Brendan Nyhan

Jon Chait debunks a second species of presidential Green Lanternism at his TNR blog. Rather than asserting that the president’s failure to achieve a policy goal is a result of insufficient will, American Prospect co-editor Robert Kuttner suggests on the Huffington Post that Obama’s political problems are due to a lack of resolve to pursue a more liberal economic agenda:

Come November, as Republicans break out champagne, the usual commentators will offer the usual alibis and silver linings.

The party of the newly elected president always loses Congressional seats. Not always: viz. Roosevelt, 1934, or Bush II, 2002. The two men shared nothing, except resolve in a crisis. That should tell you something. Where’s Obama’s resolve?

But as Chait argues, there’s little evidence that “resolve” is why FDR and Bush did so well in those elections:

[T]he general trend is that midterm elections are bad for the president’s party, and slow income growth is even worse. Ronald Reagan had a lot of “resolve,” but he still lost a lot of seats in 1982.

Kuttner cites two notable exceptions to the pattern of the president’s party losing midterm election seats. The first is 2002. I think it’s pretty clear that the 9/11 attacks had an unusually powerful role here. The second is 1934… Is that another exception? Actually, no. Personal income grew an astronomical 12.7% in 1934.

So we’re down to one exception to the rule: 2002. Locating a single exception to a well-established trend is not a good reason to ignore the trend.

What’s fascinating is that this brand of Green Lanternism — like the policy one — is almost a perfect inverse of what conservatives were saying about George W. Bush just a few years ago, a fact that seems to be lost on the liberals espousing it now. For instance, Jonah Goldberg suggested back in 2006 that Bush would be more popular if he were more conservative on domestic policy:

Perhaps this unnoticed fact [Bush’s alleged liberalism on domestic issues] explains part of Bush’s falling poll numbers more than most observers are willing to admit. The modern conservative movement, from Goldwater to Reagan, was formed as a backlash against Nixonism. Today, Reaganite conservatives make up a majority of the Republican party. If Bush held the Reaganite line on liberty at home the way he does on liberty abroad, he’d be in a lot better shape. After all, if Bush’s own base supported him at their natural level, his job-approval numbers wouldn’t be stellar, but they wouldn’t have his enemies cackling, either.

These beliefs are a sort of ideological Mad Libs — if only the president were more ________ [liberal/conservative], he’d _________ [be more popular/enact the agenda I want]. It’s apparently a comforting belief, but one that’s rarely true.

Update 7/7 12:13 PM: For those who don’t know the background, I coined the Green Lantern
theory of the presidency as a riff on Matthew Yglesias’s Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics. Here’s an excerpt from his original post:

As you may know, the Green Lantern Corps is a sort of interstellar peacekeeping force set up by the Guardians of Oa to maintain the peace and defend justice. It recruits members from all sorts of different species and equips them with the most powerful weapon in the universe, the power ring.

The ring is a bit goofy. Basically, it lets its bearer generate streams of green energy that can take on all kinds of shapes. The important point is that, when fully charged what the ring can do is limited only by the stipulation that it create green stuff and by the user’s combination of will and imagination. Consequently, the main criterion for becoming a Green Lantern is that you need to be a person capable of “overcoming fear” which allows you to unleash the ring’s full capacities. It used to be the case that the rings wouldn’t function against yellow objects, but this is now understood to be a consequence of the “Parallax fear anomaly” which, along with all the ring’s other limits, can be overcome with sufficient willpower.

Suffice it to say that I think all this makes an okay premise for a comic book. But a lot of people seem to think that American military might is like one of these power rings. They seem to think that, roughly speaking, we can accomplish absolutely anything in the world through the application of sufficient military force. The only thing limiting us is a lack of willpower.

What’s more, this theory can’t be empirically demonstrated to be wrong. Things that you or I might take as demonstrating the limited utility of military power to accomplish certain kinds of things are, instead, taken as evidence of lack of will.

[Cross-posted to Pollster.com]

From my Twitter feed:
–Congressional oversimplification alert: “We could cut unemployment in half… by reclaiming the jobs taken by illegal workers”
-New version of Fox News junk chart — Edward Tufte sheds another tear (part one in the series)
-Newsmax ruled out of Newsweek bidding — good news for journalism
-Bob Herbert goes Green Lantern in a column claiming Obama could have achieved vast liberal agenda if he’d only tried harder
-A new low: report on John Edwards dancing to Wreckx-N-Effect’s “Rump Shaker” with grad students
-Larry King’s TV show is ending, but he’s best via Twitter. Who can forget this? “Of all the muffins, corn is my favorite”
-See Mark Blumenthal and Charles Franklin on the desperate need for more transparency in polling

Sean Trende at Real Clear Politics objects to my post on Peggy Noonan’s mystical interpretations of presidential popularity and mounts a defense of non-quantitative punditry:

Non-quantitative punditry has a huge place in our discourse for many reasons, including one that is directly applicable here… [T]he most applicable problem here is that there is always a large portion of the data that have to be explained qualitatively.

For example, take the Presidential Approval models. There are any number of them out there, but all of them have a significant portion of the variation in Presidential approval (or variance, in geekspeak) that the model just can’t account for. Even for models that make political scientists giggle with glee at the high r-square they’ve produced, there will still be about 10 to 20% of the data that the model won’t explain. Political scientists like to call this “error,” but it isn’t really “error.” It’s just “other stuff we can’t readily turn into data”…

All we know is that there is always going to be a large portion of data — whether it be presidential approval, congressional midterm elections, or presidential election results — that can’t be easily explained quantitatively. This is where qualitative analysts like Noonan will always be valuable.

Trende points to the loss of approval Reagan suffered after Iran-Contra that was unrelated to the state of the economy, and the fact that Clinton didn’t suffer a similar drop during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.*

I think Trende is largely doing battle with a straw man here — I don’t disagree in principle with any of these points. There’s no question that factors other than the economy affect presidential approval (for instance, any well-specified model includes political events such as Iran-Contra), and there’s no question that qualitative insights can help us understand why presidential approval deviates from what we might otherwise expect given the state of the economy.

Instead, my point in the original post was to criticize the tendency of pundits to invent elaborate rationales for presidential approval ratings or election results while neglecting or ignoring the role played by the economy. In both Noonan quotes, she briefly acknowledges the possible role played by the economy in explaining Bill Clinton’s popularity and Barack Obama’s political difficulties before deviating into characteristically involved accounts of why the most important explanatory factor is instead whether presidents are “snakebit” or have sufficiently clarified “The Sentence.”

Since Obama took office, TNR’s Jon Chait has dubbed the Republican version of this tendency the “Wehner fallacy” after former Bush administration official Peter Wehner. Here’s how Chait explains it:

[A] recurring theme in Republican commentary has been to ignore the economy in assessing the public’s sour mood toward the party in power, and to assert that disapproval of the Democrats is entirely a function of public revulsion at the liberal agenda. One could make a case that the Democrats have politically overreached. I disagree. But to characterize the backlash as driven entirely by concerns about policy, without mentioning the pull of an economic crisis that began before Obama took office, is not an argument that any political scientist, or even a candid pollster or political adviser, would take seriously. It’s pure propaganda.

We can observe a similar version of this problem in punditry about presidential campaigns. Elections typically converge to an outcome quite close to what we would expect given the fundamentals (principally, the state of the economy), but pundits instead attribute these outcomes to campaign events, debates, etc. in a manner that is frequently inconsistent with the evidence (see, for example, here, here, and here).

I have no problem with punditry that helps try to explain deviations from expected presidential approval ratings or election outcomes given the state of the economy. But pundits who try to substitute their own made-up stories for the economy as the primary explanatory factor are peddling nonsense.

* Though Clinton’s ratings did not decline, it does not follow that the Lewinsky affair had no effect on his approval ratings. Brian Newman’s research (gated) concludes that the Lewinsky scandal suppressed likely gains in Clinton’s approval ratings in 1998.

[Cross-posted at Pollster.com]

Given the findings about possible non-random discrepancies in Research 2000 polls that were published yesterday on Daily Kos and similar results from Nate Silver, I’ve added the following disclosure to previous posts that cite Research 2000 polls:

[Update (6/30/10): Serious questions have been raised about the validity of Research 2000’s polls. The results discussed below should thus be viewed as potentially suspect until the matter is resolved.]

More work is needed to fully analyze these results (the planned lawsuit by Daily Kos may also reveal relevant evidence), but the disclosure seems necessary given the cloud of suspicion around Research 2000 at this point.

Jonathan Chait had a great post a couple of weeks ago that’s worth revisiting because of what it tells us about how pundits reason about politics.

As Chait noted, political scientists have established that presidential election outcomes are largely a function of the state of the economy, particularly in an election year (the same principle applies to presidential approval). And yet pundits routinely invent elaborate narratives to “explain” these outcomes in terms of strategy, tactics, personality, etc.

One case in point is the Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan, who blunders into this issue in a revealing passage from a recent column:

The president is starting to look snakebit. He’s starting to look unlucky, like Jimmy Carter. It wasn’t Mr. Carter’s fault that the American diplomats were taken hostage in Tehran, but he handled it badly, and suffered. He defied the rule of the King in “Pippin,” the Broadway show of Carter’s era, who spoke of “the rule that every general knows by heart, that it’s smarter to be lucky than it’s lucky to be smart.” Mr. Carter’s opposite was Bill Clinton, on whom fortune smiled with eight years of relative peace and a worldwide economic boom. What misfortune Mr. Clinton experienced he mostly created himself. History didn’t impose it.

But Mr. Obama is starting to look unlucky, and–file this under Mysteries of Leadership–that is dangerous for him because Americans get nervous when they have a snakebit president. They want presidents on whom the sun shines.

But as Chait points out, there’s nothing mysterious about it:

Toward the end of the first paragraph, Noonan wanders toward the basic reality of the situation — people liked Clinton because the economy was booming — before returning to the familiar embrace of mysticism (Americans get “nervous” when the president appears “snakebit.”) Rather than seeing this as demonstrating a basic correlation, she calls this the “Mysteries of Leadership.”

The same principle applies to Obama. It has nothing to do with being “snakebit”; he is presiding over a weak economy, a context which magnifies all of his political difficulties.

It turns out that Noonan has made similar claims before. Here, for example, is a June 2009 column in which she briefly acknowledges that the state of the economy may be hurting Obama but then argues that his real problem is the lack of what she calls “The Sentence”:

Something seems off with our young president. He appears jarred. Difficult history has come over the transom. He seemed defensive and peevish with the press in his Tuesday news conference, and later with Charlie Gibson on health care, when he got nailed by a neurologist who suggested the elites who support a national program seem not to mind rationing for other people but very much mind if for themselves.

All this followed the president’s first bad numbers. From Politico, on Tuesday: “Eroding confidence in President Barack Obama’s handling of the economy and ability to control spending have caused his approval ratings to wilt to their lowest level since taking office, according to a spate of recent polls.” Independents and some Republicans who once viewed him sympathetically are “becoming skeptical.”

You can say this is due to a lot of things, and it probably is, most especially the economy, which all the polls mentioned. But I think at bottom his problems come down to this: The Sentence. And the rough sense people have that he’s not seeing to it.

The Sentence comes from a story Clare Boothe Luce told about a conversation she had in 1962 in the White House with her old friend John F. Kennedy. She told him, she said, that “a great man is one sentence.” His leadership can be so well summed up in a single sentence that you don’t have to hear his name to know who’s being talked about. “He preserved the union and freed the slaves,” or, “He lifted us out of a great depression and helped to win a World War.”

But again, this is silliness. If the economy was strong, public perceptions about “The Sentence” wouldn’t be a political problem. What was Bill Clinton’s “Sentence” in his second term? (Indeed, Noonan has argued that Reagan “knew, going in, the sentence he wanted, and he got it” and yet his approval ratings still declined substantially when the economy was bad in 1982.)

The underlying problem is that Noonan and other pundits have strong professional incentives to construct these ad hoc explanations, which emphasize their own expertise in narrative construction and dramatize politics for public consumption. Until more pundits recognize the potential advantages of incorporating political science into their work, mysticism and superstition will continue to dominate.

Update 7/1 9:22 AM: See this post for more.

[Cross-posted to Pollster.com]

From my Twitter feed:
-A new 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair poll finds 24% 13% of Americans still believe Obama wasn’t born in US (update: and 11% aren’t sure)
–Insanely bad job loss chart on Fox News — somewhere Edward Tufte is crying…
–A smart post on the economic incentives for “objectivity” that the Weigel debate has been missing (more on this later)
–Interesting quote: “One cannot both be a progressive and be opposed to pension reform”
-NYT’s Adam Liptak draws on research by political scientists and legal scholars in Kagan confirmation story
-Steve Forbes pushes the myth that tax cuts increase revenue — a claim that was repeatedly rejected by Bush administration economists — in a Wall Street Journal op-ed

Charles M. Blow, the “visual Op-Ed columnist” for the New York Times, has discovered a magical ability to plumb the inner workings of President Obama’s psyche:

On the other side stands Obama — solid and sober, rooted in the belief that his way is the right way and in no need of alteration. He’s the emotionally maimed type who lights up when he’s stroked and adored but shuts down in the face of acrimony. Other people’s anxieties are dismissed as irrational and unworthy of engagement or empathy. He seems quite comfortable with this aspect of his personality, even if few others are, and shows little desire to change it. It’s the height of irony: the presumed transformative president is stymied by his own unwillingness to be transformed. He would rather sacrifice the relationship than be altered by it.

As Bob Somerby points out, it’s a close approximation of the faux mind-reading style pioneered by Maureen Dowd. Like her, it may make him rich and famous, but as a matter of fact it’s baseless speculation. As such, I’ve added my own suggestion for the appropriate visual to accompany the column above.

At the end of last week, the disclosure of off-the-record emails sent by Washington Post blogger Dave Weigel created a controversy that led to his resignation from the newspaper. One such email quoted by the Daily Caller stated the following:

“Tangentially related: Betsy McCaughey showed up at Grover Norquist’s conservative meeting today, massive spiral-bound health care bill in hand, and shook with rage as she promised that the ‘war’ was not over.”

“I’m still smiling.”

In a post defending Weigel, former RNC staffer Liz Mair describes how two high-profile conservatives replied to an RNC email citing McCaughey by arguing that she was not a credible source or deserving of coverage (a position I’ve repeatedly advocated):

Let me say straight off that there are a wide array of people who cover health care policy who are not liberals who do not view [McCaughey] as a credible individual and relish moments where she is discredited or undercut in some way, even if they disagree with a particular policy outcome or proposition. Let me tell you how I know this. When I worked at the RNC in 2008, I sent something out that cited McCaughey, and I directed it to a whole slew of bloggers who write on health care and health care policy, including many from actual medical and medically-oriented publications such as Web MD, and many who had expressed private and public support for much of what John McCain was advocating in terms of health care reform. Surprise, surprise, I got several emails back, including from two people who, if I disclosed their names (and I won’t because their comments were made off-the-record, and unlike JournoList members, I respect that), would be immediately recognized as conservative, about McCaughey and how she was not a credible source who should be quoted by X, Y, Z publication, and how health care debates would be better if she lost and/or disappeared.

This is an encouraging sign. Let’s hope these conservatives find the courage to speak up publicly soon.

From my Twitter feed:
–Chris Mooney on why scientists struggle to correct public misperceptions, and how they can do better
–A politician I can get behind: “Gnarr … ruled out any party whose members had not seen all five seasons of ‘The Wire.’”
–The best initial post on Weigelgate — read Conor Friedsdorf on the problems with the precedent that is being set
–CJR’s Greg Marx on the unsupported narrative of the oil spill taking down Obama’s approval ratings
-Kudos to NYT’s Michael Luo for a midterm elections story that is well-informed by political science
-How could requiring the disclosure of content of meetings between lobbyists and government officials possibly work? Disclosure requirements will always be circumvented.

-MoveOn.org has erased “General Petraeus or General Betray Us?” ad from their website — see the original here

-Classy DSCC fundraising appeal calls Carly Fiorina, Rand Paul, and Sharron Angle a “veritable ‘Axis of Palin’”
-Richard Cohen demands more demonstrative body language from Obama — another great use of WP op-ed space
–New study finds that 97% of the most active climate researchers believe in climate change caused by human activity
-The swing against the party in power is a natural part of politics, not a failure for liberals as David Brooks suggests

The narrative that President Obama’s approval ratings are being heavily damaged by the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is quickly overwhelming the critical faculties of the media.

Last week, I laid down a marker on this point, noting the potential appeal of the spill as a journalistic narrative to dramatize Obama’s political difficulties. It appears that process is already well underway.

For instance, a story by Mark Murray, the deputy political director of NBC News, wrote an article on a new NBC/WSJ poll for MSNBC’s website headlined “Poll: Spill drags the president’s rating down.” Murray’s lede states that “Two months of oil continuing to gush from a well off the Gulf Coast, as well as an unemployment rate still near 10 percent, have taken a toll on President Barack Obama and his standing with the American public.” However, given the relative stability of Obama’s numbers, Murray resorts to hyping small changes:

In the poll, Obama’s job-approval rating stands at 45 percent, which is down five points from early last month and down three points from late May…

What’s more, Obama’s favorable/unfavorable rating is now at 47 percent to 40 percent, down from 49 percent to 38 percent in early May and 52 percent to 35 percent in January.

What’s left unsaid is that the changes in favorability and approval from the most recent NBC surveys asking those questions are within the poll’s margin of error.

Similarly, Chris Matthews claimed on Hardball Tuesday that Obama’s approval ratings “have been falling steadily since that oil rig blew up in the Gulf of Mexico two months ago” and that “his disapproval ratings [are] well above his approval ratings”:

That was President Obama just last week calling upon Americans to seize the moment in that Oval Office address. The president‘s poll numbers, however, have been falling steadily since that oil rig blew up in the Gulf of Mexico two months ago. Is this just a blip on the screen for him, or has the president lost his political touch?…

Let‘s take a look at the president‘s poll numbers in the Pollster.com trend line. These are a combination of all the polls. They show his disapproval ratings well above his approval ratings.

There may well have been a small downturn in Obama’s numbers in recent weeks. But as Media Matters points out, Matthews’ claim that Obama’s poll numbers have been “falling steadily” since the spill is overstated. Excluding Rasmussen polls, which often dominate the Pollster.com ratings due to their frequency and have a pronounced pro-GOP house effect, the shift in Obama’s ratings since the spil on April 22 is on the order of 2-3 points, which is only clearly visible if we zoom in closely on the data:

In the broader view, however, the change (if it is real) is very small:

In addition, any change in Obama’s approval ratings is not necessarily the result of the oil spill — the economy (for instance) or many other factors could also affect his ratings.

In short, given what we know at this point, a more appropriate headline for reports on Obama’s approval numbers is the one used by Pew: “Obama’s Ratings Little Affected by Recent Turmoil.” That may not be “news,” but it’s what the evidence tells us.

Update 6/25 11:47 AM: CJR’s Greg Marx independently wrote an excellent post on the same theme, which includes a very nice useful interview with Pollster.com’s Charles Franklin (a University of Wisconsin political scientist):

The point is not that Pew is right and the NBC poll is wrong, but that both data sets are legitimate—so journalists should include both, and be circumspect about sweeping conclusions. Any given poll contains uncertainty, so “until we see several of them moving in the same direction, it’s pretty hard to be sure that you’re picking up true change,” said Charles Franklin, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin and co-founder of the polling aggregation site Pollster.com.

Media institutions have an obvious incentive to play up the polls they pay for. But “a story written entirely from the point of view of either of those two polls would be misleading to readers,” Franklin said. A more accurate story would present the fuller range of data—which remains, at the moment, ambiguous.

To be fair to NBC’s journalists, the Pew poll hadn’t yet come out when they started reporting on their numbers. But they didn’t need it to offer more perspective. Franklin passed on via e-mail the chart below, which shows the trend for every pollster who has conducted surveys before and after the oil spill (click the image for a larger version as a PDF):

There’s a considerable amount of variation there. Taking a comprehensive view, “the trend lines do show some modest long-term decline,” according to Franklin. But while supposition that the spill might become a drag on the president is reasonable, “statistical tests show little evidence that the decline is specifically after the oil spill—rather, [we see] a continuation of a very slow decline since the first of the year.” What you’d need to see to make claims about the spill’s impact is not a downward trend after that point, but a worsening trend—and while it might show up eventually, “I just don’t think the evidence is there yet.”

Update 6/28 7:34 AM: See also Frank Newport at Gallup:

On Monday of this week I reviewed these data and concluded: “No Sign That Obama’s Overall Job Approval Rating Has Been Significantly Affected.”

Based on weekly Gallup averages, here’s what I said:

There is less evidence that the oil spill has affected Obama’s standing in the public’s eye from a comparison of his weekly overall job approval average before the BP spill on April 20 with his average after the spill. Obama’s ratings have been slightly lower in the last four weeks than they were in the four weeks prior to that, but his average in either time period is not much different from his 48% average in the four weeks immediately prior to the spill . . . However, weekly trends in Obama’s overall job approval rating show no significant impact from the oil spill; his weekly average now is little different from what it was in the weeks prior to the spill.

Now. That was through last week; Obama’s weekly job approval average for June 15-21 was 47%. This week, so far, Monday through Thursday, Obama has been averaging 45%. If this lower trend continues through the weekend (by no means guaranteed), then we will report a dip by next week.

But, by this point in time, it’s getting more and more difficult (and it never was easy) to establish causality between changes in Obama’s approval rating and the oil spill. There are other variables coming into play as each day goes on. In particular, this past week we have the firing of Gen. Stanley McChrystal (and we’ll have some specific data on the public’s reaction to that on Monday), plus the tentative passage of a new financial reform bill much pushed by the Obama administration. Either could be affecting Obama’s job approval rating — along with economic news, the Dow, and a host of other variables not as dramatically obvious as the oil spill.

As noted, the further away we get from the April 20 oil spill, the lower the certainty with which we can attribute changes in Obama’s job approval rating to it — or any specific event.

But the data to date do show little evidence of a dramatic drop in Obama’s job approval rating immediately after — or two months after — the BP oil platform explosion and the beginning of the oil leak/spill.

[Cross-posted to Pollster.com]