Brendan Nyhan

John Judis writes in The New Republic that Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush “enjoyed great popularity even though polls showed that the public disliked some of their initiatives” because they provided “leadership and not mediation”:

Why has Obama continued to opt for compromise? One reason may be that he dislikes conflict and wants to see himself as a mediator. Another reason seems to be political. Obama’s political team appears convinced that by positioning the president as the Great Mediator, they will win over independent voters in the 2012 election… Still, his advisers might want to look at a recent Pew poll that shows Obama losing ground with self-identified independents during the last two months. It just might be that what these and other voters want from a president is leadership and not mediation, even if they disagree with some of Obama’s policies. That’s certainly what happened during Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush’s presidencies. Both men enjoyed great popularity even though polls showed that the public disliked some of their initiatives.

In reality, Bush’s popularity shot up to stratospheric levels immediately after the 9/11 attacks (86% in a September 13 ABC News poll) before he’d even had time to show much leadership. It was a classic rally-around-the-flag response — exactly what you’d expect given the magnitude of the attacks. The rest of his presidency was a slow decline toward the highest disapproval ratings ever recorded by an American president.

While Reagan also enjoyed high levels of approval at times (most notably, when he was shot, when the economy was booming before Iran-Contra, and when he was about to leave office), he was actually not especially popular either — his average Gallup approval ratings in office were lower than those of Kennedy, Clinton, Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, and George H.W. Bush.

Judis has made a practice of overhyping Reagan as a model for Obama. In articles published in March 2010 and August 2010, he claimed that Reagan’s communication strategy was responsible for his political success in a poor economy during his first two years in office. However, there is no convincing evidence that Reagan’s approval ratings or GOP performance in the 1982 midterms were better than we would have otherwise expected. The same conclusion applies here — there’s no reason to think that “leadership” made Bush and Reagan enjoy “great popularity.”

[Cross-posted to HuffPost Pollster]

Seth Masket makes a useful point about the reasoning used by the third party hypesters at Americans Elect:

This whole endeavor seems rather enamored of the idea that American Elect can change American politics by harnessing the power of the Internet. Or as the organization promises, “We’re using the Internet to give every single voter… the power to nominate a presidential ticket in 2012.” Look, I love the Internet as much as anyone, but its transformative power in politics has been way overstated. Political activists use the Internet to fundraise, to contact voters, to spread information, and to debate issues. News flash: we were doing all those things before the Internet was invented. We may do those things differently — sometimes more easily, sometimes more effectively, but not always — but it’s still the same basic tasks of politics.

This is the same specious reasoning we saw in predictions of an “Internet candidate” for president or the so-called “party-in-a-laptop”. In almost every case, the people who make these sorts of claims fail to explain how, exactly, the Internet will make a third party feasible. The whole enterprise has an underpants gnomes quality to it:

1. Internet
2. ???
3. Third parties!

The Internet may reduce the costs of organization or communication in important ways for political activists, but fundamental barriers to third party success – most notably, strategic voting and the Electoral College – haven’t changed.

Yesterday Thomas Friedman proclaimed that a viable third party presidential candidate will emerge in 2012:

Thanks to a quiet political start-up that is now ready to show its hand, a viable, centrist, third presidential ticket, elected by an Internet convention, is going to emerge in 2012. I know it sounds gimmicky — an Internet convention — but an impressive group of frustrated Democrats, Republicans and independents, called Americans Elect, is really serious, and they have thought out this process well. In a few days, Americans Elect will formally submit the 1.6 million signatures it has gathered to get on the presidential ballot in California as part of its unfolding national effort to get on the ballots of all 50 states for 2012.

As Cogitamus reminds us, though, Friedman has made similar proclamations several times before. Here are his previous predictions from my timeline of third party hype:

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (4/28/06):

If the Democrats shirk this energy challenge, as the Republicans have, I’m certain there is going to be a third party in the 2008 election. It is going to be called the Geo-Green Party, and it is going to win a lot of centrist voters. The next Ross Perot will be green.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (5/3/06):

Yes, our system is rigged against third parties. Still, my gut says that some politician, someday soon, just to be different, just for the fun of it, will take a flier on telling Americans the truth. The right candidate with the right message on energy might be able to drive a bus right up the middle of the U.S. political scene today — lose the far left and the far right — and still maybe, just maybe, win a three-way election.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (6/16/06):

Frankly, I wish we did not need a third party. I wish the Democrats would adopt a Geo-Green agenda as their own. (Republicans never would.) But if not, I hope it will become the soul of a third party…

To be sure, Geo-Greenism is not a complete philosophy on par with liberalism or conservatism. But it can be paired with either of them to make them more relevant to the biggest challenges of our time. Even if Geo-Greenism couldn’t attract enough voters to win an election, it might attract a big enough following to frighten both Democrats and Republicans into finally doing the right things.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (10/3/10):

Barring a transformation of the Democratic and Republican Parties, there is going to be a serious third party candidate in 2012, with a serious political movement behind him or her — one definitely big enough to impact the election’s outcome.

There is a revolution brewing in the country, and it is not just on the right wing but in the radical center. I know of at least two serious groups, one on the East Coast and one on the West Coast, developing “third parties” to challenge our stagnating two-party duopoly that has been presiding over our nation’s steady incremental decline.

Like a stopped clock, Friedman may be right this time — Americans Elect seems better organized and funded than previous ill-fated efforts like Unity ’08. It’s certainly possible that they will put a credible candidate on the ballot in most or all states. But all the other factors that make it so difficult for independent candidates to successfully challenge the established parties still apply (ask Ross Perot!).

[Cross-posted to Huffington Post]

Nate Silver suggests that Republican governors are unpopular due to their conservatism:

[J]ust a year ago, there were plenty of moderate Republican governors — most of them in liberal or moderate states, where they were often quite popular. Now there are almost none, save some borderline cases like Mr. Daniels and Mr. Herbert.

The unsurprising result is that Republicans now have a group of extremely unpopular governors — particularly Mr. Scott of Florida, Scott Walker of Wisconsin, John R. Kasich of Ohio and Paul R. LePage of Maine, all of whom have disapproval ratings exceeding 50 percent. Other Republican governors in crucial swing states like Michigan and Pennsylvania also have below-average ratings.

What Silver omits, though, is a more basic political fact: incumbents tend to be unpopular when the economy isn’t performing well. Here are two graphs from Jim Stimson’s Tides of Consent (previously reproduced by John Sides on The Monkey Cage) which show how approval ratings of governors and other public officials and institutions trend together and generally follow perceptions of the economy:

It’s possible that the conservatism of the GOP governors is driving their approval ratings even lower than they otherwise would be, but a poor economy is difficult for every incumbent.

[Cross-posted to HuffPost Pollster]

According to New York Times columnist David Leonhardt, President Obama’s advisers are seeking inspiration from the campaigns of presidents who were re-elected despite increased unemployment:

Mr. Obama’s advisers, meanwhile, are looking for lessons from re-election bids that overcame a first-term rise in unemployment, like those of George W. Bush, Richard Nixon and Dwight Eisenhower, Republicans all. That’s a turnabout from the Obama team’s initial plan to base its re-election campaign on the economy’s progress since 2008.

The problem for Obama is that the first terms of the three presidents in question (Bush 43, Nixon, and Eisenhower) produced reasonable income growth, which is a better predictor of presidential election outcomes than unemployment. Consider this modified plot from Douglas Hibbs, whose Bread and Peace model employs a weighted measure of real disposable personal income growth — the presidents in question are highlighted in green:

Eisenhower, Nixon, and Bush 43 all presided over at least moderate income growth during their first four years in office; Obama so far has not. (The same applies for GDP growth, another frequently used variable in forecasting models.) Unless the state of the economy improves, it’s not likely to matter who he models his 2012 campaign after.

[Cross-posted to HuffPost Pollster]

Who would get blamed for an economic downturn resulting from the debt ceiling standoff? John Sides, a political scientist at George Washington University, has argued that incumbents tend to get blamed by voters for bad economic conditions even under divided government. New York Times blogger Nate Silver responds that a debt-induced crisis “would not be a normal case”:

Whatever else the 2012 election would be if the debt limit is not raised in a timely fashion, it would not be a normal case. There’s no especially appropriate precedent for the economy tanking by such an immediate and direct result of action (or inaction) in Washington. One reason the public tends to score strong economic performance in favor of the president, and poor economic performance against him, is because the United States economy is incredibly complicated — it’s hard for the public to discern cause and effect…

This would be different, however. The stock market could drop by thousands of points. Some major corporations, particularly in the financial services sector, might go under. Although the consequences might take some time to filter through the broader economy, there would nevertheless be a number of immediate and extremely visible effects. Many voters would feel as though they had perfectly reasonable grounds to connect the dots.

You’d have to weigh two things against each other: the additional damage to the economy, which is bad for the president all else being equal, and the additional ownership of the economy that Republicans would take for it, which is bad for them all else being equal. I don’t know which effect would win out, but it’s not a risk that either side should feel happy about taking.

It’s certainly true that the current standoff seems relatively unprecedented, but as Jonathan Bernstein (another political scientist) notes, “There’s always going to be some slightly new twist to almost any political phenomenon, and in most cases the new twists are a lot less important than the similarities.” Over the years, people have come up with lots of stories about why the president won’t get credit for a good economy or why the opposition will be blamed for a bad economy, but things rarely work out that way.

In this case, it’s worth thinking through the mechanics of how Republicans would be blamed instead of Obama. As Silver notes, the economy is incredibly complex. Even if there were a debt default, the process by which it would affect the economy would be difficult for people to understand. Both sides would no doubt blame each other for the outcome and create elaborate stories about why the other side is to blame, which would then be reinforced and amplified in the press. Then more than a year would elapse before November 2012, and both sides would continue to blame each other for failing to adequately address the consequences of the default. In the meantime, many people will forget the details of what happened, but will know that Obama is the president and the economy is in bad shape. Under those conditions, how likely is it that people who would normally blame Obama for the poor economy will instead blame the GOP when they show up at the polls? Presidential forecasting and approval models aren’t perfect, but I think the burden of proof is on their critics to explain why we should expect a deviation from the normal pattern of economic voting.

[Cross-posted to HuffPost Pollster]