Pollster.com Brendan Nyhan

Continetti's unlikely case for Palin

bnyhan@yahoo.com (Brendan Nyhan) — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 11:09:22 -0500

by Brendan NyhanLeast 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)]]>

WSJ vs. WSJ on 2009 elections

bnyhan@yahoo.com (Brendan Nyhan) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 09:24:27 -0500

by Brendan NyhanWall 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 polls like Dan Quayle

bnyhan@yahoo.com (Brendan Nyhan) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 15:58:12 -0500

by Brendan NyhanSarah 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)]]>

PPP poll on Obama's love of country

bnyhan@yahoo.com (Brendan Nyhan) — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 09:04:10 -0500

by Brendan NyhanA 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)]]>

Revisiting Obama's health care speech

bnyhan@yahoo.com (Brendan Nyhan) — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 08:31:34 -0500

by Brendan NyhanBack 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)]]>