Brendan Nyhan

Many thanks to everyone for their emails and comments in response to my request for feedback on the Twitter roundups. Enough people seem to find them useful that I would like to keep them, but I want to try to make the blog more useful to those who don’t. As a first step, I’m now posting all the roundups below the fold to make the home page more readable. Per people’s requests, I will try to make them shorter and more frequent. I would also like to create an RSS feed that excludes them but haven’t been able to figure out how to do so. If you know how to make that happen, please email me.

(more…)

A new Public Policy Polling survey finds that President Obama leading Mitt Romney and Rick Perry in the prospective general election polls known as trial heats.

New TNR columnist/blogger Timothy Noah suggested that Obama’s standing was “remarkable” and that the poll showed that the GOP candidates “are unable to capitalize on the miserable state of the economy”:

President Barack Obama may have an unfavorable rating of 50 percent, but he still leads every major Republican candidate in the field, according to a new survey by Public Policy Polling. That’s remarkable given the dismal state of the economy…

That the Republican presidential candidates are unable to capitalize on the miserable state of the economy gives you some idea of how weak Obama’s opposition is. None of the major GOP candidates can beat John McCain’s 46 percent from 2008. Mitt Romney, who at this point seems the likeliest nominee, loses 45 percent to Obama’s 49 percent… Front-runner Rick Perry loses 41 percent to Obama’s 52 percent.

It’s important to be cautious, however, in interpreting the President’s standing in these early trial heat polls. The fact that Obama is leading now doesn’t tell us much about how he would fare against Romney or Perry in November. Research by the political scientists Christopher Wlezien and Robert Erikson finds that general election trial heats have very limited predictive power until later in the campaign (gated). We are currently 419 days away from the 2012 election. In a draft book manuscript, they show that trial heats pitting the eventual candidates against each other do not forecast the general election outcome well 300 days in advance but their predictive power increases roughly linearly thereafter (figure reproduced with permission):

In other words, we shouldn’t make too much of where Obama stands against his likely Republican opponents right now. The direction of the economy is a better indicator of how the election is likely to turn out (as well as Obama’s approval ratings, of course, which are heavily influenced by the economy). As Wlezien and Erikson show, the campaign brings economic factors into focus for voters, which in turn causes trial heats to come into closer alignment with the eventual outcome as the election draws near. For now, though, these polls are mostly a media sideshow.

[Cross-posted to HuffPost Pollster]

My co-author Jason Reifler and I have just posted a new manuscript (PDF) titled “Opening the Political Mind? The effects of self-affirmation and graphical information on factual misperceptions.” It’s one of the followups to our Political Behavior article (PDF) on resistance to corrective information. Here’s the abstract:

People often resist information that contradicts their preexisting beliefs. This disconfirmation bias is a particular problem in the context of political misperceptions, which are widespread and frequently difficult to correct. In this paper, we examine two different hypotheses about the prevalence of misinformation. First, people tend to resist unwelcome information because it is threatening to their worldview or self-concept. Drawing from social psychology research, we test whether affirming individuals’ self-worth and thereby buttressing them against this threat can make them more willing to acknowledge uncomfortable facts. Second, corrective information is often presented in an ineffective manner. We therefore also examine whether graphical corrections may be more effective than text at reducing counter-arguing by individuals inclined to resist counter-attitudinal information. Results from three experiments show that self-affirmation substantially reduces reported misperceptions among those most likely to hold them, suggesting that people cling to false beliefs in part because giving them up would threaten their sense of self. Graphical corrections are also found to successfully reduce incorrect beliefs among potentially resistant subjects and to perform better than an equivalent textual correction. However, contrary to previous research, affirmed subjects rarely differ from unaffirmed subjects in their willingness to accept new counter-attitudinal information.

Hope you’ll check it out — comments are appreciated!

Today’s NYT news analysis by Jeff Zeleny offers a classic example of how journalists attribute political success to tactical strategies. In the course of an article reviewing President Obama’s political standing, Zeleny notes that Obama’s approval is lower than that of Clinton and Reagan at this point in their terms, which he attributes to their “repositioning” (e.g., move to the center):

The White House can no longer take comfort in comparing the approval ratings for Mr. Obama with Ronald Reagan’s or Bill Clinton’s in the months after their stinging midterm election defeats. By the time their re-election efforts were intensifying after Labor Day, their respective repositioning had helped elevate their approval above 50 percent.

First, as Mark Blumenthal notes at HuffPost Pollster (where I cross-post), the comparison to Reagan and Clinton may be overstated. At this point in their terms, the Gallup approval ratings for Reagan and Clinton were 47% and 44%, respectively, compared with 42% for Obama.

Even if we grant that Obama’s standing is lower, however, it’s not clear that we should attribute Reagan or Clinton’s approval ratings to their tactical positioning. The difference is the state of the economy. In the third quarter of 1983, GDP was growing at a rate of 8.1% (annual rate, seasonally adjusted). In the third quarter of 1995, GDP growth was 3.4% (though it had been slower in the previous two quarters). The most recent figure for Obama shows GDP growth of 1.0% in the second quarter of 2011. Zeleny attributes the difference between the candidates to tactics, but it’s likely to largely be the result of the difference in economic performance.

I certainly wouldn’t claim that ideological positioning doesn’t matter on the margin — it does — but its influence tends to be greatly overstated. If you doubt this claim, consider where Obama currently stands. He’s gone to extraordinary lengths over the last year to present himself as a moderate who is willing to compromise with Republicans, yet his approval ratings are sinking to new lows. Why? The economy is in terrible shape. No amount of repositioning will solve that problem for him. Unfortunately, even reporters as good as Zeleny tend to lose sight of this reality, particularly when it comes to recounting the supposed lessons of previous presidential campaigns.

[Cross-posted to HuffPost Pollster]

Joe Nocera’s New York Times column today features Rep. Jim Cooper, a moderate Tennessee Democrat, lamenting the state of Congress. Unfortunately, Cooper almost completely misunderstands cause and effect in his diagnosis of legislative polarization, which focuses, as Nocera writes, on “the internal dynamics of Congress itself”:

I thought it would be useful to ask Cooper how Congress became so dysfunctional. His answer surprised me. He said almost nothing about the Tea Party. Instead, he focused on the internal dynamics of Congress itself.

To Cooper, the true villain is not the Tea Party; it’s Newt Gingrich. In the 1980s, when Tip O’Neill was speaker of the House, “Congress was functional,” Cooper told me. “Committees worked. Tip saw his role as speaker of the whole House, not just the Democrats.”

Gingrich was a new kind of speaker: deeply partisan and startlingly power-hungry. “His first move was to get rid of the Democratic Study Group, which analyzed bills, and which was so trusted that Republicans as well as Democrats relied on it,” Cooper recalled. “This was his way of preventing us from knowing what we were voting on. Today,” he added, “the ignorance around here is staggering. Nobody has any idea what they’re voting on.”

In the O’Neill era, when an important issue was being debated, there were often several legislative alternatives. But, under Gingrich, “that was eliminated in favor of one partisan bill,” said Cooper. That continued after the Democrats retook the House in 2006…

In reality, however, the changes Cooper laments were largely the result of external factors. As I’ve pointed out before, Congress was relatively de-polarized in the mid-20th century because Southern Democrats operated as a virtual third party (House graphs below; Senate data are similar):

After the civil rights movement, however, the Democrats were no longer internally divided by race. As a result, the political system began to return to the historical norm of polarization. Over time, this shift was reenforced by the polarization among ideologically motivated activists who came to dominate party primaries. As more extreme representatives were elected to the House and the parties became more polarized, they began to elect more partisan leaders, who in turn implemented more partisan rules.

Newt Gingrich is an important part of this story, but he didn’t make Congress partisan – he capitalized on growing polarization among activists and elites and an ideologically motivated caucus that wanted to enact a conservative policy agenda. If Gingrich hadn’t succeeded in changing the norms of the House, another ambitious member of Congress most likely would have.

(According to Nocera, Cooper also made the claim that “redistricting has fostered extremism on both the left and the right.” If that were the case, however, the Senate would not have polarized like the House (it has). The best empirical study finds little evidence that gerrymandering plays a major role in polarization.)

Even when presidents get in trouble, we rarely see evidence of the strain they probably feel, creating a void at the center of the dramatic narrative that the media wants to sell. That’s why journalists and pundits so often rush to fill the void with faux mind-reading and silly interpretations of presidential body language.

Consider Peggy Noonan’s latest Wall Street Journal column, which centers on speculation about President Obama’s mental state. (I’ve therefore annotated it with swami graphics, which I am hoping the Journal and others will adopt as a visual aid for readers.)

The frame of the article is that the economy and Obama’s presidency have reached “new lows.” By the second paragraph, Noonan has already constructed an entirely fictional dramatic scene complete with a fake movie-style quote from Obama (“If they want this job so much let them have it”):

The market is dispirited. I’m wondering if the president is, too, and if that won’t carry implications for the 2012 race. You can imagine him having lunch with political advisers, hearing some unwanted advice—”Don’t go to Martha’s Vineyard!”—putting his napkin by his plate, pushing back from the table, rising, and saying in a clipped, well-modulated voice: “I’m tired. I’m going. If they want this job so much let them have it.”

She then moves on to speculating about Obama being “depressed” and “full of doubts”:

How could he not be depressed? He has made big mistakes since the beginning of his presidency and has been pounded since the beginning of his presidency. He’s got to be full of doubts at this point about what to do. His baseline political assumptions have proved incorrect, his calculations have turned out to be erroneous, his big decisions have turned to dust. He thought they’d love him for health care, that it was a down payment on greatness. But the left sees it as a sellout, the center as a vaguely threatening mess, the right as a rallying cry. He thought the stimulus would turn the economy around. It didn’t. He thought there would be a natural bounce-back a year ago, with “Recovery Summer.” There wasn’t. He thought a toe-to-toe, eyeball-to-eyeball struggle over the debt ceiling would enhance his reputation. The public would see through to the dark heart of Republican hackery and come to recognize the higher wisdom of his approach. That didn’t happen either.

Next, Noonan purports to discern his “inner rationale for not coming up with a specific debt-ceiling plan”:

The president shows all the signs of becoming a man who, around the time he unveils his new jobs proposal in September, is going to start musing in interviews about whether anyone can be a successful president now, what with the complexity of the problems and the forces immediately arrayed, in a politically polarized age, against any specific action. That was probably his inner rationale for not coming up with a specific debt-ceiling plan: Why give the inevitable forces a target?

She then analyzes Obama’s body language during his Midwest bus tour and purports to discern that he was “observing himself and his interactions”:

Under these circumstances he could not possibly be enjoying his job. On the stump this week in the Midwest, he should have been on fire with the joy of combat… But even at his feistiest, he was wilted. Distracted. Sometimes he seems to be observing himself and his interactions as opposed to being himself and having interactions.

Why did Obama decide to vacation in Martha’s Vineyard? Noonan looks into the President’s mind to give us some answers:

Mr. Obama’s media specialists probably told him what Bill Clinton’s mavens told him: If you’re going to the Vineyard, you have to go to some real American place first, like the Rockies. Which Mr. Clinton did. Going to the Vineyard didn’t harm him. But Mr. Clinton had prosperity…

Mr. Obama doesn’t have that advantage. It seems important to him to be true to himself — not to be the kind of person who’d poll-test a vacation. Or maybe he thinks that no matter what he does, it won’t work, so what the heck. But his decision to go now, and there, seems either ham-handed or vaguely defiant.

Finally, the column closes with speculation on Obama’s feelings about possibly being a one-term president:

In early 2010 this space made much of the president’s pre-State of the Union interview with Diane Sawyer, in which she pressed the president about his political predicaments. He said: “I’d rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president.” I thought at the time: He means it, he can accept being a one-termer.

Maybe he’s feeling it now more than ever.

Maybe it means not much will change in terms of his leadership between now and the election.

Maybe he’ll be as wilted next year as he was this week.

(Memo to columnists: When your column ends with three sentences starting with “Maybe,” you haven’t said anything.)

In short, the entire column is built on mind-reading — I had to excerpt half of it just to collect all the examples. It’s a great example of how the novelization of the presidency works. Like Maureen Dowd, Noonan’s talent for making up pleasing stories about political figures have made her a highly regarded pundit for one of the nation’s top newspapers. Too bad those stories are largely fiction.

The selection of New York Times economics columnist David Leonhardt as the newspaper’s Washington bureau chief was widely acclaimed when it was announced last month, and rightly so — Leonhardt, a favorite of mine, was recently awarded a Pulitzer Prize for “his graceful penetration of America’s complicated economic questions.” But despite all the acclaim, I still don’t think people have fully appreciated the difference in perspective that he could bring to the job.

Here’s what Leonhardt said, for instance, during a discussion of opposition to President Obama on Jonah Keri’s podcast yesterday (starting at 21:22):

I do think the economy is the dominant thing. I think what tends to happen is the economy drives elections and then we construct narratives around that to explain things. I think if the unemployment rate had been falling in the summer of ’10 and into the fall the Democratic losses would have been much less in that midterm election.

It’s hard to overstate what a radical statement this is from the incoming DC bureau chief of the Times. Journalists tend to create dramatic narratives centered on candidate tactics and personalities to explain electoral outcomes that are largely driven by structural factors (the state of the economy, the distribution of seats in Congress, etc.). If Leonhardt shifts the NYT’s political coverage away from these bogus narratives and toward the careful explanatory journalism he has practiced so successfully, it would be a huge step forward for the field.

Immediately after making the statement above, Leonhardt also went on to criticize what I’ve called the Green Lantern theory of the presidency (see also here), which has been back in the news as liberal critics of Obama have become more vocal:

Some of the criticism of the White House I think is not reality-based. You hear a fair amount of criticism on the left that basically amounts to “If only he had been tougher, if only he had asked for more of these things and demanded more of these things, Congress would have gone along.” But when you try to tease that out to the end, it ends up being fairly weak tea. It’s not at all clear if by giving more liberal speeches Barack Obama could have persuaded Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman and controlled the Senate to vote differently…

Again, rather than engaging in the false hype of the powers of the bully pulpit that so often appear in press coverage of the presidency, Leonhardt recognizes that the president’s power over Congress is quite limited. As he notes, these critiques are speculative and unsupported at best.

There’s an important connection between these two myths. In both cases, journalists tend to prioritize the visible and the dramatic (speeches, ads, etc.) over empirical evidence about what matters. Leonhardt is the rare journalist who has succeeded in political coverage by emphasizing the latter rather than the former.

With that said, it’s important to note that Leonhardt faces a difficult set of challenges. In the past, the Times has featured the work of writers who manufacture crude narratives while frequently neglecting the role of the economy in politics. Given likely institutional resistance to change, we shouldn’t set expectations for Leonhardt too high. But I’m still more optimistic about the Times than I’ve been in years.