Brendan Nyhan

Yesterday, I questioned Nate Silver’s argument that the GOP’s chances of unseating President Obama in 2012 were weakened by the party’s lack of high-favorability presidential candidates. Last night, he responded, showing that favorability ratings for presidential candidates are relatively stable across the primary process. He suggests this disproves my claim that early primary polls “don’t matter” and are “useless”:

Even at this early stage, polls tell us something — not everything, not a lot, but something — about how the candidates are liable to be perceived next year following the primaries.

In contrast, Mr. Nyhan has written that early primary polls “don’t matter” and that they are “useless” — and several other bloggers have echoed these statements. That just isn’t true. Yes, as a first approximation, the rule of thumb “don’t pay much attention to early primary polls” is probably better than “pay a lot of attention to early primary polls,” given the way that the media tends to overrate their importance. But Mr. Nyhan’s statement is hyperbolic.

There are a number of problems here. First, Silver is confusing two different arguments. My statements that early primary polls “don’t matter” and are “useless” are drawn from a different post concerning the utility of primary horse-race and straw polls for predicting a party’s eventual presidential nominee. The fact that candidate favorability doesn’t change much during primaries in no way undermines that claim.

Second, the fact that candidate favorability is somewhat stable during the primary process doesn’t mean it’s ultimately a significant predictor of the general election outcome. As Silver later acknowledges, only one candidate is nominated by either party — whether the favorability of Pat Buchanan or another losing candidate changes is irrelevant. My post yesterday focused on this point, and I stand by it.

To illustrate the burden of proof that Silver’s argument must meet, consider how well presidential election outcomes can be predicted using extremely simple models. Here is a plot from Douglas Hibbs’s Bread and Peace model, which explains almost 90% of the variation in the last 15 presidential election outcomes using just two variables — real per-capita income growth and military fatalities:

The model fits the data extremely well, leaving very little residual variation for additional predictors to explain. Moreover, only one of the two biggest outliers fits Silver’s hypothesis. It’s possible, for instance, that George W. Bush’s advantage in favorability helped him overperform against Al Gore in 2000. However, Bob Dole significantly underperformed in 1996 despite having much better early-stage favorability ratings.

The mechanism for this result is that candidates tend to converge to the support level we expect from the fundamentals over time. Consider the example of John McCain. Due to his high favorability ratings, many Beltway insiders perceived him as a formidable general election candidate. But as I predicted back in 2005, his favorability ratings declined over the course of the campaign and he ended up receiving almost exactly the vote share that forecasting models predicted.

My take on this issue is consistent with the argument that Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels made in an edited volume in 2002 (gated). In that chapter, he examined perceptions of personal traits — a more fine-grained measure of candidate characteristics — and concluded that “candidates’ images are largely epiphenomenal and have only a modest impact on election outcomes”:

The aim of this chapter is to provide a systematic test of the conventional wisdom that personality is key in contemporary American electoral politics. Using survey data from the six most recent presidential elections, the contours are examines of the candidates’ images (traits), the bases of those images in voters’ more fundamental political predispositions, and the impact of voters’ assessments of the candidates’ personal qualities on individual voting behaviour and on aggregate election outcomes. In stark contrast with the popular conception of contemporary electoral politics as candidate–centred and image–driven, it is argued that candidates’ images are largely epiphenomenal and have only a modest impact on election outcomes. This conclusion is underlined by the analysis given of the 2000 (Bush vs. Gore) presidential election, in which the estimated impact of voters’ assessments of the candidates’ personalities was even smaller than in the previous five elections considered here, although quite probably large enough to be decisive in an election decided by a few hundred votes in a single state.

As in the Bush v. Gore case, anything can matter if the election is close enough. Likewise, nominating a candidate with unprecedented negatives like Sarah Palin would likely cause the GOP to underperform in 2012. Otherwise, however, it’s not clear to me that Republicans are significantly less likely to win the presidency as a result of the candidates who are running.

[Cross-posted to HuffPost Pollster]

I’ve previously downplayed concerns that the GOP field is weak since challengers to an incumbent president usually seem flawed at this point in the election cycle. Yesterday, however, Nate Silver made a more sophisticated argument, claiming that the GOP field is relatively weak in terms of the public profiles of its candidates. He compared the favorable/unfavorable ratings of the leading Republican candidates to the ratings of the leading Democratic and Republican candidates in 2000, 2004, and 2008, and found the current candidates don’t measure up.

If we broaden the data to include the 1992 and 1996 election cycles, however, the picture becomes more muddled. Consider the favorability data for possible Democratic contenders from a Gallup poll in April 1991 (I’ve bolded the ones who eventually ran; Jerry Brown, Tom Harkin, and Bob Kerrey weren’t included in the poll):

• Lloyd Bentsen (40% favorable/25% unfavorable)
• Bill Clinton (15%/12%)
• Mario Cuomo (48%/22%)
• Richard Gephardt (49%/16%)
• Al Gore (41%/16%)
• Jesse Jackson (42%/52%)
• Dave McCurdy (7%/12%)
• George McGovern (36%/39%)
• George Mitchell (26%/13%)
• Charles Robb (17%/11%
• Stephen Solarz (12%/12%)
• Paul Tsongas (15%/12%)
• Douglas Wilder (25%/14%)

None of the candidates who ran had an especially strong public profile relative to George H.W. Bush (80% favorable, 19% unfavorable in a July 1991 ABC poll). And yet Bill Clinton, who started out with relatively modest numbers (15% favorable/12% unfavorable), ended up unseating a president who many thought would be unbeatable. The key factor? A slow economy.

We can observe the opposite lesson from the 1996 presidential election cycle. Consider the favorability profiles of the possible GOP candidates that Gallup polled in February 1995 (eventual candidates are again indicated in bold):

• Lamar Alexander (17% favorable/17% unfavorable)
• Pat Buchanan (30%/45%)
  

• Bob Dole (73%/19%)
• Newt Gingrich (43%/40%)
  

• Phil Gramm (38%/16%)
  

• Richard Lugar (14%/12%)
• Dan Quayle (47%/50%)
  

• Arlen Specter (17%/20%)
• William Weld (13%/11%)
  

• Pete Wilson (37%/21%)

The Republicans seemed to have a relatively strong group of candidates in terms of favorability ratings, including Bob Dole, who had absurdly high numbers (73% favorable!). By contrast, a March 1995 Gallup poll put President Clinton’s ratings at 51% favorable/45% unfavorable. However, once Dole became a candidate and Democrats became more critical of him, his numbers declined. By contrast, Clinton’s numbers improved as the economy grew and he ended up beating Dole soundly in the 1996 election.

Silver is right that the current GOP field lacks a widely praised figure who is held in esteem by both Democrats and Republicans, which may be a reflection of the candidates who have chosen to run or the increasingly polarized nature of our country’s politics. It’s not clear, however, that the absence of such a figure will matter. The reality is that the economy plays a dominant role in presidential outcomes. To be sure, public reputations may matter in relatively extreme cases. In the past, for instance, I’ve argued that Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin might underperform in the general election due to their polarizing public profiles (you could make the same argument for Newt Gingrich or other especially unpopular candidates). Other than Palin, however, it’s not clear that the composition of the Republican field will matter much for the GOP’s chances in 2012. The numbers that ultimately matter are economic growth, not early-stage polling.

Update 2/15 10:42 AM: I forgot the best example of all — the last challenger to unseat an incumbent before Clinton. In January 1979, Ronald Reagan’s poll ratings were 38% favorable/39% unfavorable in a Cambridge Reports survey (compared to 46%/43% for Carter) but he ended up sweeping the Electoral College in 1980 as a result of the terrible economy. Romney and Huckabee are starting from a similar position. If the economy is bad enough, they’ll win too.

Update 2/15 2:15 PM: More from Jonathan Bernstein. See also my Twitter feed and Silver’s for more.

Update 2/16 10:57 AM: I’ve posted a reply to Silver’s new post.

[Cross-posted to HuffPost Pollster]

The political press is eagerly awaiting the results of the straw poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference, which is supposed to serve as a barometer of the presidential candidate preferences of conservative elites. Unfortunately, if you look at CPAC’s track record, the straw poll is not a meaningful predictor of eventual GOP presidential nominees. If we focus on straw polls one or more years before a presidential election (like this one), here are the winners (verified from Wikipedia):

• 1986: Jack Kemp
• 1987: Jack Kemp
• 1993: Jack Kemp
• 1995: Phil Gramm
• 1998: Steve Forbes
• 1999: Gary Bauer
• 2005: Rudy Giuliani
• 2006: George Allen
• 2007: Mitt Romney
• 2009: Mitt Romney
• 2010: Ron Paul

Do you see any presidential nominees on there? Me neither. Even in presidential election years, the eventual nominee only won the CPAC straw poll in two of four cases where there was a contested primary (correct: 1980, 2000; incorrect: 1976, 2008). The same pattern is likely to apply this year. Ron Paul is reportedly favored to win this year, and he will almost surely not be the Republican nominee.

The horse race polls of Republican presidential candidates that the media has been hyping (latest example here) are similarly useless at this stage in the game. Just as a reminder, consider who was leading in horse race polls at a comparable stage in the election cycle for parties who didn’t have an incumbent president running for re-election:

• January 1979 (GOP): Gerald Ford (Cambridge Reports)
• January 1983 (Dem): Walter Mondale (Harris)
• January 1987 (Dem): Gary Hart (CBS/NYT)
• January 1987 (GOP): George H.W. Bush (CBS/NYT)
• September 1991 (Dem): Jerry Brown (ABC; no earlier polls available)
• January 1995 (GOP): Bob Dole (CBS)
• January 1999 (GOP): George W. Bush (Time/CNN)
• January 1999 (Dem): Al Gore (Time/CNN)
• January 2003 (Dem): Joe Lieberman (Gallup/CNN/USA Today)
• February 2007 (Dem): Hillary Clinton (Quinnipiac; no earlier polls available)
  
• January 2007 (GOP): Rudy Giuliani (Fox)

If we exclude sitting vice presidents (George H.W. Bush, Al Gore) and the vice president from the previous administration (Walter Mondale), the horse race polls only correctly predict the nominee two times out of eight (Bob Dole and George W. Bush). At this point in the election cycle, the preferences that matter are those of the activists, elected officials, donors, and party elites who take part in the so-called “invisible primary.” Media hype of public opinion surveys and straw polls only serves to obscure where the meaningful action is taking place.

Update 5/9 2:54 PM: See my response to Nate Silver for more.

[Cross-posted to HuffPost Pollster]

Blogger and political scientist Jonathan Bernstein has an excellent op-ed in the New York Times today about how President Obama has failed to push for his judicial nominees to be confirmed:

[T]he Democrats share a large part of the blame… For one thing, the president has named only nine judges for the 17 appeals court vacancies and only 41 judges for the 85 open district court seats. That’s significantly fewer nominations than Presidents George W. Bush or Bill Clinton had sent to Congress by this time in their first terms.

Moreover, unlike President Bush, President Obama has not used his bully pulpit to push for Senate confirmation of his nominations. Fairly or not, President Bush regularly lambasted Democrats for blocking an “up or down” vote on his nominees. Yet for all the recent chatter about a Republican-fueled judicial crisis, the president rarely speaks about the issue in public, and he didn’t mention it in his recent State of the Union address.

This behavior from Obama is consistent with his failure to push his nominees for the Federal Reserve, arguably the most important factor in determining the state of the economy in 2012 (and thus his re-election). As Bob Kuttner writes, “He has governed as if his sole task were legislative.” I don’t share Kuttner’s Green Lantern-esque fantasies about Obama changing public opinion, but it’s clear that the president has focused on legislation to the exclusion of his power as the leader of the executive branch. While there may have been good reasons to do so given the historic majorities Democrats enjoyed, Obama’s neglect of his institutional powers is likely to have significant long-term consequences for both his presidency and his party.

Update 2/10 9:50 AM: John Sides responds by asking if there is any good reporting on this issue:

[H]ere’s my question. Obama is a smart guy. His people are smart people. No doubt they are well aware of the benefits of stocking the courts with left-leaning judges and ditto for the Fed.

So, I’m curious. Does anyone know why they haven’t done it? Is it really just that — a la Robert Kuttner — they prioritize legislation more? Is there some evidence that they actually don’t care so much about the courts or the Fed? Is there some sort of organizational dysfunction within the White House? Is it the vetting? Or do they just not get it? What?

I’ve never seen any good reporting on this, although I easily could have missed something. Anyone is welcome to weigh in.

It is puzzling. I once suggested to a reporter that they cover this issue (to no avail). Are John and I missing coverage in this area? Or is it too boring for reporters?

I predicted back in November that No Labels would fizzle, but it’s remarkable to see the lack of interest. Despite widespread media coverage and a December launch event that drew numerous high-profile politicians, the group has only managed to attract 18,697 signatures for its No Labels Declaration (“We are not labels – we are people”). It’s the same tepid response we saw to Unity ’08 (124,000 members in twenty months) and Draft Bloomberg (11,600 signatures in six weeks) during the 2006-2008 period.

To put these results in perspective, here’s how the No Labels, Unity ’08, and Draft Bloomberg efforts compare to a petition asking the videogame company Blizzard Entertainment to include a LAN option in Starcraft 2, which reached 250,000 signatures in a little over a year*:

As you can see, No Labels is barely outpacing Draft Bloomberg, though it is doing better than Unity ’08. All three, however, are dwarfed by the Starcraft 2 petition, which just underscores a point I’ve made many times before — despite all the media hype, these groups have little popular support and almost no chance of changing the system.

* I constructed these lines using time-stamped blog posts by myself and others noting the number of signatures on each petition.

[Cross-posted to HuffPost Pollster]