Brendan Nyhan

In the New York Times Magazine, Matt Bai suggests it is “an ominous sign, historically speaking, for a majority party” when “the president’s own approval ratings fell below 50 percent”:

[President Obama] continued to go out and shake his head disbelievingly at “the culture of Washington,” which to the Democrats in the House sounded as if he were saying that his own party was the problem, as if somehow the Democratic majorities in Congress hadn’t managed to navigate the bulk of his ambitious agenda past a blockade of Republican vessels, their ship shredded by cannon fire. And all this while the president’s own approval ratings fell below 50 percent — an ominous sign, historically speaking, for a majority party…

Just about every strategist of either party in Washington will tell you that the best indicator of whether the voters are growing less skeptical — and, thus, of whether Democrats can survive the November elections intact — can be found in the president’s approval rating. There is a political theorem that illustrates this, supported by data from past elections and often repeated by Democrats now, and it goes like this: If the president’s approval rating is over 50 percent in the fall, then his party will suffer only moderately. If his rating is under 50 percent, however, then the pounding at the polls is likely to be a memorable one.

I’m not sure why Bai thinks Obama’s approval numbers are so ominous. Using USA Today’s presidential approval tracker, I made this chart showing approval ratings to this point in each of the last seven presidencies:

Obama’s approval trajectory (in purple) is tightly clustered with five of the last seven presidents. Only two of those seven — George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush — had significantly higher approval ratings at this point, and neither is an especially compelling counter-example: Bush 43’s approval ratings were artificially inflated by 9/11, and Bush 41 was not re-elected. It’s not clear that there’s anything ominous about Obama’s standing at this point.

If Bai is instead referring to the fortunes of the president’s party in midterm elections under unified government, then there are only three relevant first-term examples in the contemporary era: Carter (1977-1978), Clinton (1993-1994), and Bush 43 (2001-June 2002). Of those, Democrats suffered moderate damage in 1978 with Carter around 50 percent; the Republicans won a landslide victory in 1994 with Clinton in the mid-40s; and Republicans picked up seats in 2002 when Bush’s approval ratings were still extremely high.

Finally, if Bai is referring to midterm elections more generally, I’m not sure what makes 50 percent so magical. The president’s approval ratings are an important factor, as this Nate Silver graph shows, but it’s not clear that it matters whether Obama is slightly below 50 percent or not — he’s likely to lose seats either way (as most presidents do):

In reality, other factors such as slow jobs growth and the generic ballot are far more ominous for Democrats than Obama’s approval rating.

[Note: The text of this post was revised.]

[Cross-posted to Pollster.com]

One of the ironies of the Obama presidency is seeing Democrats use the same tactics they once decried from the Bush administration (attacking dissent, etc.). The latest example comes from Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who said the following on Fox Business:

WASSERMAN SCHULTZ: On the pace that we’re on, with job creation in the last four months, if we continue on that pace, and all the leading economists say that it is likely that we will, we will have created more jobs in this year than in the entire Bush presidency.

But as former Bush administration official Keith Hennessey points out, Wasserman is cherry-picking the start date for Obama administration job creation in a misleading way:

Ms. Wasserman Schultz is picking her timeframes carefully, in particular by ignoring the four million jobs lost during the first 11 months of a Presidency that is so far 16 months old.

Even today, after five straight months of job growth, three million fewer people are working than when President Obama took office. That’s hardly something to brag about…

Let’s look at how Ms. Wasserman Schultz justifies her claim. As always, you can click on the graph for a larger view.

You can see two yellow dots in January 2001 and January 2009, and a thin yellow line extended so we can measure the difference between the two. The red arrows show that, if you measure only endpoint to endpoint, 1.1 million net net jobs were created during the Bush Administration (I’m using the payroll survey in all cases).

But this analysis misses most of the story. We can see a steady employment decline from early 2001 through mid-2003, followed by a steady, strong, and sustained period of job growth for almost four years. This 46 month period is the second longest in recorded history for sustained job creation in the U.S., and more than eight million jobs were created during this period (the white arrows). A mild recession began in late 2007, followed by a severe contraction in the second half of 2008 and continuing into the Obama Presidency.

Compounding the chicanery, Ms. Wasserman Schulz measures the Obama job creation beginning with the first pink dot in December 2009. Her conclusion is based on the orange arrows and her guess about how they will grow throughout this year. She’s ignoring the four million decline in employment from January 2009 (despite the stimulus), and she’s ignoring that we’re still three million jobs shy of where we were when President Obama took office. If she were to apply the same methodology to President Obama as she did to President Bush, she’d be comparing +1.1 M (Bush) with –3.0 M (Obama). But that wouldn’t look quite as good for her case.

Wasserman’s approach is likely to be quite familiar to Hennessey given how often the Bush administration used similar tactics. For instance, the Treasury Department released this graph attributing 2003-2005 jobs growth to the second Bush tax cut:

As I pointed out at the time, the graph ignores previous job losses from 2001-2003 while taking credit for job creation starting at the lowest point on the graph:

It’s exactly what Wasserman Schultz did. Expect other Democrats to follow her lead.

Update 6/15 4:47 PM: In comments, Hennessey defends the Bush Treasury graph:

I argue that Rep. Wasserman Schultz’s specific claim is misleading. The Bush-era Treasury chart does not purport to make any claims about the history of employment during the entire Administration. It is instead attempting to show the timing correlation between the tax cuts and the return of employment growth. The Treasury chart supports the argument, “The 2003 tax cuts contributed to the strong employment growth that began a few months after those tax cuts became law.” If one were also to include the prior 2.5 years of employment history, it would only reinforce that argument. I don’t have a problem with advocates choosing timeframes to make their case. I do have a problem with advocates using timeframes to lead listeners to an incorrect policy conclusion. I think Rep. Wasserman Shultz’s statement does this. Some of that may be in the eye of the beholder, but I believe there are objective standards against which claims can be measured. I don’t see how the Treasury chart is similarly misleading. If there’s an argument that it is, I’d like to hear it. Thanks.

The argument against the Treasury chart is simple — the headline for the graph states “Jobs Rebound and Unemployment Falls as Bush Economic Policies Come into Effect.” However, the graph omits the 2001 tax cut and starts the timeline two years into Bush’s term, falsely suggesting (a) that the 2003 Bush tax cut was the administration’s first economic policy enactment; (b) that it took effect almost immediately (while the 2001 tax cut took years to have an effect); and (c) that the 2003 tax cut drove jobs growth starting in the fall of that year. I don’t think any of those claims are defensible.

From my Twitter feed:
-More racial codewords on Obama’s “ass to kick” comment — Washington Times columnist calls it “street-gangster language”
-Bill Maher even more racially offensive on Obama and BP
-A cool network graph showing issue networks of the American left (from friends/colleagues Michael Heaney and Fabio Rojas)
–Trailer for new gerrymandering doc seems uninformed by relevant political science
–“On Point” interview with author of Getting It Wrong: Ten of the Greatest Misreported Stories in American Journalism
–Contra Mickey Kaus, 20% against Boxer is not a big protest vote — Hillary challenger in New York got 17% by himself in 2006 and she almost won the party’s presidential nomination two years later

[Updated below with more details on Clinton’s win in 1996]

I take it as a given that most journalists know very little about political science. But I still assumed that almost everyone has a basic understanding of the relationship between the state of the economy and presidential election outcomes. Apparently Fred Barnes missed the memo.

As Jamison Foser points out at Media Matters, Barnes published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal yesterday that repeatedly suggests the key to Obama’s re-election is cutting spending:

If Mr. Obama wants to avert a fiscal crisis and win re-election in 2012, he needs House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to be removed from her powerful post. A GOP takeover may be the only way…

Over the past 50 years, it should be no surprise which president has the best record for holding down discretionary spending. It was President Reagan. But who was second best? President Clinton, a Democrat. His record of frugality was better than Presidents Nixon, Ford and both Bushes. Mr. Clinton couldn’t have done it if Republicans hadn’t won the House and Senate in the 1994 election. They insisted on substantial cuts, he went along and then whistled his way to an easy re-election in 1996…

Mr. Obama’s re-election to a second term is heavily dependent on his ability to deal effectively with the fiscal mess.

The suggestion that Clinton had “an easy re-election” due to spending restraint is implausible. Here’s a plot of changes in non-defense discretionary spending (Barnes’s preferred metric) for recent first-term presidents (see methodological notes below for details):

The relationship between spending restraint and vote share is entirely driven by Reagan’s 1984 landslide (an outlier on both dimensions). When it is excluded, there is no relationship between the variables.

By contrast, the relationship between economic growth and presidential vote share is extremely strong and robust to the exclusion of any single president. Here, for example, is the same set of presidents with their vote share plotted against the Douglas Hibbs measure of weighted per-capita growth in disposable personal income (drawn from his Bread and Peace model):

As I’ve previously noted, Clinton’s move toward the center (which included an emphasis on deficit reduction) may have helped somewhat to boost his margin above what we would have otherwise expected, but the driving force in 1996 (as in every election) was the state of the economy.

Similarly, it’s hard to imagine Reagan being re-elected based on his record of spending restraint if the economy was in the tank. The fiscal year 1982 budget cut non-defense discretionary spending substantially, but it wasn’t enough to protect Reagan during the recession of 1981-1982, which pushed Reagan’s approval numbers down to 35% by January 1983. Once the economy bounced back, however, approval rebounded in time for him to crush Mondale in 1984.

Barnes may wish that presidents were re-elected based on spending restraint, but that’s just not the world we live in. Obama’s fortunes will rise or fall depending on the state of the economy.

Update 6/10 9:33 AM: To reinforce the point that we don’t need to use the Clinton’s move to the center (which Matthew Yglesias emphasizes), here are plots from two other prominent forecasting models showing how closely Clinton’s popular vote totals can be predicted using economic conditions alone.

First, here’s a plot from a 2008 article by Alan Abramowitz predicting vote share using GDP growth in the second quarter of a presidential election year:

Second, here’s a plot from a 2008 article by Tom Holbrook predicting vote sharing using average satisfaction with personal finances in the summer of a presidential election year:

In both cases, the actual outcome is quite close to the predicted value from a simple linear fit.

Update 6/10 12:07 PM: Jonathan Bernstein objects to the claim that Clinton moved toward the center after 1994. I’ll certainly agree that the difference between Clinton pre- and post-1994 is overstated, but there is at least some evidence to support the claim that he moved rightward. Most notably, see this figure from Michael Bailey which uses Supreme Court cases as a bridge to compare the preferences of the president with those of Congress and members of the Court (click the graphic for a larger version):

[Methodological notes: Spending levels are drawn from the historical tables for the FY2010 budget and are in constant dollars (Table 8.2). I compare spending in the fiscal year beginning before the president takes office (e.g. fiscal year 1969 for Nixon) to the fiscal year that ends just before the president is up for re-election (e.g. fiscal year 1972 for Nixon). I start with fiscal year 1974 for Ford (since he took office in August of that year) and end with fiscal year 1976 (excluding the transition quarter in 1976).]

From my Twitter feed:
–A gruesome convergence of my interests in political misinformation and early 1990s rap
–Tomorrow’s Glenn Beck chalkboard diagram today
–Anecdotal claims versus data on girls and the hookup culture
-Dear New York Times: Any trend that involves Dustin Diamond (aka “Screech”) is, by definition, about to stop being a trend
-Howard Kurtz demands a display of staged anger from Obama, then suggests his display of anger was staged
-Headline of the day: “Nudists to lobby Capitol Hill this week”
-Politics everywhere: Snooki decries tanning tax in health care bill, says Obama targeted tanning because of “Jersey Shore”
-Drudge deploying offensive racial tropes: “OBAMA GOES STREET: SEEKING ‘ASS TO KICK’”

In an op-ed published in late March, I predicted that misinformation about health care reform would persist after its passage:

At the White House signing ceremony for health care legislation on Tuesday, President Obama declared, “In a few moments, when I sign this bill, all of the overheated rhetoric over reform will finally confront the reality of reform.” For Democrats nervous about political fallout from the bill in the November midterm elections, it’s reassuring to imagine that the myths about the legislation — that it provides free coverage to illegal immigrants, uses taxpayer money to subsidize abortions and mandates end-of-life counseling for the elderly — will be dispelled by its passage.

But public knowledge of the plan’s contents may not improve as quickly as Democrats hope. While some of the more outlandish rumors may dissipate, it is likely that misperceptions will linger for years, hindering substantive debate over the merits of the country’s new health care system. The reasons are rooted in human psychology…

Surprisingly, however, DNC pollster Joel Benenson suggests in a new memo (PDF) that “misinformation about President Obama’s health care reforms” is “giv[ing] way to Americans’ real-life experience with it” (via Mike Allen):

However, none of the poll results cited in the memo pertain to misinformation, and I haven’t seen any surveys that show a decline in misperceptions about reform. While it appears to be true, as Benenson argues, that a narrow majority of Americans oppose repealing the law, it’s not clear that this finding has anything to do with a decline in misinformation. Indeed, his proposed mechanism (“real-life experience” with reform) is implausible since most of the changes in the law have not yet taken effect. Absent further evidence, the claim appears to be pure partisan bluster.

[Cross-posted to Pollster.com]

From my Twitter feed:
-I love that Larry Kudlow’s radio promo says he was a mid-level bureaucrat under Reagan. Don’t change the channel — he worked at OMB 25 years ago!
-Elevating the discourse, Charlie Rangel refers to “terrorists” on Wall Street, Joe McGinniss compares Sarah Palin’s tactics to those of “Nazi troopers,” and Chris Matthews calls Palin’s post about McGinniss a “fatwa”
–A proposal to ban serial dissemblers from Sunday shows (similar to my “naming and shaming” idea)
-Sestak from way back: Historian K.C. Johnson shows that LBJ (like Obama, Reagan, etc.) used appointments to influence candidates
-Slate’s Chris Beam parodies what news coverage would be like if written by political scientists (perhaps the first parody of political scientists ever to appear in a mainstream press outlet)
-Even by White House press briefing standards, Robert Gibbs attempting to prove Obama’s rage about the Gulf oil spill was pathetic
-Topping Krugman’s classic “Shape of the Earth: Views Differ” faux headline, CNN searches for an upside to the Gulf spill
–Must-read Greg Marx story in CJR on political science as an “untapped resource” for journalists (note: I was interviewed)
–Results from a Slate experiment showing how easy it is to manipulate political memories:
-In a new ad, Mickey Kaus randomly bashes unions without explaining what their failings have to do with labor policy or Barbara Boxer — it’s a total non sequitur
-Correlation/causation alert: “Skinny People Shop at Whole Foods”

I’m sympathetic to Ross Douthat’s argument that a center-right version of Newsweek could be a force for good, but his suggestion that Newsmax (a bidder for the newsweekly) could carry out that strategy is lunacy:

If Meacham had wanted to play to what seems like Newsweek’s business strength — its large audience outside the Acela corridor — he would have tried to tilt the magazine toward the center-right rather than the center-left, in the hopes of becoming the go-to outlet for the millions of Americans who think that the elite media is too liberal but find Rush Limbaugh too conservative…

Meacham didn’t do any of this, but maybe a Newsweek owned by Newsmax would. True, the Newsmaxers are hard right, not center-right: They’re more Rush than Rauch, more Levin than Labash. But they’re also insisting that if they buy the magazine, “Newsweek would continue in its mission to objectively report the news and provide analysis from a wide spectrum of perspectives.” This sounds like a philosophy that would be compatible with a gradual rightward shift for the newsweekly, rather than a sudden wrench into Sarah Palin territory. And that shift might — might! — be what it takes to save Newsweek from extinction.

Unfortunately, Newsmax’s claims about how it would operate the magazine are cheap talk — they have every incentive to try to appear respectable at this point in the process. The reality is that the magazine has a long history of using nasty rhetoric and promoting misinformation. Among other examples, here’s what we wrote at Spinsanity about the Deck of Weasels cards sold by Newsmax during the Iraq war:

The most explicit comparisons [to Iraqi leaders depicted on the now-famous deck of cards issued by the Pentagon to troops in Iraq to help them identify top Iraqi officials], however, have been made by NewsMax.com and Greenpeace, who have both issued their own decks of cards featuring their political enemies. The NewsMax [deck] includes a picture of a politician or celebrity doctored to include a beret bearing the logo of the Iraqi Republican Guard and a “quote revealing his anti-American, pro-Saddam ranting”. Prominently featured are French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac as the Ace of Spades (Saddam Hussein’s position in the Pentagon deck) and “Sen. Robert ‘KKK’ Byrd” as the Ace of Diamonds.

I wouldn’t expect this company to engage in “a gradual rightward shift for the newsweekly,” and you shouldn’t either.

In a post previewing his remarks at the Personal Democracy Forum, The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder endorses my call (see here, here, and here) to “name and shame” elites who promote misleading information (as well as a similar argument by Robert H. Frank):

I subscribe to the Brendan Nyhan/Robert Frank notion that social shaming may well be a valid way for fact-checkers to convince more than a handful of people that the other side is simply wrong. Frum has done a serviceable job in calling out his fellow conservatives, but he does not possess the power or the infrastructure to  shame people who cross a line.  As Nyhan proposes, when someone like Frank Gaffney, who still gets invited to major events by reputable people, implies that President Obama a Muslim, he should be shamed into hiding by his fellow conservatives. (Shaming by liberals, or mere corrections, won't work, and will often promote the myth). 

It’s fantastic to see journalists in the mainstream media endorsing the idea, but it’s not enough to call on conservatives and liberals to shun the Gaffneys on their side of the aisle. The Atlantic and other elite publications have to stop giving those people a platform to promote misinformation.

From my Twitter feed:
-Robert H. Frank calls for “social sanctions” of dishonest elites — very similar to my “naming and shaming” idea
-Related note to Orrin Hatch — “social sanctions” are vastly preferable to criminalizing false claims of military service
-You know the Sestak scandal allegations have no legs when the WSJ editorial page can’t muster any serious outrage
–New York Daily News op-ed by political scientists Seth Masket and John Sides on effects of unemployment and growth in midterm elections
-Polarization alert: Gulf oil spill pushes up support for environmental protection except among Republicans
-Emory’s Alan Abramowitz finds that more conservative Republican senators lose votes, but relationship likely to vary by state partisanship (see section 5.2 of this paper)
-CJR’s Greg Marx debunks hype of the Contract with America and other “gimmick platforms” — they’re unlikely to matter much