Brendan Nyhan

Back in December, I predicted that Barack Obama’s approval ratings could go as high as the low 70s by his inauguration. He didn’t quite get there, but his approval is in the low- to mid-60s after a week in office.

These are still striking numbers. For instance, Obama’s initial Gallup approval rating of 68 percent is the highest of any president since Kennedy, as Nate Silver’s graph illustrates:

With that said, however, Silver’s argument that “it is hard to mount a credible argument that Reagan began his term with more political capital than Obama” is bizarre.

Unlike Obama, Reagan unseated a first-term incumbent. He also received more electoral votes and a greater share of the two-party presidential vote than Obama did. The fact that Obama “won a lot more popular votes than Reagan did” and “his margin of victory was larger than Reagan’s in absolute (rather than percentage) terms” is an irrelevant consequence of population growth. (By Silver’s logic, almost any contemporary election would be considered more decisive than, say, Andrew Jackson’s 1832 landslide because of the larger absolute margin in the popular vote.)

Even more importantly, 1980 is one of the three previous contemporary elections that was widely perceived as a mandate election in Washington (along with 1964 and 1994) — a perception that caused Democrats to change their voting behavior in Congress in the election’s aftermath. There’s no perception of such a mandate this time around and Republicans are responding accordingly by
opposing Obama’s stimulus plan. In short, Obama may have a honeymoon in presidential approval, but he doesn’t have a mandate.

On Sunday, Jim Rutenberg of the New York Times described coverage of Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural, writing, “Then, as now, the Washington press corps seemed to revel in the search for meaning in every facial tic or expression of its subjects.”

This week, his newspaper did the same sort of mind-reading in its coverage. A news story by David E. Sanger asserts that “what [Obama] did say must have come as a bit of a shock to Mr. Bush…. [H]e had rarely been forced to sit in silence listening to a speech about how America had gone off the rails on his watch.”

The noted swami Maureen Dowd went even further, creating mock inner dialogue for Bush:

With W. looking on, and probably gradually realizing with irritation, as he did with Colbert, who Mr. Obama’s target was
— (Is he talking about me? Is 44 saying I messed everything up?) — the newly minted president let him have it:

“As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals,” he said to wild applause (and to Bartlett’s), adding: “Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience’s sake.” He said America is choosing hope over fear, unity over discord, setting aside “false promises” and “childish things.”

As I said in a post mocking Rutenberg, however, the problem is that the culture of the press corps does not allow for self-criticism of faux mind-reading in the present tense.

It’s infuriating to me when political journalists lack the most basic understanding of quantitative data. For instance, I just heard a podcast of an NPR story about President Bush’s political legacy in which Mara Liasson referred to “the president’s decisive re-election victory in 2004.” But as many people (including me) pointed out at the time, Bush’s win was hardly “decisive.” For instance, as Ron Brownstein noted, Bush’s Electoral College margin was the second narrowest for an incumbent since the passage of the 12th Amendment — only Woodrow Wilson got a lesser share of the available electoral votes.

Update 1/22 3:39 PM: In comments, David suggests that Bush’s victory was decisive with respect to the popular vote, but that’s not true either. As Brownstein points out, “Bush beat Kerry by just 2.9 percentage points: 51% to 48.1%. That’s the smallest margin of victory for a reelected president since 1828.”

Inaugural coverage officially jumped the shark yesterday with the publication of a McClatchy story investigating the “mystery” of why portable toilets at the event got less usage than expected:

Among other things, the inauguration of President Barack Obama was “the largest temporary toilet event in the history of the United States,” an official of Don’s Johns, the firm that provided most of them, said Wednesday.

Here’s the mystery, however: Did it have to be? According to Conrad Harrell, vice president of Don’s Johns in Chantilly, Va., most portables were about a quarter full Wednesday morning. Harrell had thought they’d be half full, as they are after most events.

Adam Carter, the operations manager for Alpine Portable Restrooms of Round Hill, Va., was puzzled, too. He said Wednesday that he’d “found whole rolls of unused toilet paper in some.”

Here are the possibilities: The planners overestimated demand. The crowd was so dense that people couldn’t get to them. The crowd chose to use Smithsonian museum restrooms, the better to escape temperatures in the 20s. Or the crowd thought ahead.

The evidence appears to support all those theories, and also to suggest a slight lack of enthusiasm.

Fascinating. I smell a Pulitzer in their future…

It’s rare to see reporters cite specific examples when criticizing their fellow journalists. That’s why Jim Rutenberg’s target of criticism in today’s New York Times Week in Review piece today was so amusing:

Then, as now, the Washington press corps seemed to revel in the search for meaning in every facial tic or expression of its subjects. A reporter for The Times noted that as Buchanan sat and waited for Lincoln to take his oath, he “sighed audibly, and frequently, but whether from reflection upon the failure of his administration, I can’t say.”

Apparently, the embargo on criticism of faux mind-reading in the Times is 148 years. I’m therefore projecting that Maureen Dowd and Adam Nagourney will come under scrutiny around, say, 2155 or 2156.

Back in April, I hailed the founding of The Analyst Institute as a sign of the experimental revolution that is taking place in campaign tactics. On Friday, Pollster.com’s Mark Blumenthal reported on a press briefing by TAI’s Todd Rogers describing the “record use” of experiments in 2008 by Democratic campaigns who were seking “to figure out exactly what impact their voter contact activities were having”:

The Catalist data make a strong case that Obama gained most among the voters that the Obama campaign and its allies targeted. But a complicated question remains: Did the field and media campaign activity cause the shift, or were the campaigns effectively piling on among voters that were the most likely to shift anyway? That question, as the Catalist analysts concede, is more difficult to answer with observational data, although within a few months they will add to their database records of which individuals actually voted in 2008, allowing for more analysis of which efforts helped boost turnout and which did not.

Of course, as all pollsters know, proving that sort of causation with this sort of data analysis is very difficult if not impossible. What works better are “randomized controlled experiments” that compare how randomly sampled voters exposed to an experimental “treatment” (in this case various campaign activities) compare to randomly sampled voters in “control groups” with no such exposure. Nine months ago, Brenden Nyhan blogged abut the founding of a new Democratic organization called the Analyst Institute , directed by a Harvard PhD named Todd Rogers. This development, Nyhan wrote, signaled that political operatives were “finally catching on” to the experimental work by Yale’s Alan Gerber and Donald Green on the effectiveness of campaign techniques.

Yesterday, Rogers confirmed Nyhan’s intuition. He drew back the curtain and provided a few examples of what he described as a “record use” of controlled experiments by the Democrats in 2008, used as they “had never been used before . . . to figure out exactly what impact their voter contact activities were having.”

One such experiment involved post election survey work conducted in 11 states by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) on both experimental and control groups of their members. In this case they held back a random sample “control group” of voter who received no contact from SEIU during the campaign. They then surveyed both the control group of non-contacts and a random sample of all the other voters who received campaign mail and other contact by SEIU.

What impact did the “hundreds of thousands” of targeted contacts SEIU make during the election have in “actually changing support for Obama?” According to Rogers, their post election survey found the “surprisingly positive effects” illustrated in the slide below. The campaign contacts “undermined McCain favorability, increased Obama favorability” and convinced voters that “Obama was better on jobs, the economy and health care,” exactly the messages communicated by the SEIU campaign.

As someone who worked as a Democratic pollster for twenty years (until turning to blogging full time in 2006), I can confirm the unprecedented nature of the the experimental work that Rogers describes. Similar experiments had been conducted before (I worked on a few), but these previous efforts were typically sporadic and scattershot. What is different now is both the scale and sophistication of the work and also — in one of the least understood aspects of campaign 2008 — the increased cooperation now occurring among Democratic party organizations, campaigns, and consultants to systematically study which campaign techniques work, and which do not.

These tactics will not only revolutionize campaigns but also allow political scientists to answer all sorts of previously unanswerable questions about what works, what doesn’t, and why.

Dignity alert — the mayor of Pittsburgh held a press conference to pretend to change his name from Ravenstahl to Steelerstahl:

To understand the depth of feeling here for the Steelers, consider the news conference Wednesday morning at the Allegheny County Department of Court Records.

There, Pittsburgh’s mayor, Luke Ravenstahl, filled out a Verified Petition for a Name Change in a ceremonial effort to convert his surname to Steelerstahl. It would be that way, he said, until the Steelers and the Ravens played Sunday for the American Football Conference title.

“We got a call yesterday from Star 100.7’s morning show D. J., who suggested that I take Ravens out of my name and insert Steelers,” said Ravenstahl, who is a rabid Steelers fan. “Of course I thought it was a great idea. I guess it’s the least I can do for Steeler Nation to try to show them support they deserve.”

Yes, it is all in good fun, and Mayor Luke, as many refer to the boyish-looking mayor of 28, laughed as he filled out the forms.

I don’t know anything about Ravenstahl or Pittsburgh politics, but when you’re a 28-year-old elected official, making a joke of yourself is pretty much never a good idea.

What is going on with Greg Mankiw? Since leaving the White House, the distinguished Harvard economist and former Bush administration CEA chair, whose statements about the revenue effects of tax cuts were repeatedly contradicted by White House officials without public comment by Mankiw, keeps suggesting that other politicians and economists are deviating from economic truths for political reasons.

Back in 2007, Mankiw criticized the implausible supply-side claims of John McCain, but the Harvard Crimson pointed out that Mitt Romney, who Mankiw was advising, had made nearly identical statements without rebuke from Mankiw. Similarly, Mankiw did not call out President Bush or other administration officials when they repeatedly suggested that tax cuts increase government revenue.

Then on Sunday, Mankiw suggested that contradiction existed between the conclusions reached by Obama’s incoming CEA chair, Christina Romer, and the stimulus approach Obama was promoting. Romer’s Berkeley colleague, Brad DeLong, vehemently defended her, stating that Mankiw had mischaracterized Romer’s beliefs and her research.

I share Mankiw’s concern with truth and accuracy in public statements about economics, but shouldn’t he start with his former employer before going after anyone else?

Supporters of Israel’s anti-Hamas offensive are attempting to shut down debate by calling opponents of the campaign “anti-Israel” — the same sort of tactic used here after 9/11 to try to shut down debate about the war on terror. It’s disturbingly familiar stuff.

That said, however, there is an interesting reversal in assumptions between the debate over dissent and the debate over the war itself. As usual, dissenters against Israel and their supporters stress the purity of their motives while critics accuse dissent of having the effect of aiding the enemy. But in the case of the war, supporters of Israel focus on the purity of its motives in trying to avoid harm to civilians while critics like Ezra Klein are stressing the all-too-predictable toll of the war on civilians in Gaza.

A student at Yale named Elizabeth Campbell sent me a paper reporting the results of an innovative field experiment she conducted. Campbell’s study evaluated the effects of displaying one’s political preferences on the service in New Haven restaurants by randomly assigning customers to wear different campaign buttons. The resulting service was evaluated with respect to several metrics of timeliness as well as whether the server attempted to return a “lost” letter left on the table containing $3 in cash and the customer’s contact information.

While Campbell’s empirical results are somewhat ambiguous, it’s striking that undergraduates are now carrying out field experiments — the methodology only came into widespread use among political scientists in the last five to ten years (largely as a result of the efforts of Yale’s Donald Green, who advised Campbell, and his colleague Alan Gerber). Hopefully this is an indication that the experimental revolution is moving forward…