Matt Drudge is currently blaring this headline about a new CNN poll (PDF):
CNN SHOCK POLL: MAJORITY SAY OBAMA DOESN'T DESERVE 2ND TERM
Actually, the poll isn't especially shocking. As The Hill points out, "52 percent of Americans said President Barack Obama doesn't deserve reelection in 2012" -- a number that is almost identical to the proportion who disapprove of the job he's doing (50%).
For context, a Fox News poll in August 2001 asked the following question about George W. Bush:
Considering how President (George W.) Bush has performed so far, do you think he deserves to be reelected or would the country probably be better off with someone else as president?
The results? 36% said Bush deserved to be reelected, 42% said the country would be better off with someone else, and 22% said it depends or weren't sure. These numbers are actually worse than Obama's relative to the 55% approval/32% disapproval numbers the Fox poll showed for Bush.
[Cross-posted to brendan-nyhan.com]
Back in January, I predicted a rash of process-based explanations of President Obama's declining political fortunes in 2010:
During the next eleven months, it will become increasingly obvious that Democrats face an unfavorable political environment and that President Obama's approval ratings are trending downward. Inside the Beltway, these outcomes will be interpreted as evidence that the Obama administration has made poor strategic choices or that the President isn't "connecting" with the American public. Hundreds of hours will be spent constructing elaborate narratives about how the character, personality, and tactics of the principals in the White House inevitably led them to their current predicament.
Within two weeks, the narratives about Obama not "connecting" arrived thanks to Scott Brown's victory in the special election for the open Senate seat in Massachusetts.
It's now been about a month since I wrote the original post. After tiring of the "not connecting" narrative, the press has now moved on to blaming Obama's advisors for his political problems. Congressional Democrats have quickly gotten on board, implausibly blaming Rahm Emanuel for not targeting more conservative Senate Republicans on health care.
Obama's staff certainly has made mistakes, but I doubt they are the principal cause of the administration's problems. As I've pointed out before, good fundamentals make political strategists look like geniuses and bad fundamentals make the same strategists look like idiots. In other words, staff performance is largely a reflection of the political fundamentals (in particular, the economy), not the cause of a president's success or failure.
Unfortunately for Obama's staff, they're under siege from all sides. The political press needs a dramatic narrative in which the President's problems are the result of failed political tactics; Democrats need a scapegoat; and Republicans want a scalp (particularly Emanuel's). If the year doesn't go well for Obama, it's likely that someone will be thrown overboard.
PS I predict Mickey Kaus is ahead of the curve on phase three, which will be to blame Obama himself for poor strategic choices.
Update 2/12 9:14 AM: See also Peggy Noonan's column today, which points in a similar direction as Kaus (i.e. blaming Obama himself).
[Cross-posted to brendan-nyhan.com]
Since the beginning of the presidential campaign, Barack Obama and his advisers have repeatedly claimed that they don't listen to DC's conventional wisdom. But Obama's decision to propose a freeze of discretionary non-security spending suggests that the White House misunderstands the problem in the same way as most of the rest of Washington.
The problem, as I've argued, is that Obama's political fortunes are closely tied to the economy -- a variable over which he has relatively little control. With his first midterm election approaching and the economy in terrible shape, an anti-presidential backlash was a virtual certainty. Obama's approach to health care or the economy may have exacerbated this backlash -- the public tends to move in the opposite direction from public policy (though usually after some lag) -- but it's highly unlikely that Obama's policies or communication strategies were the primary cause of his declining approval ratings.
The decision to respond to this problem with a partial spending freeze is both bad politics and bad economics. From an economic perspective, Obama faces a serious risk of a long period of slow growth or even a double-dip recession. He has no politically feasible jobs agenda; his proposed tax credit is tiny relative to the scale of the problem. Imposing additional limits at government spending will only make the problem worse.
From a political perspective, Obama's gesture will have very little effect. The idea seems to be that it will appeal to independents and Republicans who are concerned about the deficit. However, most Republicans and Republican-leaning independents will not support Obama no matter what he does. They may say they are concerned about the deficit or government spending, but if those concerns are addressed they are likely to find other reasons to oppose the administration. (In addition, their perceptions are likely to be biased.) Deficits might hurt Obama on the margin, but in most cases I tend to think that they're a convenient reason to cite for opposing a president you wouldn't like anyway.
Just to underscore the magnitude of the political and economic problem Obama faces, the White House budget, which was released today, projects "8.9 percent unemployment at the end of 2011, and 7.9 unemployment percent by the end of 2012." While unemployment isn't as good a predictor of election outcomes as income growth, these figures underscores the difficult path to re-election that Obama currently faces. He can still win in 2012 -- seasonally adjusted unemployment in December 1983 was 8.3% and Reagan went on to beat Mondale in a landslide -- but he needs significant growth to do it (regression line excludes the outliers of 1952 and 1968):
Given the historical record, the downside risk of suboptimal economic policy vastly outweighs the symbolic appeal of spending freezes and other short-term deficit measures. Unfortunately for Obama, this is one issue where his administration appears to buy into the conventional wisdom.
Update 2/2 1:30 PM: Matthew Yglesias makes the point more eloquently in a post linking to this one:
Roughly speaking, people got it into their heads over the years that "deficits" are "bad" (which is usually true, but also pretty simplistic) and then the economic situation became very bad, so people have decided that large deficits must be the problem. This is a misunderstanding. An application of a crude, sorta-correct rule of thumb to an unusual situation. It also involves people confusing cause and effect. Steep economic downturns cause large deficits, which is bad. But the deficit is the symptom rather than the cause. Meanwhile, as Brendan Nyhan observes the Obama administration seems eager to pile bad political science on top of the mass public's bad economics. People are upset, and they say they want a smaller deficit. So Obama's proposing to give it to them, and seems to have no intention of doing anything about its own forecast of a years-long bleak economic situation.
In political terms, though, the actual performance of the economy in 2012 is going to be much more important to Obama's re-election than the budget deficit. In particular, by directing its policymaking more at the things that the public thinks are the cause of economic problems rather than the things that economists think are the cause of economic problems, the administration is making is running a huge risk of GOP takeover of the House in 2010. What's more, they've left themselves with almost no margin of error for their own re-election. And for double-irony, the very members of congress who are most endangered by poor short-term economic performance are the ones who are doing the most to urge the administration to adopt a fiscal retrenchment agenda. The faith in vox populi that this reflects ("the public will reward me for doing what they said they wanted me to do, even if it turns out not to work at all") is sort of touching, but really lacks any basis in the evidence. It's fascinating to me how few professional political operatives or reporters seem interested in systematic studies of US politics.
See also:
-Seth Masket on pundits misunderstanding Obama's problems
-John Sides on the overemphasis on process as the problem in the health care debate
-Jon Chait on Peter Wehner ridiculing "structural factors" as the primary reason for Obama's decline
[Cross-posted to brendan-nyhan.com]
Via John Sides, David W. Brady, Daniel P. Kessler, and Douglas Rivers have published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that is likely to fuel Democratic panic in Washington over health care:
The majority party normally loses seats in midterm elections, but the Republican resurgence of recent months is more than a conventional midterm rebound. How can a little known Republican run a competitive Senate campaign in Massachusetts? The culprit is the unpopularity of health reform, and it means that Democrats will face even worse problems later this year in less liberal places than Massachusetts.
We have polled voters in 11 states likely to have competitive Senate races in November on how they feel about health reform and how they might vote in November...
Health reform is more popular in some of these states than in others. Where it's popular, Democratic candidates don't have too much of a problem, but where it's unpopular--and that includes most states--the Democratic Senate candidates are fighting an uphill battle...
Support for the Republican Senate candidates in these races is closely related to voter opposition to the health-care Senate bill...
How do we know that it's the health-reform bill that's to blame for the low poll numbers for Democratic Senate candidates and not just that these are more conservative states?
First, we asked voters how their incumbent senator voted on the health-care bill that passed on Christmas Eve. About two-thirds answered correctly. Even now, long before Senate campaigns have intensified, voters know where the candidates stand on health care. And second, we asked voters about their preference for Democrat versus Republican candidates in a generic House race. As in the Senate, the higher the level of opposition to health reform, the greater the likelihood that the state's voters supported Republicans.
Brady and Rivers are highly respected political scientists (I'm not familiar with Kessler), but I'm not sure we can draw strong conclusions from these data. Since health care passed on a perfect party line vote in the Senate, it's relatively easy to know where an incumbent stands on the issue. And given the salience of the health care debate, the correlation between state opposition to health care reform and support for Republican senate candidates is (a) not surprising and (b) not necessarily causal (especially given that those are aggregate measures).
I tend to think that much of the health care fallout is an expression of economic discontent, but there's certainly an argument to be made that it has exacerbated the public's predictable turn away from liberalism. In either case, however, disentangling these factors is extremely difficult.
Update 1/21 8:25 PM: Matt Blackwell makes a similar argument at the Harvard Social Science Statistics blog.
[Cross-posted to brendan-nyhan.com]
The question of the moment is what effect Scott Brown's victory will have on national politics.
It's important to note that his election to the Senate does relatively little to change the overall balance of power in the country. See, for instance, Joshua Tucker's helpful chart:
The loss of Democrats' filibuster-proof majority seems to eliminate the prospect of passing the health care bill through conference committee, but for other legislation, the shift of the pivotal voter from Ben Nelson to Olympia Snowe in the Senate is likely to have a relatively small direct effect. Nelson is currently paying a heavy political price in Nebraska for his support of the health care bill and is unlikely to take a similar risk on future legislation. (On a more technical level, Tucker also notes that the gap between Nelson and Snowe's ideal points is probably relatively small -- see, for instance, Simon Jackman's estimates [PDF].)
Similarly, we knew Democrats faced an unfavorable environment two weeks ago and that the health care reform plan was relatively unpopular in national polls. Not much has changed on either front.
What matters, however, is the collective interpretation of the election. Even though Brown's victory was an ambiguous amalgam of national and local factors, including Coakley's hapless campaign and poor economic conditions, the media is already portraying the outcome as a referendum on President Obama (though a majority of Massachusetts voters approve of his performance) and health care (even though Brown supports a very similar state-run plan in Massachusetts). Debatable as they may be, these interpretations may quickly become conventional wisdom -- indeed, many Democrats have already endorsed them.
The most relevant comparison to the current situation might be electoral mandates. The seminal political science research on the subject shows that opposition party legislators tend to deviate from their typical voting patterns in the direction of a perceived mandate for some period of time before returning to normal.
Given the Democratic tendency to panic in these types of situations, we may see a similar shift in voting patterns or a change in the party's legislative agenda. Pundits will likely claim that Democrats should yield to public opinion as expressed by Massachusetts voters. But it's not at all clear that such moves will prevent significant losses in the November midterms, nor that there is a "message" from Brown's victory as such.
Update 1/20 1:50 PM: Based on Brown's voting record as a state legislator, political scientist Boris Shor estimates that he will become the Senate filibuster pivot rather than Snowe. As I've previously argued, I think Brown moved right to motivate the GOP base in a low-turnout special election, so I'm skeptical he'll pursue such a moderate course (at least right away). But if Shor is correct and Brown is between Nelson and Snowe, it reduces the rightward shift in the filibuster pivot, meaning that Brown's win would have an even smaller effect than we might have otherwise thought.
Update 1/21 9:36 AM: See also John Sides on the need to admit what we don't know about the MA results and Greg Marx on the media's misguided attempts to distill a "message" from the election.
Update 1/22 9:44 AM: Via Matthew Yglesias, Alec MacGillis reports in the Washington Post that "Brown's victory in Mass. senate race hardly a repudiation of health reform."
[Cross-posted to brendan-nyhan.com]
Tom Edsall quoted me in a Huffington Post article today on the 2010 elections:
There are, however, a number of factors that suggest 2010 will be quite different from the Democratic rout of 1994 -- the so-called Gingrich Revolution. "First, 1994 was the culmination of the South moving into the Republican column; there's no equivalent regional shift trending against Democrats in this cycle. Second, the GOP brand is still in terrible shape relative to 1993-1994," says Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at the University of Michigan.
For more, see this post on the 1994/2010 comparison from September. The statement about the Republican brand is a reference to this post, which shows that the GOP's net favorables in August 2009 were the worst since 1993 for an opposition party in the first year after a presidential election.
My assessment is roughly in line with the other political scientists Edsall quoted, Charles Franklin of the University of Wisconsin and Pollster.com and Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia:
"I'd say a loss of 20-30 seats, but not yet in the high 30s to make change of control a probable outcome," says University of Wisconsin political scientist Charles Franklin, who bases his prediction on historical precedents. "Presidential support needs to be in the low 40s to predict a very large loss of seats, based on post WWII data. Also, the GDP [Gross Domestic Product] per capita should be in decline or very small gains. At the latest revision of 2.2% in the third quarter, we are low but not as low as in worst midterms for parties."
The economy remains the crucial unknown: "If GDP grows at a three percent or so rate through the election, I think approval will turn up into the 50s, and that probably leads to Republican gains of 15 to 20 seats, which historically wouldn't be bad for the Democrats," Franklin says. If GDP begins to decline, "then approval will fall more and Democrats could be looking at 30-plus lost seats -- still a stretch for Republicans to gain control, but not out of reach."
..."There are several differences with 1993," says the University of Virginia's Larry Sabato. "First, Democrats then didn't believe it was possible for them to lose the House; now they know better and are more cautious." In addition, he says, there have been fewer retirements this year; the Democratic base after Obama's 53 percent win is stronger than it was when Clinton only won a 43 percent plurality in 1992; and the public image of the GOP was much better in the early 1990s than it is now.
For context, here's a lightly edited version of what I sent to Edsall:
As far as the House, I've seen nothing that would dramatically change what I wrote back in September. The Democrats will almost surely lose a significant number of seats, but at this point I still expect them to narrowly retain their majority. Also, there are two important differences between 2010 and 1994. First, 1994 was the culmination of the South moving into the Republican column; there's no equivalent regional shift trending against Democrats in this cycle. Second, the GOP brand is still in terrible shape relative to 1993-1994.
In terms of Obama's coalition, I don't think the decline so far has been especially dramatic (at least relative to my expectations). He started off with honeymoon levels of approval we haven't seen in some time, but now he's reverting toward where Reagan and Clinton were at this point in their term. We shouldn't have expected anything different -- Republicans and GOP-leaning independents were going to revert to disapproval of him as soon as he did anything controversial. Also, we expect him to (a) suffer from the poor economy (b) face a public that trends toward a preference for less government during a period of unified Democratic control and (c) lose seats in his first midterm like most recent presidents. Given all of those factors, I think he's in pretty good shape.
In related news, the Intrade futures market currently estimates the probability of the Democrats retaining control of the House at 66.5%:
(Cross-posted to brendan-nyhan.com)
A New York Times story on President Obama's approval rating yesterday included this unpersuasive claim:
If Congress passes Mr. Obama's health care bill, the White House -- and many independent analysts -- believe that the accomplishment of a signature campaign promise is likely to push the president's approval ratings back up.
I can see why the White House might make this argument to wavering Senate moderates, but who are these unnamed "independent analysts" and what are they talking about? I don't know any reason to expect that Obama will receive a significant approval boost from passage of health care.
Let's consider the last three presidents who passed a "signature campaign promise" during their first year in office -- Reagan, Clinton, and George W. Bush. (I'm omitting George H.W. Bush, who didn't have much of a domestic agenda.)
-Congress passed Reagan's budget on June 25, 1981 and passed his tax bill on July 29, 1981. Here are his approval ratings from Gallup from that period:
| 6/5-8/81 | 59% |
| 6/19-22/81 | 59% |
| [Budget passes June 25] | |
| 6/26-29/81 | 58% |
| 7/17-20/81 | 60% |
| 7/24-27/81 | 56% |
| [Tax bill passes July 29] | |
| 7/31-8/3/81 | 60% |
| 8/14-17/81 | 60% |
Do you see an approval boost? I don't.
-Bill Clinton signed his deficit reduction bill on August 10, 1993 (the major votes were on August 5 and 6). You can argue about whether this was a "signature campaign promise" (Clinton increased his focus on the deficit after taking office), but it was the major legislative accomplishment of his first year in office and there's no evidence he received a boost from it:
| 6/29-30/93 | 46% |
| 7/9-11/93 | 45% |
| 7/19-21/93 | 42% |
| [Bill passes August 5-6] | |
| 8/8-10/93 | 44 % |
| [Bill signed August 10] | |
| 9/10-12/93 | 47 |
-Finally, there's George W. Bush, who passed his tax cut bill on May 26, 2001 and signed it into law on June 7, 2001 -- as with the previous two examples, there was no discernable bump in approval (I'm omitting the bipartisan No Child Left Behind bill, but the story is the same there):
| 4/20-22/01 | 62% |
| 5/7-9/01 | 53% |
| [Bill passes May 26, signed June 7] | |
| 6/8-10/01 | 55% |
| 6/11-17/01 | 55% |
| 6/28-7/1/01 | 52% |
| 7/10-11/01 | 50% |
The larger story here is that many journalists and political operatives have a wildly exaggerated view of the president's ability to change public opinion outside of a foreign policy context (as with the Obama's health care speech). The reality is that Obama, like his predecessors, is largely at the mercy of the economy and external events unless a new war or foreign policy crisis emerges.
Update 11/25 8:50 PM: Via a reader comment below, here's another useful comparison -- LBJ's approval numbers when Medicare was enacted (it passed Congress July 27-28, 1965, and was signed into law on July 30):
|
5/13-18/65 | 70% |
| 6/4-9/65 | 69% |
| 6/24-29/65 | 66% |
| 7/16-21/65 | 66% |
| [Bill passes July 27-28, signed July 30] | |
| 8/5-10/65 | 65% |
| 8/27-9/1/65 | 64% |
The same conclusion applies.
(Cross-posted to brendan-nyhan.com)
Least plausible political argument I've seen today -- Matthew Continetti's Wall Street Journal op-ed claiming
Sarah Palin's "poll numbers among independents are strong enough to give her a chance" to make a comeback (coincidentally, he wrote a book
defending her). Here's the key passage on Palin's poll numbers:
Ms. Palin's unpopularity--the result of horrendous media coverage and her role as the McCain campaign's pitbull--is a major political obstacle. Her unfavorable rating hovers around 50%, the point at which most politicians would reach for the Valium.
An October Gallup poll put Ms. Palin's favorable number at 40%, her lowest rating to date. In a November Gallup survey, 63% of all voters said they wouldn't seriously consider supporting her for the presidency.
Yet Ms. Palin isn't as unpopular as John Edwards, and she has a higher approval rating than Nancy Pelosi. As Hillary Clinton's career shows, public perception changes over time. Ms. Palin remains highly popular among Republicans (69% favorable). But the Democrats' striking antipathy to the former governor--she has a 72% unfavorable rating among them--drives down her overall approval.
Independents are a different story. These are the folks who decide presidential elections, and they are divided on Ms. Palin. In last month's Gallup poll, Ms. Palin had a 48% unfavorable and 41% favorable rating among independents. Not good, but not insurmountable. Flip those percentages, and they could be serving moose burgers in the White House in 2013.
What drives independents' uncertainty is their feeling that Ms. Palin isn't up to the job. Independents blanch at her perceived lack of expertise on issues unrelated to energy or abortion. They look at Ms. Palin's disappointing interview with Katie Couric last year, or laugh at Tina Fey's impression on "Saturday Night Live." Her resignation--still not fully explained--stokes their worst fears.
Continetti goes on to outline a strategy that he believes Palin could use to rehabilitate her image. But Palin's reputational problems are more profound than he admits. As I pointed out a couple of weeks ago, perceptions of Palin's qualifications for the presidency are shockingly low for a former presidential/VP nominee -- there's been no one comparable to her since Dan Quayle. As such, while it may be true that independents are "divided" in their feelings toward Palin (41% favorable, 48% unfavorable), they tilt heavily toward viewing her as unqualified. Continetti doesn't mention any polls on the subject, but a Gallup survey released last week found that only 28% of independents (and 58% of Republicans!) believe Palin is qualified to be president -- significantly lower than the other prominent Republicans included in the survey (Huckabee, Romney, Gingrich). Given how much people already know about her and how much negative attention she draws from Democrats and the press, it's extremely unlikely she will turn around those numbers. In other words, keep the moose burgers on ice.
PS Note to Continetti: It's a bad sign when you have to clarify that Palin is more popular with John Edwards, a man who cheated on his wife while she was battling cancer.
Update 11/18 9:46 AM: This post was cited in a Christian Science Monitor story on Palin's 2012 prospects.
(Cross-posted to brendan-nyhan.com)
Wall Street Journal, 11/3/09:
Republicans Are Poised for Gains in Key Elections
Outcomes in New York, New Jersey and Virginia Are Unlikely to Forecast Much About National Races in 2010, History Shows
Republicans appear positioned for strong results in three hard-fought elections Tuesday. But isolated, off-year contests aren't always reliable indicators of what will happen in the wider federal and state races held in even-numbered years.
Wall Street Journal, 11/4/09:
Republicans Win in Key States
A Republican sweep in Virginia and New Jersey on Tuesday shifted the political terrain against President Barack Obama only a year after his historic election.
PS For the record, the WSJ was right the first time. Despite what the press will tell you, a handful of off-year elections don't tell us much about the "political terrain" facing Obama and the Democrats. As Matthew Yglesias points out, we have these things called "polls" that we can use to measure people's political beliefs and opinions. Perhaps we should consider using those instead.
Update 11/4 11:41 AM: Dave notes in comments on my blog that the first story includes a similar passage about the election potentially revealing "much tougher political terrain," which I missed:
A Republican sweep in Tuesday's key contests would at minimum show that Democrats face much tougher political terrain than they did a year ago.
I'm not sure what the passage means (the metaphor of "political terrain" is not well-defined) but it seems to contradict the lede of the story, which states that off-year elections are not reliable indicators. The point remains that the ledes are in tension (if not in direct contradiction).
It's also worth noting note the contradiction between the election "show[ing]... political terrain" (11/3) and the results actually "shift[ing] the political terrain" (11/4). Maybe it's time to retire the metaphor, which lets reporters vaguely suggest that things have changed without specifying how.
Update 11/4 8:49 PM -- Eric Boehlert at Media Matters has a virtually identical item on the AP's election coverage:
The AP on Tuesday:
To be sure, it's easy to overanalyze the results of such a small number of elections in a few places. The results will only offer hints about the national political landscape and clues to the public's attitudes. And the races certainly won't predict what will happen in the 2010 midterm elections.
The AP on Wednesday:
To be sure, each race was as much about local issues as about firing warning shots at the politically powerful. But taken together, the results of the 2009 off-year elections could imperil Obama's ambitious legislative agenda and point to a challenging environment in midterm elections next year.
(Cross-posted to brendan-nyhan.com)
Sarah Palin continues to post gruesome poll numbers for a supposedly serious presidential contender. The latest CNN poll found that only 29 percent of Americans believe she is qualified to be president. That number represents a significant decline from perceptions of her qualifications during the campaign, which were already terrible.
Indeed, perceptions of Palin's qualifications are unprecedented among presidential/vice presidential nominees and major presidential contenders in recent years. From Joe Biden to George W. Bush, no one has been perceived as less qualified since Dan Quayle and Ross Perot. The Palin-Quayle parallel, which Jon Chait nailed soon after her nomination, is particularly striking. Each was a surprise VP pick who sparked initial enthusiasm but later became widely perceived as incompetent.
To illustrate the point, here's a comparison of poll results measuring perceptions of Palin and Quayle's qualifications based on time elapsed since their initial convention speeches*:
Though Quayle served as vice president for four years (and got a small bump in the Gulf War period), he could never overcome the perception that he was not qualified to be president. I expect Palin's trajectory to be very similar.
Update 10/30 1:26 PM: Credit where credit is due -- Phil Klinkner raised the Palin-Quayle parallel back on August 30, 2008, citing a Rasmussen poll.
Update 10/31 10:48 AM: In the post above, I didn't make explicit what happened to Quayle after his tenure as vice president. For those who don't know, he withdrew from the presidential race in 1996 and declined to run in 2000. Though he gave various reasons for his decisions to withdraw, the fundamental problem was his perceived lack of qualification to be president. Palin may run in 2012 or 2016 -- the base likes her much more than it did Quayle -- but she will face the same obstacles that he did in trying to mount a successful campaign.
* The polls that were included used national adult and registered voter samples with binary qualified/not qualified questions.
(Cross-posted to brendan-nyhan.com)
A national survey by Public Policy Polling found that 48% of Republicans (and 26% of Americans generally) endorsed the unsupported smear that President Obama doesn't love America (27% of Republicans said Obama does love America and 25% were not sure). Those numbers are even worse than the myth that Obama wasn't born in this country, which was endorsed by 42% of Republicans (and 23% of Americans generally) in a September PPP poll.
Update 10/23 2:05 PM: As a point of comparison (per Jinchi's comment on my blog), a Fox News poll in June 2008 asked "How much do you think Barack Obama loves America?" (rather than "Do you think that Barack Obama loves America?"). 27% of Republicans said "a great deal," 34% said "somewhat," 14% said "not much," 12% said "not at all," and 14% said they didn't know. Though the question and response options varied slightly, those responses are substantially more positive than those found by PPP.
Update 10/25 8:42 PM: Per MartyB's comment on my blog, it's worth clarifying that the reason I compared the two posts above. While the two claims obviously differ in terms of the extent to which they can be disproven, both polls demonstrate that Obama is not viewed as a legitimate president by much of the GOP base.
(Cross-posted to brendan-nyhan.com)
Back on Sept. 9, I predicted that President Obama's speech to Congress on health care was "not likely to change much in terms of public opinion" based on previous political science research. A few days later, I noted weak and inconsistent evidence of an effect (a claim that was disputed by Nate Silver). University of Wisconsin political scientist Charles Franklin subsequently weighed in, finding that "Opposition [to health care reform] has grown but is now slowed to a near halt" while "[s]upport reversed its decline sometime in August and has begun an upturn" which was "probably driven by the speech."
So how do things look today? Here are estimated trend lines for Obama job approval and support for health care reform:
To maximize the likelihood of seeing an effect, I've restricted the date range to July 1-October 5 and used the most sensitive trend line estimator. Nonetheless, the effect of the speech on Obama's job approval is minimal -- the graph shows a small upward blip after the speech but the series quickly returned to its previous trajectory. There was a small bounce in support for health care reform after the speech, but part of the effect dissipated. Meanwhile, estimated opposition to reform, which dipped in the wake of the speech, quickly rebounded toward previous levels and is now greater than it was before the speech. When Charlie Rangel said before the speech that "this level of involvement from the president could well be a game-changer," I don't think these were the results he had in mind.
I'm emphasizing this point because there's a misperception among journalists that the president can easily move public opinion. As we've seen again and again over the years, it's simply not true, but the lack of followup by the press means that the lesson is never learned. (At most, a failure to move poll numbers is blamed on some specific aspect of president's message or strategy.) So we repeat the same cycle over and over again.
(Cross-posted to brendan-nyhan.com)
Josh Tucker (a political scientist at NYU) emails to ask if there are significant regional differences in the data on the state of the GOP brand that I blogged about yesterday.
Tucker, like many other bloggers, was struck by a chart created by Steve Benen highlighting differences a September Daily Kos poll found in views of the Republican Party by region:
As a point of comparison, I checked both the May 1993 Pew poll featured yesterday and a CBS/New York Times poll from late 1994 and there weren't huge regional differences in Republican favorability between the South and the rest of the country. The same applied in a 2006 CBS/NYT poll.
The Pew poll I blogged about yesterday (the Religion & Public Life Survey) isn't available online, but I checked several recent survey questions about the GOP image for which raw data is available in the Roper Center database. The 2009 survey that most closely replicates the Kos question about views of "Republicans in Congress" (a CBS poll) shows a smaller difference between the South and other regions, though it was conducted in March:
In addition, two other surveys asking closely related questions about approval of Republicans in Congress and views of the Republican Party show no obvious divergence between the South and the rest of the country:
One objection is that the CBS and USA Today/Gallup polls took place before the anti-Obama backlash had gotten underway. However, the CNN poll above was conducted July 31-August 3 and shows relatively similar views of the Republican Party by region.
There are important cultural and political differences between the South and the rest of the country, but those differences may be less dramatic than the Kos question suggests. It would be useful if other polls could break out their results by region to see if the Kos finding holds more generally.
(Cross-posted on brendan-nyhan.com)
How weak is the Republican brand right now? This issue came up yesterday when a Media Matters criticized The Hill for failing to mention the GOP's poor polling numbers in a story on the 2010 elections. Similarly, I recently suggested that that the damaged Republican brand might limit the number of seats that the party picks up. But is the party really worse off than previous opposition parties at this point in the election cycle?
As a first cut at the question, I pulled all the relevant polling on approval of the party in Congresss and party favorability from the Roper iPoll database for the periods leading up to the four most recent midterms (1994, 1998, 2002, and 2006). In both cases, the results are consistent, but I'll focus on the favorability questions since Pew and CBS asked comparable questions about party favorables in each cycle.*
The overall finding is simple -- the GOP's standing relative to the Democrats on both measures is worse than any opposition party in the sample. For instance, the Pew data show that the Republicans are currently viewed more negatively than any minority party in the previous four midterms in terms of both net favorables and the difference in net favorables between parties:**
The CBS results (not shown) are even more dramatic. In June, when the question was most recently asked, Republican net favorables were -30% and Democratic net favorables were 25%, which swamps the comparable results from the previous cycles.
In short, there's no question that the GOP party brand is in worse shape than any opposition party in recent memory. The question, however, is whether this difference in party valence will (a) persist through next November and (b) translate into fewer GOP House seats at the polls, especially once we account for the generic Congressional ballot, which should (in principle) take much of this difference into account (see Alan Abramowitz's model, for instance). Those questions remain to be addressed.
* Also, the approval question seems to be less closely related to electoral outcomes -- for instance, disapproval of Republicans in Congress was high in September 1994.
** I chose the survey closest to the current point in the electoral cycle, though the exact date varied. Net favorables are defined as the percentage of Americans who have a favorable view of the party minus the percentage who have an unfavorable view.
(Cross-posted to brendan-nyhan.com)
In a comment on my post about the 2010 midterms yesterday, Charlie Cook protests the "lack of focus on actual Congressional districts":
What I find interesting about this whole conversation is the lack of focus on actual Congressional districts. When you look at the 84 CD's currently held by Democrats, that went for either Bush 2004 or McCain 2008, the 48 Democratic seats that went for Bush and McCain, the 54 seats that were in Republican hands four years go, it is very clear that the party's vulnerability exceeds their margin of 40 seats.
In particular, Cook says, the remaining Southern Democrats who hold competitive seats are vulnerable:
I was interested in your comment, "There's no comparable regional partisan shift working against the Democrats right now."
Have you been in the South lately? The level of anti-Obama, anti-Democratic and anti-Congress venom is extraordinary, and with 59 Democrat-held seats in the region, 22 in or potentially in competitive districts, this is a very serious situation for Democrats. I have had several Democratic members from the region say the atmosphere is as bad or worse than it was in 1994.
This is not just about President Obama. It is anti-Congress and anti-Democratic Congress.
While the election is obviously 13 months away and much can change, that means it could get better, or snowball and get worse. To the extent that Democratic performance in 2008 was elevated by unusually high African-American turnout, that exposure to decline is even greater.
At this point, Democratic members in the South, Border South, Mountain states, in districts with heavy rural and small town populations as opposed to urban and suburban, particularly those with few transplants from other parts of the country, and fewer college graduates, are at particular exposure. Some of these members have either never had a tough race or haven't in many years, with campaign organizations that are hardly sharped to a fine edge.
So while the Democratic performance in the generic Congressional, which is substantially lower than it was during the periods leading up to the 2006 and 2008 elections, when these majorities were built, that is only part of the case for why this may be an extremely challenging election for Democrats.
How seriously should we take these objections? On the first point, Cook's job is to focus on the details of individual races, so it's not surprising that he thinks we should do so. But it's easy to be drawn into highly idiosyncratic narratives and end up losing sight of the big picture. In particular, individual House races are a noisy, lagging indicator of national trends (see, for instance, the House races that suddenly became competitive very late in 1994 and 2006). Political scientists try to abstract away from these details and analyze the underlying process that generates House election outcomes. Cook argues that many House seats held by Democrats are potentially vulnerable, but majority parties always hold marginal seats. The question is whether the number of potentially vulnerable Democratic members is significantly greater than, say, the number of vulnerable Republicans in 2006. (In technical terms, what does the seats-votes curve look like for 2010 relative to previous elections?)
In terms of Cook's second point about the South, I'm open to the idea that the regional shift against Democrats is not complete, making some members there particularly vulnerable. But with only 22 in competitive or potentially competitive races, it's not clear that enough Southern Democrats will lose to create a 1994-style landslide.
(Cross-posted to brendan-nyhan.com)
During his interview with President Clinton yesterday on Meet the Press, David Gregory asked a question that is increasingly occupying the minds of prominent Democrats -- "do you worry about a repeat of '94 politically?"
Vice President Joe Biden raised a similar concern last week, telling attendees at a Democratic fundraiser in Delaware that "If [Republicans] take them back [35 Democratic House seats in traditionally Republican districts], this [is] the end of the road for what Barack and I are trying to do."
So is the House really in play? Analysis by several political scientists suggests that the answer is yes. Democrats could lose the House, which would take a 40 seat swing, but a 1994-style landslide seems unlikely.
A Sept. 3 column by Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University, analyzes a statistical model of midterm elections since 1946 and concludes that Democrats should expect significant losses:
Democrats are likely to lose at least 15 seats in the House of Representatives in 2010 and their losses could go as high as 30-40 seats. The Senate looks more promising for Democrats because there are as many Republican as Democratic seats up for election next year but a loss of 3-4 seats is entirely possible.
Under what Abramowitz calls "what might be considered a worst case scenario for Democrats" in which "President Obama's approval rating sinks into the low 40s next year" and "Republicans take a 5 point lead on the generic ballot," he projects a GOP gain of four seats in the Senate and 41 seats in the House -- just enough to take back control of the lower chamber.
Tom Holbrook at UW-Milwaukee cautions, however, against Charlie Cook's warning that "wave elections, more often than not, start just like this: The president's ratings plummet; his party loses its advantage on the generic congressional ballot test; the intensity of opposition-party voters skyrockets; his own party's voters become complacent or even depressed; and independent voters move lopsidedly away":
Let's look first at presidential approval... [I]t appears that early reports of presidential approval are fair predictors of midterm losses (r=.60, p=.02), though there are still a number of data points that are significantly off the regression line... Still, there is a clear relationship here, one that might foreshadow the outcomes of next year's elections. Based on the Obama's current level of approval (52%, Gallup polls in September), the trend in these data predicts a seat loss of 28 seats for the Democrats in 2010.
Should this be cause for Republican jubilation and Democratic hand-wringing? Not quite. The problem with forecasts like this one is that the sample size is small enough (n=15) and the forecasting error is large enough (standard error of forecast=17.9) that a 95% confidence interval around the prediction ranges from a loss of 67 seats to a gain of 11 seats. In other words, the prediction from these data encompasses everything from a complete Democratic collapse to historic gains for the Democrats. The best guess is still substantial Democratic losses, but with plenty of hedging.
What about Obama's standing among independents? Is it particularly important to the Democratic fortunes in the 2010 elections? It turns out that presidential support among independents is no more or less important than the overall level of presidential approval...
Finally, we turn to the generic congressional ballot. It is clear from other research that the generic ballot predicts well in the fall of election years (see Abramowitz), but is it really of much use 14 months out? In a word, no...
The third political scientist to weigh in, Andrew Gelman at Columbia, suggests that the current generic Congressional ballot numbers for Democrats are roughly consistent with a Republican vote swing that would be large enough to take back the House (though he admits he's extrapolating -- see Holbrook's finding above).
Finally, low-volume trading on the Intrade prediction market puts the probability of a Republican takeover of the House at 37%.
In the end, Democrats seem likely to suffer significant losses (especially if the economy hasn't started to turn around), but Holbrook is right to emphasize the level of uncertainty, which is still relatively high. As to the 1994 question, here's what Clinton said to Gregory yesterday:
PRES. CLINTON: It, it--there's no way they can make it that bad, for several reasons. Number one, the country is more diverse and more interested in positive action. Number two, they've seen this movie before, because they had eight years under President Bush when the Republicans finally had the whole government, and they know the results were bad. And number three, the Democrats haven't taken on the gun lobby like I did, and they took 15 out of our members out. So I don't think it'll be--whatever happens, it'll be manageable for the president.
I'd put a slightly different spin on the first and third points. From a political science perspective, 1994 was the culmination of the long decline of Democratic dominance among whites in the South -- many incumbents were vulnerable on issues like guns, gays in the military, etc. because their districts had changed. There's no comparable regional partisan shift working against the Democrats right now. Clinton's second point can be similarly reinterpreted -- the damage done to Republican brand under President Bush may restrict Republican gains in this election relative to 1994.
Update 9/28 11:52 AM: I missed a more recent Abramowitz analysis, which argues that a repeat of 1994 is unlikely due to the growing proportion of non-white voters in the electorate -- a development that is likely to damage the GOP's prospects due to its weakness with those groups (see Clinton's first point above).
Update 9/29 7:19 AM: The Hill points out another reason that a 1994-style wave election is unlikely - the lack of retirements by incumbents:
In the last three "wave elections," the party that lost a large number of seats has been hampered by incumbents not running for reelection. But so far in the 2010 cycle, not a single House member has announced his or her retirement, though 18 -- seven Democrats and 11 Republicans -- have said they will run for higher office.
(Cross-posted to brendan-nyhan.com)
Tom Jensen of Public Policy Polling continues his interesting polling on political misperceptions in a new national poll (PDF) that was conducted Sept. 18-21 and released today.
As in the New Jersey poll released last week, PPP's national poll includes contrasting "truther" and "birther" questions. However, Jensen consulted with me on the wording of the "truther" question, which I had criticized, and ended up selecting new wording I adapted from a Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll. The new question removes the ambiguity associated with the phrase "advance knowledge," which could be interpreted to refer to the August 2001 memo Bush received warning of the threat from Al Qaeda:
Old question: "Do you think George W. Bush had advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks?"
New question: "Do you think President Bush intentionally allowed the 9/11 attacks to take place because he wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East?"
Here are the poll results for the two misperceptions by party:
The primary finding is that the Obama birth certificate misperception has become far more prevalent among Republicans (42% no, 22% not sure) than the 9/11 misperception for Democrats (25% yes, 12% not sure). The percentage of Republicans who directly endorse the myth has increased substantially since the Daily Kos poll released in late July (which found 28% of Republicans said Obama wasn't born in this country and 30% weren't sure).
In terms of the 9/11 myth, the PPP results are generally consistent with what Scripps found in 2006, though reported levels of 9/11 misperceptions are lower among Democrats* (note: the Scripps results are juxtaposed below with the Daily Kos poll results referenced above):
The difference in 9/11 misperceptions between the two polls could be the result of variations in question wording (among other things, the original Scripps question refers to "people in the federal government" rather than President Bush) or differences in the response options (yes/no versus a scale of likelihood). 9/11 misperceptions may also have declined over time, particularly since Bush is no longer in office.
(Cross-posted to brendan-nyhan.com)
Back in August, I created this plot showing the parallels in partisan misperceptions about President Bush (a 9/11 conspiracy) and President Obama (not a citizen):
Public Policy Polling just asked questions about both misperceptions in the same poll in New Jersey (PDF). While the 9/11 question, which asks whether the respondent thinks Bush had "advance knowledge" of the attacks, isn't ideal for reasons outlined in the previous post, the results are extremely similar to those presented above (though the partisan skew of the misperceptions among independents flips):
The poll also asked if people think Obama is the anti-Christ (GOP: 14% yes, 15% not sure). It's too bad they didn't also ask about whether Bush is the anti-Christ or we could have had another nice comparison...
(Cross-posted to brendan-nyhan.com)
Though the public is closely divided on health care reform, Matthew Yglesias suggests an alternative interpretation in which "Obama is clearly winning" on the issue because of the zero sum nature of partisan politics. As evidence, he cites the public's preference for Democrats on the "Who do you trust to do a better job handling health care?" question in the latest Washington Post poll (48% Democrats, 36% Republicans).
However, it's not clear that the issue is zero sum. While a plurality of the public may prefer the Democratic approach to health care reform to the Republican approach (i.e. D > R), many of those same people may prefer the status quo to both parties' approaches (i.e. SQ > D > R). As a result, the Democratic pursuit of health care reform may hurt them more than Republicans, who are unlikely to have the power to pass legislation any time soon.
Update 9/14 4:41 PM: To clarify, the question is whether saying you trust Republicans to handle health care can be interpreted as a preference for the status quo over the Democratic proposals and nothing more. My argument is that saying you trust Republicans to "handle" health care may instead be interpreted as indicating a preference for the GOP's private market approach to reform (i.e. John McCain's plan). If a large number of people interpret the question this way and don't like the private market approach, the Democatic approach could look artificially popular. Individual-level poll data would help us adjudicate between these two different stories.
(Cross-posted to brendan-nyhan.com)
Last week, I predicted that President Obama's primetime speech to Congress would fail to have a significant effect on public opinion. While it's too early to reach a definitive conclusion, the early indications are largely consistent with that conclusion. An ABC News/Washington Post poll conducted Sept. 10-12 shows no statistically significant change in Obama's approval on health care or support for health care reform compared with a poll conducted August 10-12 (see also the Post story on the poll -- via Kaus). At best, Obama might have regained the ground he lost in late August -- a CBS News poll (PDF) conducted Sept. 10 showed a 12 point increase in approval of the president on health care compared with a poll conducted August 27-31, but that poll also showed no change in the percentage of Americans who think health care reform would help them personally. (In addition, the CBS poll re-surveyed respondents from the August 27-31 poll -- a format that is useful for comparing opinions before and after the speech, but may not be fully representative.)
Update 9/16 8:36 PM: Nate Silver calls me and George Stephanopolous out, falsely stating that both of us "[concluded] that there is no bounce on the basis of the ABC poll... while ignoring the other polling." That's wrong on two counts. First, at the time I posted, I had not seen any post-speech polls other than the ones cited in the post. Second, I didn't say "there is no bounce" -- I said the speech would most likely "fail to have a significant effect on public opinion" and that, "While it's too early to reach a definitive conclusion, the early indications are largely consistent with that conclusion." (Note also the post title: "Obama's health numbers: Not moving much" [emphasis added].)
Since I wrote that post, Rasmussen and CNN have released polls showing what Mark Blumenthal describes as "[s]mall, nominal increases in approval for Obama or support for health reform." In particular, the observed increases in support for health reform in the two polls were not statistically significant (Rasmussen's has seemingly dissipated already). Despite preliminary evidence of a small uptick in Obama's approval, I'll stand by my claim.
(Cross-posted to brendan-nyhan.com)
An interesting development on the polling front: Tom Jensen of Public Policy Polling is open-sourcing his polls. Yesterday he asked for suggestions on which state to poll next and posted a draft questionnaire for Joe Wilson's district for comment.
This approach, which I think is brilliant, raises a more general question: where's the innovation in content creation among political organizations? Beyond MoveOn.org, very few organizations in politics take advantage of the creativity and intelligence of their supporters.
Along similar lines, why doesn't a political organization like one of the major parties offer up some money in a competition to, say, predict who will respond favorably to solicitations for money, votes, etc. using anonymized data? The Netflix Prize, which will be awarded on the 21st, drew a vast amount of effort from the machine learning community, and there's now a company that will provide infrastructure for similar contests. Who's going to be the innovator?
(Cross-posted to brendan-nyhan.com)
Good news -- widespread denunciation of the euthanasia/"death panel" myth as false by the press is prompting conservative elites to distance themselves from the claim.
National Review is calling Sarah Palin's "death panel" rhetoric "hysteria." Senator Chuck Grassley quietly retracted his claim that the government could decide to "pull the plug on grandma" under proposed health care legislation in Congress. And even more extreme sources like Fox News, Glenn Beck, and Dick Morris have been forced to concede that there is no explicit "death panel" provision in the legislation (though they argue that it will create rationing that amounts to "de facto death panels").
This trend gives me hope that the elite-focused naming and shaming strategy that I've advocated (here and here) can work.
Unfortunately, myths spread so quickly these days that the damage to the health care debate may already be irreversible. A Pew poll released yesterday finds that 86% of Americans have heard of the "death panel" claim. Among this group, fully half of Americans either believe the claim is true (30%) or don't know (20%), including 70% of Republicans (47% true, 23% don't know). Results from a Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll using different wording are nearly as discouraging -- they estimate that 11% of Americans and 28% of Republicans think "death panels" are real, and an additional 17% of Americans and 31% of Republicans aren't sure. Either way, it's not clear that subtle backtracking by conservative elites will move those numbers back down anytime soon.
Update 8/24 10:25 AM: The Washington Post's Charles Krauthammer also admitted that "there are no 'death panels' in the Democratic health-care bills, and to say that there are is to debase the debate." However, like Fox, Beck, and Morris, he then goes on to claim that the funding of end of life consultations is "intended to gently point the patient in a certain direction, toward the corner of the sickroom where stands a ghostly figure, scythe in hand, offering release."
(Cross-posted to brendan-nyhan.com)
NBC released a health care poll (PDF) last night that deputy political director Mark Murray summarized in an article with the subhed "Misperceptions abound on president's health overhaul initiative":
Majorities in the poll believe the plans would give health insurance coverage to illegal immigrants; would lead to a government takeover of the health system; and would use taxpayer dollars to pay for women to have abortions -- all claims that nonpartisan fact-checkers say are untrue about the legislation that has emerged so far from Congress.
Forty-five percent think the reform proposals would allow the government to make decisions about when to stop providing medical care for the elderly.
That also is untrue: The provision in the House legislation that critics have seized on -- raising the specter of "death panels" or euthanasia -- would simply allow Medicare to pay doctors for end-of-life counseling, if the patient wishes.
While it's great to see major news organizations polling on misperceptions, the wording of the NBC poll questions means that we can't draw sharp conclusions about the extent to which the public has mistaken beliefs about the actual contents of the legislation before Congress.
Here is the relevant segment of the poll results with question wording:
The problem is that NBC asked respondents if various results were "likely to happen" under the proposed health care plan, a vague phrase that allows for implausible but increasingly popular fallback position that the provisions in question are not in the plan but will somehow result from it in practice. (See, for instance, Rudy Giuliani's defense of the "death panels" myth.) It would have been preferable to first ask respondents what provisions they thought were part of the legislation and then to ask if they think "death panels" and other doomsday scenarios would be the eventual result.
(Cross-posted to brendan-nyhan.com)
An update on state polling on the Obama birth certificate myth -- Public Policy Polling has released a preview of a new poll showing that 43% of Colorado Republicans think President Obama was not born in this country and an additional 24% were unsure. Those numbers are comparable to the numbers that PPP found in Virginia (41% no, 27% not sure) and North Carolina (47% no, 29% not sure) and much worse than those found in Utah (13% no in a poll conducted by local media), suggesting that birther-ism may be prevalent among Republicans in states outside of the South that lack large black populations.
Update 8/20 9:24 PM: Here are the full poll results (PDF).
(Cross-posted to brendan-nyhan.com)
Two new polls are out measuring the state-level prevalence of the misperception that President Obama is not a citizen of this country.
Tom Jensen of Public Policy Polling has released a preview of a poll showing that 47% of North Carolina Republicans think President Obama is not a citizen -- an even more disturbing finding than his previous poll, which found that 41% of Virginia Republicans believed in the myth. By contrast, a Deseret News/KSL-TV poll found that only 13% of Utah Republicans -- and 9% of Utahns generally -- said that they believe Obama is not a citizen (via David Weigel).
These results are consistent with the national figures from a Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll, which found that the myth was endorsed by 28% of Republicans (and 11% of Americans) overall and that it was more prevalent in the South.
What explains the state-level differences in birther misperceptions that we observe? The Washington Independent's David Weigel suggests the difference may be linked to a lack of racial polarization in Utah:
So why does rock-solid Republican Utah have fewer "birthers" than, the deep South, or even fewer than blue Virginia and North Carolina? A lack of racial polarization has something to do with it. Utah, like the rest of the great plains and western states, got bluer in 2008 despite overall McCain victories and despite having a very, very white population. In Utah, Obama got 327,670 votes in 2008, up from the 241,199 votes that Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) got in 2004. For the first time since 1964, the Democratic candidate for president actually carried Salt Lake County. This happened with 31 percent of Utah whites backing Obama. Not even close to a winning margin; but in Louisiana, for example, Obama only won 14 percent of the white vote.
The reason, of course, for the lack of racial polarization in Utah is that it is overwhelmingly white. By contrast, states with large black populations (particularly those in the South) are often much more polarized along racial lines. Following up on my analyses of state-level Obama support by black population, I therefore plotted state-level GOP birther misperceptions against the state-level black population (with the aggregate US total added for context). While it is obviously far too early to draw any firm conclusions, the result is highly suggestive:
Again, the plot is only for illustrative purposes -- it is far too soon to tell if the relationship will hold with data from more states. But the fit to the state data is almost perfectly linear thus far (R2=.99).
(Cross-posted to brendan-nyhan.com)
Since the release of a Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll showing that 28% of Republicans believe President Obama was not born in this country, Chris Matthews, Ann Coulter, Bernie Goldberg,
David Paul Kuhn at Real Clear Politics, and other media figures have drawn an equivalence between the Kos poll and a 2007 Rasmussen poll which found that 35% of Democrats believe George W. Bush knew about 9/11 in advance.
The problem, as Media Matters points out, is that the wording of the Rasmussen poll ("Did Bush know about the 9/11 attacks in advance?") almost surely conflates people who believe Bush intentionally allowed an attack to occur with those who think the administration was negligent in its attention to the potential threat from Al Qaeda. Even National Review Online's Jonah Goldberg conceded this point in a column published soon after the poll was released.
However, another, lesser-known poll used less ambiguous wording and found similar results. A July 2006 Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll asked the following question:
There are also accusations being made following the 9/11 terrorist attack. One of these is: People in the federal government either assisted in the 9/11 attacks or took no action to stop the attacks because they wanted to United States to go to war in the Middle East.
When asked how likely this was, 16% of Americans said it was very likely and 20% said it was somewhat likely that people in the Bush administration "assisted in the 9/11 attacks or took no action to stop the attacks because they wanted to United States to go to war in the Middle East."
The partisan breakdown was not provided in the Scripps news report on the poll, but using the weighted data provided by Scripps (see update below), we can directly compare the proportion of incorrect or don't know responses to the 9/11 conspiracy and Obama birth certificate questions:
There is an undeniable symmetry to the misperceptions, which skew in the expected partisan directions in both cases. The total proportion of incorrect or don't know responses among Republicans on Obama's citizenship (58%) is comparable to the proportion of comparable responses among Democrats on a 9/11 conspiracy (51%).
The pattern of responses by party is similar if we only include those respondents who directly endorsed the misperception in question (i.e. "very likely" to be a 9/11 conspiracy, Obama not a citizen):
Even under this more stringent standard, 23% of Democrats and 28% of Republicans indicated direct support for the misperception of interest.
In short, using a more appropriate comparison poll, the primary conclusion stands -- both party's bases are disturbingly receptive to wild conspiracy theories.
Update 8/10 1:39 PM: I've updated the response totals and graphics based on data provided to me by Scripps that is weighted by race, age, and gender to match Census figures. Applying these survey weights results in slightly higher estimated levels of misperceptions on the 9/11 conspiracy question than I previously reported. This accounts for the discrepancy between the publicly available Scripps data and their published results that I mentioned in the initial version of this post.
Update 8/15 10:39 PM: I just discovered that the first chart had not been updated to reflect the correct weighted response totals. Apologies -- it has been corrected above.
(Cross-posted at brendan-nyhan.com)
Tom Jensen of Public Policy Polling reported on Twitter today that a new poll his firm conducted finds that only 32% of Virginia Republicans think Obama was born in the US, while 41% think he was not and 27% are not sure. These numbers are even worse than the national results from the Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll released on Friday, which found that 28% of Republicans think Obama is not a citizen and 30% are not sure.
Here is a bar chart that combines results from the two polls to compare Virginia Republicans with Republicans and the public nationally (click it for a larger version):
Pretty depressing stuff.
(Cross-posted at brendan-nyhan.com)
As Emily notes, a new Daily Kos-sponsored poll from Research 2000 finds that only 77% of Americans, and 42% of Republicans, believe Obama was born in this country -- a result that suggests the Obama birth certificate myth has circulated more widely than previously thought.
Here are the findings in a bit more detail, including partisan and regional breakdowns which show that the false belief that Obama was not born in this country is most commonly held by Republicans and residents of the South:
Research 2000 for Daily Kos. 7/27-30. All adults. MoE 2%
Do you believe that Barack Obama was born in the United States of America or not?
Yes 77
No 11
Not sure 12
Yes No Not sure
Dem 93 4 3
Rep 42 28 30
Ind 83 8 9
Northeast 93 4 3
South 47 23 30
Midwest 90 6 4
West 87 7 6
To put these numbers in perspective, we can compare them to the most recent Pew poll on the prevalence of the false belief that Obama is a Muslim (click on the chart for a larger version):
As you can see, there's good news and bad news. The good news is that the number of correct responses is much higher on the citizenship question than the religion question. On the other hand, the proportion of incorrect answers is also much higher on the citizenship question among Republicans, which suggests that the encouragement of the birth certificate myth by conservative pundits and Republican politicians has begun to activate the GOP base on this issue. I'm not sure if Michael Steele is going to be able to make this "unnecessary distraction" go away any time soon.
(Methodological details: The chart above describes responses saying Obama was born in the U.S. or not as "citizen"/"non-citizen," which should be interpreted as shorthand for whether he is believed to be a natural-born citizen. It also groups all responses other than "Christian" and "Muslim" from the Pew poll into a "Don't know" category, including the 6% of respondents who refused to answer the question among the general population and the unknown proportion of Republicans who refused to do so.)
(Cross-posted at www.brendan-nyhan.com)
