Brendan Nyhan

Former Vice President Walter Mondale is the latest public figure to fall victim to the impossible-to-kill myth that the predictable decline in President Obama’s political standing is the result of a failure to “connect” rather than structural factors:

Mondale recalled that President Carter, as his standing in the polls slid, “began to lose confidence in his ability to move the public.” The President, he said, should have “got out front earlier with the bad news and addressed the people more.” He sees a similar problem with Obama: “I think he needs to get rid of those teleprompters, and connect. He’s smart as hell. He can do it. Look right into those cameras and tell people he’s hurting right along with them.” Carter, on the other hand, he said, might not have been able to. “At heart, he was an engineer,” Mondale said. “He wanted to sit down and come up with the right answers, and then explain it. He didn’t like to do a lot of emotional public speaking.”

The Washington Post’s Dan Balz frames the issue similarly, suggesting it’s some sort of mystery why Obama “has had so much difficulty making a connection with voters on economic issues” in the context of what is arguably the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression:

One of the persistent mysteries about the president is why someone who began his adult life as a community organizer, working with economically displaced workers in Chicago, has had so much difficulty making a connection with voters on economic issues. That was a problem during his presidential campaign. From the questions on Monday, it remains a problem today.

Salon’s Steve Kornacki does a fantastic job illustrating why these claims are nonsense in a retrospective on Bill Clinton in 1994 (disclosure: I cross-post on Salon). Just as with Reagan in 1982 (see here and here), an unfavorable political environment overwhelmed Clinton’s ability to “connect”:

It’s tempting — really, really tempting — to watch Bill Clinton on television these days and to say, “Gee, the Democrats would be much better off right now if he were in the White House instead of Barack Obama”…

We’re hearing a lot of this kind of talk this week, with Clinton back in the news, thanks to his annual global summit in New York…

Clinton, pundits are now telling us, embodies the magic formula that Obama is missing…

This is true, but only to a point. Yes, Clinton was — and is — one of the most effective communicators the Democratic Party has ever produced. But his gift for persuasion had sharp and clear limits while he was president, and when he was faced with a political climate like the one Obama now confronts, it was utterly useless.

That was in the 1994 midterm elections, the last time before this year that a Democratic president’s party controlled both chambers of Congress. The economy wasn’t as feeble, but Clinton had been weakened by a series of public relations blunders and by the success of congressional Republicans in stalling major pieces of his agenda (a stimulus package, healthcare reform, and a crime bill, mainly) and making Clinton seem ineffective. His poll numbers were slightly weaker than Obama’s are now and the prospects for his party weren’t good.

Nonetheless, Clinton hit the campaign trail with vigor, believing that he could talk and emote his way to a decent November result. And if you look back now and read Clinton’s campaign trail words — or watch him in action — you’ll quickly realize that all of the magical-seeming traits we now celebrate were on full display…

In short, Bill Clinton was Bill Clinton in the 1994 midterms — and his party still got massacred. The GOP still won 52 House seats and won the chamber for the first time since 1954, and it still won eight Senate seats to control that body for the first time in eight years. And when the dust settled, the political world — Republicans, Democrats and the media — was united in one conclusion: Clinton was a goner in 1996. The country had tuned him out. He had lost his ability to “connect.”

His experience is well worth keeping in mind now. We like to think that personality, message and campaign tactics are what define elections — that the good politicians are the ones who put all of this together in a way that trumps structural factors like the economy. But that’s just not how it works. Clinton’s words — no matter how masterfully crafted and articulated — fell on deaf ears in 1994, just as Obama’s are mostly falling on deaf ears today. It was only when favorable structural factors were again present that Clinton began “connecting” again. Obama’s style may be different than Clinton’s, but it already played well with the general public once, and it can again — if favorable structural factors return.

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

Is Sarah Palin the frontrunner for the 2012 GOP nomination? That’s the claim that’s been made by some prominent commentators (here, here, and here), but it’s wildly premature. There’s a reason that the Intrade futures market currently puts the odds of Palin winning the nomination at 18% (behind Mitt Romney and John Thune) — in particular, her terrible poll numbers.

It’s worth underscoring just how bad Palin’s numbers are. The closest comparison to her is probably Hillary Clinton, another female politician with high unfavorables entering an anticipated presidential campaign. But even Clinton had much better numbers than Palin at this point in 2006:

Also, though Palin’s ability to raise money and turn out crowds has made her a star within the party, it’s unlikely that she will enjoy anything near the level of elite support that helped get Clinton so close to the Democratic nomination.

I’ve looked back through polls on possible presidential candidates at this stage in the election cycle, and it’s difficult to locate an appropriate comparison for Palin. Besides Clinton, the best comparison might be to Dan Quayle, a former vice president with extremely high unfavorables who was widely perceived as not ready to be president. As a result (presumably), Quayle ultimately decided not to run in 1996 and 2000 dropped out of the field before Iowa in 2000. Similarly, though he was perceived as competent, high unfavorables may have helped dissuade Al Gore from running again in 2004 and 2008. Here’s how Quayle, Gore, Clinton, and Palin’s favorable/unfavorable numbers compare from the Gallup poll question closest to this point in the current electoral cycle:

Obviously, neither Quayle nor Gore inspired the sort of adulation that Palin does today, but there’s a reason that they didn’t run. Given that Palin can make millions if she stays out of electoral politics, I’d put the odds of her running at less than the current Intrade estimate of 69%.

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

Dear New York Times –

Please don’t allow banner ads like this on your site (click image for larger version):

It’s absurd and offensive to compare the Tea Party to “Nazi Brownshirts”; also, the grammar is wrong.

Thanks,
Brendan

Today’s New York Times includes a front-page story on a new poll headlined “Poll Suggests Opportunities for Both Parties”. In the lede, Jeff Zeleny and Megan Thee-Brenan note the signs pointing to a Republican sweep, but note “while voters rate the performance of Democrats negatively, they view Republicans as even worse, providing a potential opening for Democrats”:

Republicans are heading into the general election phase of the midterm campaign backed by two powerful currents: the highest proportion of voters in two decades say it is time for their own member of Congress to be replaced, and Americans are expressing widespread dissatisfaction with President Obama’s leadership.

But the latest New York Times/CBS News poll also finds that while voters rate the performance of Democrats negatively, they view Republicans as even worse, providing a potential opening for Democrats to make a last-ditch case for keeping their hold on power.

Is this really true? Will the poor state of the GOP brand limit the party’s gains in November? I made this argument months ago (see here, here, and here), but the Republican party’s image hasn’t prevented it from taking a substantial lead in the generic ballot.

To review the evidence about where the GOP brand stands relative to the opposition party in previous midterm elections, let me update my post from last October. Here’s a bar chart of each party’s net favorable ratings (% favorable – % unfavorable) for the most comparable available CBS poll from midterm elections between 1990 and 2010*:

The GOP’s net favorability ratings relative to Democrats are still worse than any opposition party in the previous five midterm elections (the closest comparison is 1998, when Republicans were seeking to remove Bill Clinton from office).

In the past, the opposition party’s (dis)advantage in net favorability relative to the president’s party has been relatively highly correlated (r=.71) with changes in the number of House seats in midterm elections. However, a simple linear fit shows a totally implausible result for 2010 (Republicans losing 17 seats):

I’m not buying it. At this point, every other major factor (the high number of seats Democrats currently hold, the fact that it’s a midterm election, and the generic ballot) points toward big GOP gains — the predicted result of most House forecasting models. Unfortunately for Democrats, midterm elections are a referendum, not a choice.

Update 9/17 9:09 AM: Barry Pump points out that the net favorability advantage appears to be a better predictor in the last five midterms than the generic ballot. It’s very hard to say what will happen. As he points out, this is uncharted territory:

First, we’ve never been in a situation until now — as far as we have data to show it — where both parties were disliked but one party was disliked far more than another. We’ve also never been in a situation where the difference between the favorability rankings of the two parties was as great as it is now. (That’s from the first graph.)

Second, we’ve yet to be in a situation until now — as far as we have data to show it — where the favorability rankings of the two parties were so discordant with the generic ballot.

* I focus on net favorables rather than net approval of the parties in Congress (which Zeleny and Thee-Brenan cite) because the available data is more comprehensive and the measure is less confounded with feelings about Congress as an institution.

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