify top Iraqi officials], however, have been made by NewsMax.com and Greenpeace, who have both issued their own decks of cards featuring their political enemies. The NewsMax [deck] includes a picture of a politician or celebrity doctored to include a beret bearing the logo of the Iraqi Republican Guard and a "quote revealing his anti-American, pro-Saddam ranting". Prominently featured are French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac as the Ace of Spades (Saddam Hussein's position in the Pentagon deck) and "Sen. Robert 'KKK' Byrd" as the Ace of Diamonds.
I wouldn't expect this company to engage in "a gradual rightward shift for the newsweekly," and you shouldn't either.
In a post previewing his remarks at the Personal Democracy Forum, The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder endorses my call (see here, here, and here) to "name and shame" elites who promote misleading information (as well as a similar argument by Robert H. Frank):
I subscribe to the Brendan Nyhan/Robert Frank notion that social shaming may well be a valid way for fact-checkers to convince more than a handful of people that the other side is simply wrong. Frum has done a serviceable job in calling out his fellow conservatives, but he does not possess the power or the infrastructure to shame people who cross a line. As Nyhan proposes, when someone like Frank Gaffney, who still gets invited to major events by reputable people, implies that President Obama a Muslim, he should be shamed into hiding by his fellow conservatives. (Shaming by liberals, or mere corrections, won't work, and will often promote the myth).
It's fantastic to see journalists in the mainstream media endorsing the idea, but it's not enough to call on conservatives and liberals to shun the Gaffneys on their side of the aisle. The Atlantic and other elite publications have to stop giving those people a platform to promote misinformation.
From my Twitter feed:
-Robert H. Frank calls for "social sanctions" of dishonest elites -- very similar to my "naming and shaming" idea
-Related note to Orrin Hatch -- "social sanctions" are vastly preferable to criminalizing false claims of military service
-You know the Sestak scandal allegations have no legs when the WSJ editorial page can't muster any serious outrage
-New York Daily News op-ed by political scientists Seth Masket and John Sides on effects of unemployment and growth in midterm elections
-Polarization alert: Gulf oil spill pushes up support for environmental protection except among Republicans
-Emory's Alan Abramowitz finds that more conservative Republican senators lose votes, but relationship likely to vary by state partisanship (see section 5.2 of this paper)
-CJR's Greg Marx debunks hype of the Contract with America and other "gimmick platforms" -- they're unlikely to matter much
adored but shuts down in the face of acrimony. Other people’s anxieties are dismissed as irrational and unworthy of engagement or empathy. He seems quite comfortable with this aspect of his personality, even if few others are, and shows little desire to change it. It’s the height of irony: the presumed transformative president is stymied by his own unwillingness to be transformed. He would rather sacrifice the relationship than be altered by it.
last night, I was struck by how small a role race has played in Barack Obama's presidential campaign and time in office relative to what we might have expected a few years ago. His popular vote total in 2008 was 
