The tactical fallacy

More and more pundits are jumping on the Democrats/Obama-are-in-trouble-due-to-bad-messaging bandwagon (for recent examples, see here, here, here, and here). What we're observing is a classic example of what you might call the tactical fallacy. Here's how it works:

1. Pundits and reporters closely observe the behavior of candidates and parties, focusing on the tactics they use rather than larger structural factors.
2. The candidates whose tactics appear to be successful tend to win; conversely, those whose tactics appear to be unsuccessful tend to lose (and likewise with parties).
3. The media concludes that candidates won or lost because of their tactical choices.

The problem is that any reasonable political tactic chosen by professionals will tend to resonate in favorable political environments and fall flat in unfavorable political environments (compare Bush in '02 to Bush '06, or Obama in '08 to Obama in '09-'10). But that doesn't mean the candidates are succeeding or failing because of the tactics they are using. While strategy certainly can matter on the margin in individual races, aggregate congressional and presidential election outcomes are largely driven by structural factors (the state of the economy, the number of seats held by the president's party, whether it's a midterm or presidential election year, etc.). Tactical success often is a reflection of those structural factors rather than an independent cause.

What advocates of the tactical view have failed to do is provide a viable counterfactual -- where is the example of the president whose messaging succeeded despite a similarly poor economy? TNR's John Judis has tried to argue that Reagan was more successful than Obama in 1981-1982 (here and here), but as I have pointed out (here and here), the 1982 election results do not suggest Republicans significantly overperformed and Reagan's approval ratings (both on the economy and overall) were extremely similar to Obama's at the same point in their presidencies.

The reality is that Obama's current standing -- and the rush to blame it on tactical failures -- could be predicted months ago based on structural factors. His approval ratings largely reflect a poor economy. Similarly, Democrats were likely to suffer significant losses in the House no matter what due to the number of seats they currently hold and the fact that it is a midterm election. Nonetheless, expect the tactics-are-everything crowd to be saying "I told you so" on November 3.*

* Bonus prediction: If the economy rebounds before 2012, the media will rediscover the tactical genius of Obama and David Axelrod.

[Cross-posted to Pollster.com and Huffington Post).

Comments

[Rob]

Fair enough, as far as it goes. Yes, the economy probably does play the largest role in determining elections--as perhaps it should, since politicians (especially Democratic politicians) persist in promising that they'll improve the economy and the lot of the middle class, and since they unfailingly take credit for a good economy even if they had little to do with bringing it about.

Brendan uses all the right qualifiers--"largely driven", "often is a reflection"--but these tend to obscure the fact that the state of the economy accounts for only something like 60% of the variability in election results. That still leaves a lot of variability, some of which is almost certainly accounted for by tactics, and some of which is surely accounted for by policy. And thank goodness for that. It would be awful if politicians could enact any policies they liked, no matter how unpopular those policies might be, and suffer no electoral consequences.

[MartyB]

While I think that Brendan make a good point - there is no doubt many pundits are just making stuff up - I have my doubts about how robust any studies might be that BN places so much faith in re: the economy and mid-terms.

Is there enough data to even measure how much of a factor the economy has (re: Rob's 60% above) with any margin of error that isn’t enormous? I mean there are only 10 mid-term data points in the past 20 years, and any of these could have been influenced by extraordinary factors beside the economy, so how can you measure what is "normal"?

How do they measure "the economy" and what factors might be different now vs. the past.

And how do these models deal with the tails of the distributions, which is where the surprises are? ( 2008 financial melt-down!)

If they are indeed reliable, I am curious what Poli-sci models of expected congressional change of hands due to economy alone might predict vs. what actually occurs in November. Any excess might be attributed to other factors such as tactics, policy, etc and we would know whether it is the pundits many theories or Brendan's many warnings that should carry more weight.

[bnyhan]

Marty - see the forecasting articles for the '04, '06 and '08 elections here: http://www.apsanet.org/content_13020.cfm They're not perfect, but they generally do well, especially in comparison to tactics-based storytelling (which can't be quantified and thus has no predictive power).

[David in Cal]

ISTM that few, if any, conservatives are blaming Obama's drop in popularity to tactics. Conservatives mostly blame his actual job performance.

[JP]

@Marty, you can also check out my way cool blog. I wish I had more time to dedicate to it.

http://www.jonathanursin.blogspot.com/