Brendan Nyhan

Can it really be true that the person who taped the latest smear robocall against Barack Obama is named Orson Swindle? Was Johnny Deceptive booked?

John McCain, who previously joked that he defined being rich as making over $5 million, said yesterday that his running mate Governor Sarah Palin and her family “are not wealthy.” Really? Americans’ median household net worth in 2002 was approximately $59,000 (PDF). The Palin family’s net worth exceeds $1 million according to financial disclosure forms. I think most people would define someone with a million dollar net worth as wealthy.

One thing that didn’t get much attention last week — President Bush’s approval rating in the New York Times poll was 22 percent! He’s helped set the stage for a top-to-bottom repudiation of Republicans in the House, Senate, and presidential races a week from Tuesday. Perceptions of a Democratic mandate are sure to follow.

What’s striking about this is that so many people thought that President Bush would be a transformational president who would reshape American politics. Instead, he’s on the verge of becoming the Jimmy Carter to Obama’s Reagan. For instance, here’s what I wrote in early 2002 before it became clear that Bush would squander his political capital so profoundly:

Bush now has a realistic opportunity to become a president who defines the terms of American politics long after leaving office. In his book The Politics Presidents Make, the Yale political scientist Stephen Skowronek argues that transformational presidents engage in “the politics of reconstruction,” in which they build a new political regime in opposition to the crumbling and de-legitimized order they have replaced. Examples include Franklin Delano Roosevelt after Herbert Hoover and Ronald Reagan after Jimmy Carter.

Seen in this light, the State of the Union address can be read as a conscious attempt to define an entirely new order. In it, Bush elaborated a vision of a moral America defending freedom with an extensive domestic anti-terror apparatus at home and an interventionist and open-ended war on terrorism and rogue states abroad. “[T]his will be a decisive decade in the history of liberty,” he said. “We’ve been called to a unique role in human events.”

In addition, Bush’s entire domestic agenda has now been re-conceptualized in terms of security, from “security in retirement” (pension reform, Social Security privatization) to “economic security” (education reform, energy production, free trade, tax cuts). Finally, Bush endorsed national service as a component of homeland defense and to promote an ethic of personal responsibility and civic virtue…

Bush has left the box of 1990s American politics altogether, defining a secure and moral future against an insecure and self-indulgent past. Skowronek says transformational presidents “retrieve from a far distant, even mythic, past fundamental values that they claimed have been lost.” Reagan, for example, described his “Revolution” as “a rediscovery of our values and our common sense.” Here’s Bush: “After America was attacked, it was as if our entire country looked into a mirror and saw our better selves.”

On its own, this may seem obvious — America was self-indulgent in the 1990s, we did fail to take the threats against us seriously, and the war on terrorism is incredibly important. But just as Reagan broke from and stigmatized old-style liberalism, Bush can now frame Democratic opposition as representative of a discredited, Clintonian past. Call it “changing the tone” squared. Concerns about missile defense, civil liberties or the wisdom of overthrowing rogue regimes like Iraq can be portrayed as dangerous and self-indulgent, the echoes of a dying era.

This framing is especially hard for Democrats to counter because most will not stand in stark opposition to the Clinton legacy as Bush is. And as it becomes common wisdom, fair or not, that Clinton failed to do all he could to prevent 9/11, Bush’s politics will increasingly come to seem a much-needed corrective. Like Al Gore, Democrats may find themselves unable to offer a compelling vision that breaks as clearly from the past.

You can almost do a find and replace on this passage to bring it up to date. Bush is now serving the role that Clinton did after 9/11 (the representative of the repudiated past), while Obama is the one claiming that a previous ideology has been discredited and promising a new beginning.

Drudge and other outlets are selectively hyping the handful of polls showing a relatively close race. That’s not surprising given their incentives. The problem is that if you draw enough random samples and you throw in house effects and questionable likely voter screens, a poll somewhere every day or two will show McCain within a few points. But the overall picture of the election is quite clear, as UNC’s Jim Stimson notes, and you should therefore disregard the outliers (key sentence in bold):

This is a race of considerable variability in various organization’s estimates of what should be the same quantity. And at the same time I have never seen such stability in my estimates of the daily lead. A typical day sees about ten organizations report an Obama lead varying between 1 and 14 points. Thirteen points difference is a lot, more than double what would be expected from sampling fluctuation alone. This arises chiefly, it appears, from two sources, (1) initial assumptions about the partisan makeup of the electorate, and (2) varying likely voter assumptions. Both are probably more ambiguous than usual this year. Democratic party identification is trending upward this year. In that context it is harder than in a more stable environment to know what the right numbers are. Any old assumptions will very likely be wrong, as would the practice of just forcing the sample to have equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans, which used to be employed, and maybe still is, by the Battleground poll. Turnout projection is especially difficult this year because the Obama campaign intends to turn out huge numbers of young and African-American voters who are traditional nonvoters. A model that assumes traditional patterns will be wrong if the campaign succeeds and right if it fails. Figuring out the quality of the two sides’ ground games is beyond the normal expertise of pollsters.

Stability: When all the polls are combined to form daily estimates, it is the opposite fact that is most striking. Despite all that daily variation, Barak Obama has held a lead over John McCain of about 7 points over more than a month with virtually no daily variation. In my metric of the two-party vote division, the Obama lead of about 53.5 is just locked between 53 and 54 day after day after day. The organizations that do really large samples are reporting the same fact, remarkable continuity of day to day estimates, as if the race has been frozen since late September. Tracking polls with smaller samples are reporting trends, back and forth, which, while entertaining, appear to be quite false.

Stimson’s estimate, which is currently at 54% of the two-party vote, mirrors Charles Franklin’s estimate of 54% at Pollster.com. Both are quite close to the median prediction of 52% from leading political science models.

Some unconvincing spin from Steve Schmidt:

“The McCain campaign is roughly in the position where Vice President Gore was running against President Bush one week before the election of 2000,” said Steve Schmidt, Mr. McCain’s chief strategist. “We have ground to make up, but we believe we can make it up.”

Actually, with a week to go in 2000, Gore was only down 2-3 points in national polls:

By contrast, Pollster.com estimates Obama is up by eight points right now:

Update 10/24 10:27 AM: The 2000 graph above, which is from Charles Franklin of the University of Wisconsin and Pollster.com, has a mislabeled y-axis — it should be “Gore minus Bush” not “Kerry minus Bush”.

Paul Krugman and Paul Waldman push back against a Newsweek cover story that preemptively proclaims America a “center-right” country.

These are the precursors to the high-stakes debate that will follow Obama’s likely victory on November 4. Here’s a handy clip ‘n’ save guide to what you should expect:

(1) Many people will proclaim falsely that the election represents a “realignment.” However, the idea that some elections represent discontinuous breaks from the past that permanently shift political alignments has been discredited in political science.

(2) There will be a strenous battle over whether Obama and/or Congressional Democrats have a “mandate.” As I argued back in 2004, there will be no correct answer to this debate — mandates, like realignments, are essentially a social construction:

The best work I’ve seen on this is a recent American Journal of Political Science article by Jim Stimson, David Peterson, and two other political scientists (236K PDF). They define a mandate as essentially a social construction – a collective interpretation of election results that carries an informational signal to nervous incumbents worried about re-election. In response, members of Congress deviate from their normal voting patterns in the direction of the mandate for some period of time, particularly those whose winning margins decreased in the previous election (they give this period a half-life of approximately 150 days). The authors provide some useful empirical tests of this hypothesis, examining the 1964, 1980 and 1994 elections as the three most recent “mandate” elections (based on coding of media content). 1980 appears to have had by far the biggest impact on individual Congressional voting behavior.

(3) Media Matters and I documented numerous commentators asserting that Bush had a “mandate” even though his victory was one of the narrowest by an incumbent president in American history. Will those same commentators declare that Obama has a mandate after what is likely to be a more convincing victory?

(4) The most important question, however, is whether a “mandate” response is even possible in 2009. The last perceived Democratic mandate was after the 1964 election. Since then, the GOP has become a vastly different party. In the current political context, it’s hard to imagine too many Republican incumbents voting for, say, Obama’s initial tax and budget proposals the way many Democrats did with Reagan in 1981. Won’t the Grover Norquists of the world threaten to back primary challengers against anyone who helps Obama pass his agenda?

Update 10/22 1:26 PM: Let the realignment claims begin! Beneath a loaded picture of Obama praying with a group of African Americans Drudge is touting a Zogby poll that John Zogby is suggesting could reveal a “realignment”:

Anything can happen, but time is running short for McCain. These numbers, if they hold, are blowout numbers. They fit the 1980 model with Reagan’s victory over Carter — but they are happening 12 days before Reagan blasted ahead. If Obama wins like this we can be talking not only victory but realignment…

For the record, Reagan received 55% of the two-party vote and 489 electoral votes. Obama may come close to Reagan’s popular vote numbers (Pollster.com has him at 53.7% of the two-party vote) but there’s no way Obama will equal that electoral vote total — Sam Wang’s meta-analysis currently predicts approximately 360 electoral votes with a 95% confidence interval of approximately 330 to 370.

Update 10/22 4:30 PM: After talking with my colleagues here at Duke, let me amend what I said about realignment. Obama’s election may be seen in retrospect as part of a realigning trend away from the Republicans. There’s no question that the 2006 and 2008 elections will represent a historic swing toward Democratic control of government. If you don’t believe me, look at the Pollster.com House and Senate maps. The question is whether the trend will continue in 2010 and whether Democratic dominance will persist long-term. We won’t know the answers to those questions with any certainty for a while.

Over the last few months, Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo blog has frequently been captured by a pernicious form of psychobabble about John McCain’s inner thoughts. But even by his standards, the post below — which consists entirely of a reader’s speculations about John McCain’s mental state — might represent a new low of McCain swami-dom:

TPM Reader HR puts McCain on the couch …

I’ve never really cared whether McCain was an honorable man who lost his way, or was never all that honorable in the first place. It’s seemed to me a distinction without a difference– I’m reminded of the debate in Pogo about whether The Odyssey was written by Homer, or another blind Greek poet of the same name.

That having been said, McCain’s defense of robocalling to Chris [Wallace’s] is
fascinating. It’s so evident that McCain is lying through his teeth–and knows it. But instead of feeling guilty, contrite (like a man of honor), or oblivious (like a sociopath), McCain just gets angrier.

I get the sense that the further he drifts from his (perhaps former) ideals, the angrier he gets at those who (in his mind) forced him to stray.

“My fellow prisoners” indeed.

Back in May of last year, I noted an aide to John McCain attacking Barack Obama’s past drug use (“Obama wouldn’t know the difference between an RPG and a bong”) and suggested that we might see a similar tactic this fall:

Given Obama’s racial background, the danger is that these attacks will be used to trigger ugly racial stereotypes about him, particularly once Republicans shift from bong jokes to talking about cocaine, which Obama admitted to trying in his first book.

So far, there’s been surprisingly little evidence of this, but trial balloons are being floated.

First, John McCain’s lawyer raised questions about why the New York Times had not tried to find Obama’s dealer in a response to an investigative article about CIndy McCain’s addiction to painkillers:

You have not tried to find Barack Obama’s drug dealer that he wrote about in his book, ‘Dreams of My Father.’

Then Rudy Giuliani returned to the issue on Fox News:

You can’t even — you can’t even raise these issues. And, you know, God forbid somebody would do some reporting on Barack Obama’s use of drugs. I guess that was the point that Mrs. McCain’s lawyer made.

Giuliani later backtracked, saying, “Now, I don’t think the Time should do that. I think, you know, the presidential campaigns have gotten bad enough. They shouldn’t do that.” But he had already put the line out on TV at that point.

In a historical context, it’s surprising how little racial imagery and rhetoric has been used against Obama. The efforts to portray him as a Muslim and associate him with terrorists have completely superseded his identity as an African American. But with John McCain calling Obama’s tax policies “welfare,” it’s not hard to see how Obama’s history with drugs could be used to appeal to similar stereotypes.

As noted earlier, I was a panelist in a forum at Duke on Muslim Americans and the 2008 election. Here are excerpts from some coverage in the local press:

Duke Today — Muslims and the 2008 Election:

Durham Herald Sun — Religion’s role in vote debated:

The Chronicle — Forum talks politics, the Muslim vote:

Another hot topic of discussion was the persistent rumor circling that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is a Muslim, and the effects of the adamant denial of the rumors.

Although Obama is a Christian, there is still a significant portion of people who either believe the opposite or are unsure of his religious affiliation, the panelists said.

The denouncements produce a negative affect on Muslims and Obama alike, as they feed the perception that something is wrong with being Muslim, Read said. Nyhan noted that when Obama brings up the subject, it reminds people of the controversy surrounding his identity.

Princeton’s Sam Wang has a nice summary of the perverse incentives that distort media coverage of the horse race:

It is not in the interest of individual pollsters or media organizations for you to have the most accurate possible picture of the horserace. Here is why.

Uncertainties such as the margin of error can be reduced by taking more samples…. The same is true for combining polls, with the added advantage of reducing the effects of methodological variation…

So why don’t more pollsters or media organizations aggregate polls?… Two forces encourage bad horserace reporting:

Competition among pollsters. It’s not in the interest of individual pollsters to say “average my results with the others.” It’s also not advantageous to collect a larger sample once the margin of error meets industry standards.

The hungry media beast. With news budgets on the decline, it’s costly to report real news. Why pay for investigative reporting when you can buy a poll and report the horserace? Within the area of poll reporting, market forces discourage high accuracy. For example, commissioning a survey of 4 times as many people would reduce uncertainty by a factor of two. But why pay 4 times as much for data that generate a lower likelihood of an apparent – and reportable – swing?