What's going on here? One possible lesson is "don't mess around with the health care system". But the correlation between recent presidencies, and precipitous declines, seems even more obvious. What changed?There are two candidates I can think of. The first is a general rise in partisanship, and decline in respect for institutions like the presidency. The second is the media.
The pre-Nixon presidents enjoyed a certain media conspiracy of silence. They were treated with a fair amount of deference, which is why the public didn't know about FDR's wheelchair, or JFK's affairs. Post Nixon, they started being a little more aggressive, so approval ratings became more volatile.
One could postulate that Carter, Clinton, Bush I, and Reagan, were all heavily influenced by the old consensus liberal media. That media had high hopes for Democrats, and didn't much like Republicans. So all Republicans had to do was, like, not invade Poland, and their approval ratings rose. The expectations for Carter and Clinton were higher, and therefore their ratings fell.
By Bush II, that consensus had been eroded by the proliferation of niche outlets. We are now inundated with information about our presidents. And the more information we have--the more time we spend watching them give bad speeches and make embarassing gaffes--the faster our approval falls. I suspect that emotionally, we actually prefer that the Great Oz stay behind the curtain, so we could content ourselves with the occasional ceremonial display. But those days are long gone.
On the other hand, this is all just so much armchair sociology. Thoughts?
1) I love how everyone's initials are on that graph, except for IKE. Great stuff.
2) What's more shocking about BHO's plot is not the slope downward, but the noise. THis is probably due to the sampling frequency, i.e. polling every day.
3) You have 2 Democratic presidents in the time (after 1980)of "modern media," which includes 24-hour cable and the internetz. Both of these presidents have remarkably downward sloping curves. There is no doubt that Republicans losing power and voicing their displeasure at losing power in the media has something to do with this.
4) More importantly (and correct me if I am wrong here) but I believe that both Clinton and Obama began their term in the middle of, or at the end of, a pretty sharp economic recession. I have no idea about the other Presidents - but that may have more to do with popular sentiment than anything.
Re: 3. There wasn't any displeasure voiced in the media about losing power with Bush either. No recount. No "Bush knew terrorists existed that wanted to attack us". No Bushitler.
Re: 4. Bush began his term at the beginning of a pretty sharp recession (so did Regan). Remember the "we need to cut taxes to help the economy" debates? I'd assume that actually helped his approval - ie. he actually did something demonstratively positive for all taxpayers and not just pass a massive pork/spending bill that spends money in ways no one knows about and can see.
It's pretty clear there is plenty of mud on both sides, and I really don't like either side either so it's not like I'm defending "my guy" here.
he actually did something demonstratively positive for all taxpayers and not just pass a massive pork/spending bill that spends money in ways no one knows about and can see.
I can see how one would believe this if you only ever read RedState and NRO. The fact is that 37% of the stimulus were tax cuts for about 98% of working households. If you bothered to look at any place that actually crunches the numbers (Tax Policy Center, etc.) you'd know that. The stimulus was never a massive pork bill, although I will concede that labelling it as such did a great deal to discredit it.
Sending out checks to people who don't pay any taxes is not a "Tax Cut" it is a transfer payment.
I don't necessarily think that is a bad thing, poorer citizens tend to have a much higher marger propensity to spend and thus a transfer payment to them has a much more stimulative effect.
But payments to them are not "Tax Cuts".
(Replying to "lc")
A payment that reimburses some of the many state and local taxes paid I'd still consider a "tax cut" (for the individual). Just a thought.
Steve, that's missing a fairly critical component of the analysis. One of the big problems with taxes is that they're distortionary - they make you say things like, "Well, I would buy a bigger house, but the property taxes make it too expensive". If I get a lump sum back, it doesn't make me go back to buying the house I wanted, it just makes me richer. The government might not be taking as much on net, but it's still just as distortionary as ever.
Re:Re3. - I still don't see how that disproves the point that there must have been some general popular backlash at a newly annointed Democratic president because of the transition from Republican power. I think this surely has something to do with media influence. I also think this has something to do with the media characterization of the environment surrounding a Democratic candidacy, and the campaign, versus the reality of a Democratic president.
Re:Re4 - Maybe, but GHWB was voted out primarily because of the economic climate, and GWB would have surely been canned if he could have run for another term. Maybe Regan was similar in this regard, GWB - he inherited the bursting of a stock bubble.
Simply put, I think it is nonsensical to read anymore into that chart than the following:
Obama's graph looks like that because more voters are being turned off by his administration and/or policies on a daily basis.
To try to attribute his decline to Republicans is simply going far beyond the data you have and reveals more about your potential bias than any form of reality.
I know it's easy to blame the failings of your guy on your opposition, but the simple fact is, Obama's approval ratings are consistently dropping. I do not believe they will ever drop to Bush's numbers, they will probably level off in another month.
But it really is telling to see people reaching for explanations how it's the Republicans fault that the public is not approving of Obama. Remember, the public just soundly rejected the Republicans in the last two elections. I don't think it makes any sense to believe the public is suddenly listening to them.
True for Obama, but not for Clinton. The slight recession that cost GHWB the election to Clinton was over by the time Clinton took office. If anything, the growing economy should have bolstered Clinton's approval ratings.
Clinton took office at the tail end of a recession, and while the record shows that the recession was officially over before he took office, it didn't feel that way at the time. However, the economy did turn around pretty quickly, which should have helped Clinton. Meanwhile, Reagan was elected because we were in the midst of stagflation, which didn't get much better for almost a year; yet his ratings rose a little before falling back.
I'm curious about the downward spike at the very beginning of Carter's term - did he do something dumb right before polling day, or is it just statistical noise?
On Reagan's graph, one must remember that someone shot him in March of 81.
Yancey, that'd be month 2 of his presidency. That's about when his increase in approval ratings stopped, oddly enough.
Oh, yeah, the noise.
Surely we've had daily polls for a time? It's not new for Obama?
I don't know...I can only assume it's sampling frequency. Either that or we have a bunch of drama queens in this country.
You think there's some question about whether there's a bunch of drama queens in this country?
The question is whether they can produce this.
I loved the "IKE" thing, too.
That hissing sound you hear is the air going out of the hope and change balloon. Get ready to see BHO's numbers really plummet when the media start reporting the weekly casualty numbers from Afghanistan and video of flag draped coffins at Dover AFB.
The media haven't shown one single dead body out of Afghanistan.
And they won't. "We've never been at war with EastAsia."
Given that the Afghanistan conflict started years ago, how does this fit into your grand conspiracy exactly?
Obviously you're not a golfer.
Gee, you mean Obama didn't say that we should leave Iraq to concentrate on Afghanistan? I remember that, but I'm willing to be corrected.
While I think that is a grand idea it is 7 years too late.
If the media is so "liberal" one would think that we would have had a body count (PBS Newshour had been showing pics of the dead on Fridays I think) everyday since the wars began and a daily video from Dover.
Of course since the media is NOT liberal and George Bush is no longer President I will not be surprised to see a daily body count begin on FOX followed quickly by the big 3.
The other commonality between Clinton and Obama is they both started office with Democratic control of Congress. When your party controls both the presidency and Congress the people who put you in office are less understanding when you don't come through on campaign promises.
Isn't that also true of Eisenhower? Of course, 40 and 56 years separate him from Clinton and Obama, but it is still an interesting comparison.
Why do we care about approval ratings? I know that the pols care, because it will affect approval of legislative initiatives. But it seems to me that focus-group poll-centered legislation is a step backwards.
Why should a politician who hasn't read a bill sample the opinions of voters who haven't read a bill. "If a blind man lead a blind man, will they not both fall into a pit?"
We live in a Republic, not a democracy. Madison had read his Plato and knew why the Founders wanted legislators to pass laws, not a plebiscite. Check out Federalist No. 10.
Armchair sociology indeed.
Well, you're right, in principle. But you can't leave out the human element like that. People in Congress, first and foremost, want to stay in Congress. It's not so much they're acceding to the voters' wishes because they think it's the right thing to do. They just don't want to be fired.
For Bush 43, the recount no doubt lowered his starting approval rating. That left him less room to fall and the chart doesn't extend to 9/11 and the spike after that.
For Clinton and Obama, they both campaigned as moderates (even if anyone with any sense didn't believe Obama) and then got into office and did something else. Instead of welfare reform we got gays in the military. Instead of sound fiscal policy, no more pork, the depoliticization of the Justice Department, return to the rule of law, etc., well we got the last 8 months.
Republicans amazingly (at least in my lifetime) tend to govern as they campaigned. (Bush 41 lost largely because he didn't with his 'Read My Lips' pledge.) That should lead to a fairly flat approval rating until it is affected by events.
I'd like to see this chart again - updated - in 2 weeks.
Why - to compare Obama's continued slow decline to the absurd 9/11 spike GWB got?
I think you've nailed it with Clinton and Obama. Both immediately jumped on very liberal policies the minute they took office. Clinton had actually been a bit more open, during the campaign, about this liberal policies compared to Obama, and did not receive a plurality of the vote. Perot was the spoiler there.
As soon as he took office, Clinton moved for gays in the military and was hit big time by many Democrats over it. Sam Nunn, chairman of the Senate Armed Forced Committee, went ballistic. Clinton was also effected by Hillary, who was very divisive. We had immediate stinks about Hillary being in charge of picking an Attorney General (even the NY Times had an article with "white males need not apply" on that) and a whole bunch of other stuff.
Uh, a lot of people would take issue with your analysis here, in that, you know Obama hasn't been "ultra liberal" unless passing universal healthcare and the stimulus are so far left that they've come back around again to garner support by half the population.
I think the "ultra liberal" might have liked Obama to REALLY leave gitmo, investigate torture, stop using states secrets defenses (and expanding them).
GWB also ran as a moderate, then packed his cabinet with more oil men and CEOs than anyone before, relaxed regulations on ARSENIC in drinking water, took needlessly aggressive stances with China, etc. but no one seemed to notice that he was actually a conservative. (To be clear, I'm not saying he should have been called an "ultra conservative")
Other than that, spot on analysis.
I didn't say liberal. I said they didn't do what they campaigned on. And as you say, I don't recall Obama running on continuing to use warrentless wiretaps or indefinite detention or terrorizing and killing innocent civilians with Predator strikes. Quite the opposite in fact, but as soon as he was in office he reversed course on those and a host of other issues mentioned above.
Bushs first main act was renominating stalled judicial appointments left over from Clinton and passing NCLB with the liberal lion of the Senate. What a partisan.
As to ARSENIC, would those be the ARSENIC limits Clinton couldn't be bothered to enforce for 8 years but then issued an executive order on only after Gore lost? How could that be part of the campaign when the rules didn't even exist before the election was over?
I have the feeling much of this amounts to little more than statistical error. To the extent that every president has a "honeymoon period" that wears off after a few months, I don't see very much difference in Obama from any other President. I also think we have to examine the different methods in which these polls were conducted 30 and 40 years ago.
Also - how much influence did public opinion have on Bush II policy? Precisely none, I believe. I can't see why Obama should be any different.
He doesn't see why either, which is why he's having so much trouble. The reason Bush stopped worrying about public opinion in his second term was he had executive authority to do what he wanted to do, which was prosecute the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Obama wants to make big changes here at home, and for that he needs Congress.
What happened to LBJ's chart? He wasn't all that popular, if I recall. Something about a little conflict in Asia, perhaps?
LBJ and Ford don't appear here, probably because they both took office midterm (after assassination and resignation respectively). Not really properly comparable.
In LBJ's first 8 months, nobody cared about Vietnam. But there was an election gearing up, which makes the results not strictly comparable.
"the more time we spend watching them give bad speeches and make embarassing gaffes"
Not to cause intra-Atlantic friction, but I believe if you ask your associate James Fallows, he will happily explain to you that Obama does not make gaffes. His speeches are all excellent and seek to teach us something.
When Obama says something about 57 states or not knowing a word in "Austrian", these are not gaffes or mistakes that any human might make given the rigors of the job and the amount of public speaking he does; no, rather these are "knowing casualisms" and are just a further sign of how divinely perfect Obama is in every way.
Seriously, check out some of Fallows' blogposts about Obama. They read like a parody of sycophantic lovesickness.
How is "general rise in partisanship" apparent from this graph? I guess the rapid fluctuation in BHO's graph can be attributed to the new media/web2.0/blogs.
It's statistical noise. Polls aren't perfect representations of the underlying truth, hence the "within 3%, 19 times out of 20" you see attached to all of them. Bouncing around by a few percent from the central trend is entirely normal.
I think there is a third very strong reason for this, beyond the media and an overall lack of respect:
Ignorance of the Population. The dumbing down of America.
There was a time when Americans understood the true responsibility, capability, and limitations of the Executive. Now we have people asking the President to save them, personally. To buy them a home, or a car, etc.
They don't want a president; they want Caesar.
Chauncey was more than happy to exploit this. That's what "Change" implied, without ever committing to it. "Trust me, and I'll save you, the country, and the world..."
And people were - and many still are - stupid enough to believe it.
When it doesn't happen, and happen NOW in this ADD world that we live in, the populace turn like scorpions.
I don't buy it. The number of stupid people has not increased, nor have they got dumber. Its just that megaphones are cheaper and more widely available.
I'm not sure where we'd find hard data, but consider: If we took a microphone down to Times Square and asked random people "Who is the vice president? Who is the Speaker of the House?" Etc. Do you honestly believe that you'd get the same number of "I don't know" answers that we see today?
Every time I see or hear one of these "experiments" I cringe. It's hard to believe how ignorant our population is on basic questions.
No hard data, but I think more people will get those questions right today than 50 years ago
From what I've heard, when people polled on similar questions 50 years ago, they got similar results. It hasn't gotten much better, but it hasn't gotten much worse either.
OK, so this is going to be very controversial, but this is a website that's meant to elicit debate. I can't find numbers from 50 years ago, which is where my mind was when I wrote this, but I found some from 20 years ago.
http://people-press.org/report/319/public-knowledge-of-current-affairs-little-changed-by-news-and-information-revolutions
The controversial aspect? Check the demographics, down towards the end. I was wowed by that, but if you believe the survey - well, data is data.
Then super-impose this factoid:
http://www.america.gov/st/usg-english/2008/April/20080523105153WRybakcuH0.5036737.html
Look, I'm the father of daughters, and nobody is going to tell me that anyone knows more about current affairs than they do. Clearly Megan can (and does) go toe to toe with anybody. But I'm also an economist, and I know that anecdotes aren't the same as large-number data.
What these two results say is that the average voter from the 1960's was more male - and on average more informed on current events (including the role of the executive) - than the typical voter of today.
There's a racial argument here, as well.
http://www.nonprofitvote.org/voterturnout2008
It's a powder keg, I'll grant you, but still - I'm a numbers guy. Does anyone have better numbers?
Only one of those presidents on the graphs entered office during the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, and had two wars going as well. And only one of those on the graphs started with a budget surplus and left his follower "the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression" and two unpopular wars.
The Army slogan "be all you can be" takes into account a ceiling based upon the floor.
Our society likes to ignore the background because it makes the foreground fuzzy.
Isn't he the same guy who has absolute majorities in both the House and the Senate?
If you're willing to consider JFK/LBJ a single term of office, there's actually two such pairs. JFK entered office with a 300 million dollar surplus, and LBJ left with a 25 billion dollar deficit(which Nixon flipped straight back into surplus in his first year, incedentally). Vietnam was only really one war, but it was far bigger than both the current ones combined, as well as being far more unpopular. And while the economic crisis didn't really kick up until the early 70s, it was still getting decidedly wonky in the late 60s.
But then, casting Dick Nixon as the Messiah doesn't really take, does it?
If it is true that the more the public knows about the government the less they like it, then with more information available with each passing year, more and more people may become libertarians.
I've been thinking about libertarians a bit lately and wonder if there are various types of libertarians? Like can one be pro-life (wants the gov't to enact laws outlawing the practice) and still be libertarian? Or how about worrying about who gets married to whom? Do they have a problem with fire departments and libraries that are paid for with your taxes and run by the local gov't.
I thought libertarians were not religious, but there seems to be a bunch of evangelical libertarians lately.
Are they just posers?
Not trying to be snarky (well maybe a bit) but just wondering if there are social justice libertarians or social conservative libertarians?
Maybe there is a good website....
There's a lot of types. Basically, you qualify as a libertarian, in one sense of the term or another, if you want the government to spend less money and interfere less in personal lives, while still protecting personal rights(there needs to be a bit of a caveat here for anarcho-libertarians, who want to achieve the same goals with no government whatsoever, but they're thankfully a small group).
There's no rule saying you can't be religious, though most aren't - I know of a few who say things like that marriage is a religious act between one man and one woman, but that contract law between consenting adults can be whatever the adults in question want it to be. Libertarianism is a political theory, not a moral one(bar some weird strains like Objectivism). Abortion is a more interesting case, which generally comes down to whether it qualifies as murder or not. The state has a right to protect persons, so if the fetus is a person, then abortion should rightfully be outlawed. Most don't believe this, but I've known a few passionate pro-life libertarians, including atheist ones who were in no way socially conservative.
For things like fire departments and libraries, I think most would favour the eventual elimination of pure public-service things like libraries, but fire departments are a bit harder to do, because it's hard to negotiate contracts in an emergency situation, and there are serious negative externalities to an unfought fire.
For that matter, there are divides on more fundamental issues. Is Iraq an unconscionable waste of taxpayer money on things that do not rightly concern the US government, or is is a justifiable imposition on Americans for the sake of freeing 23 million people from virtual slavery? You'll find large and vocal groups of libertarians on both sides of that one.
So no, the movement isn't monolithic. There are some things you'll find universal agreement on - corporate welfare, say - but there's a lot of variation. As long as they agree with reducing government fairly dramatically, in virtually all directions, I wouldn't call them a poser for differing in the details. Some would, but every movement has crazy purists.
The media is Democratic, so Repulican presidents get elected in spite of the media asserting that they'll eat the first born. And then they don't. Democrats get elected while the media explains why they are Christ returned. And then they aren't.
So it comes down to relief versus disappointment.
The first is a general rise in partisanship, and decline in respect for institutions like the presidency.
It doesn't affect your point but nonpartisanship in mid 20th century is the oddity; the media and politicians were murderously partisan all through the 19th century and up until WWII. YOu'd be shocked at what presidents were called back then. So you could say, "...return of partisanship..."
What are the lefties going to say when BHO approval down to 40% in 2 months? They're gonna continue trashing Rasmussen to the bitter end? What happens when he dips below 50% on Gallup?
I think another interesting metric to use would be the "Presidential Grey Hair Index".
This is obviously not particularly rigorous, but being president of the USA clearly ages you much faster than any other job. And being in the midst of a difficult partisan debate would accelerate even that. This photo of Obama
http://www.voanews.com/english/2009-09-02-voa50.cfm
Looks pretty bad. I mean it could be the lighting, or lack of makeup, or whatever, but it is something to keep track of.
Especially compared to something like
http://hotlineoncall.nationaljournal.com/Barack%20Obama%20Capitol.jpg
agreed.