Brendan Nyhan

New Surveys Show the Persistence of Misperceptions

2012-07-30T09:21:42-04:00

Three new surveys illustrate just how persistent political misperceptions can be.

My research with Jason Reifler suggests that corrective information frequently fails to reduce beliefs in false or unsupported claims -- a response that may be rooted in the threatening nature of unwelcome facts. While there are ways to present information more effectively, the extensive social science research we review in our New America report suggests that misperceptions are very difficult to counter.

These polls illustrate the challenge. First, the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life and the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press released a new survey showing that 16 percent of Americans think President Obama is a Muslim and additional 36 percent don't know his religion. Plotting the history of Pew surveys on this question, which date back to March 2008, shows that the misperception is disturbingly stable:

Of course, it's possible that some of these respondents are expressing their dislike of Obama rather than a sincere factual belief, but others may refrain from expressing support for the Muslim claim to a survey interviewer -- an effect that Reifler and I found may be substantial for white respondents who received corrective information with a non-white administrator present. The relative magnitude of these effects is unclear.

(Pew also found that only 51 percent of Americans know Mitt Romney is Mormon and 37 percent don't know his religion, but there is no clear misperception -- no more than 5 percent selected any of the other faiths provided in the question.)

Second, MIT political scientist Adam Berinsky, who is now conducting research on misperceptions, commissioned a YouGov poll earlier this month tracking support for the false claim that President Obama was not born in the United States. Initial polls, including those conducted by Berinsky, suggested misperceptions declined substantially after the release of Obama's long-form birth certificate in April 2011, but he found that most of the decline had dissipated by January 2012. In his latest poll, Berinsky finds that birther beliefs are now higher than before the document's release. The graphs below plot his results from immediately before and after the release of the document, January 2012, and July 2012 for all respondents and Republicans:

Finally, my Dartmouth Government department colleague Ben Valentino recently coordinated a YouGov survey on U.S. foreign policy supported by the Tobin Project that included two questions on highly persistent misperceptions -- the belief that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction before the U.S. invasion in 2003 (one of the topics of my first article with Reifler) and the birther myth.

Harris polls from 2003-2006 show that the WMD myth bottomed out just under 40 percent before a bump upward in mid-2006 that may have been the result of bogus hype about the discovery of degraded chemical weapons from the 1980s. Valentino found that 32 percent continued to endorse those claims now. While this estimate represents a decline from the 2005-2006 period, it's a relatively modest one, especially considering the time that has elapsed since then and the increased unpopularity of the war in Iraq and President Bush since 2006. Since Valentino used nearly identical wording to Harris, I've plotted his results along with theirs using a flexible polynomial fit:

As we would expect, the results are strikingly different by partisanship, so I've also disaggregated his survey results by party (leaners are not included in the Democratic and Republican totals in this or the subsequent graph):

63 percent of Republicans believe Iraq had WMD compared with only 27 percent of independents/other and 15 percent of Democrats.

For the birther question, Valentino sought to probe self-reported belief change by asking respondents to indicate not just their current belief but whether their views about Obama's place of birth had changed. In all, he found that 26 percent selected "I have always believed President Obama was born in another country" and an additional 6 percent selected "I used to think President Obama was born in the United States, but now I think he was born in another country." Here is a bar chart broken out by party with responses grouped by the respondent's current beliefs:

Only 22 percent of Republicans said they believe Obama was born in this country, compared with 41 percent of independents/other and 79 percent of Democrats. By contrast, a shocking 63 percent of Republicans indicated they now believe Obama was not born in the U.S. -- a much higher estimate than Berinsky's data (presumably a result of differences in question wording). Again, even if some of these responses do not reflect sincere belief, there is no denying the resilience of misperceptions against even the strongest and most concrete documentary evidence.

Cross-posted at brendan-nyhan.com.

The Effects of Health Care Reform in 2010 and Beyond

2012-03-08T14:26:38-05:00

Why did Democrats do so poorly in the 2010 elections? The median academic forecast was 44 to 45 seats. However, Republicans significantly outperformed expectations in picking up 66 seats in the House and six seats in the Senate.

After the election, John Sides, Eric McGhee and I found that Democratic incumbents who voted for the most controversial legislation of the 2008-2010 period -- TARP, the stimulus, cap-and-trade, and health care reform -- performed significantly worse than those who voted no on those bills. Seth Masket and Steven Greene reached a similar conclusion about the effects of supporting health care reform on the vote share received by the most conservative House Democrats who ran for reelection.

Afterward, we joined forces Voltron-style and produced a new article (gated; ungated) that is forthcoming in a special issue of American Politics Research on the 2010 election. In it, we show that the roll call effect on vote share was driven by health care reform. Democratic incumbents who voted yes performed significantly worse than those who did not. Even among a more comparable set of members and districts that we isolate using statistical matching procedures, the estimated effect of support is -5.8 percentage points. We then provide simulation evidence suggesting that Democrats would win approximately 25 more seats if those in competitive districts had voted no, which accounts for the gap between the academic forecasts and the observed outcomes.*

Why did health care reform have such dramatic effects? Individual-level survey data shows that health care reform supporters were seen as more liberal and thus more ideologically distant from voters.

Using mediation analysis, we then show that perceived ideological distance appears to be the key mechanism linking incumbent support for health care reform with individual-level opposition among their constituents. In short, support for health care reform is associated with greater perceived ideological distance, which in turn is associated with a reduced likelihood of supporting the incumbent.

Going forward, the implications for 2012 are less clear. As Sides notes, the economy is the dominant issue in the presidential race and most of the vulnerable Democratic incumbents in Congress lost in 2010. Nonetheless, it will be interesting to see whether challengers can successfully target any remaining Democrats in competitive districts or states who supported health care reform. Will it hurt the party again?

Of course, none of this is to say that Democrats should have declined to pursue health care reform, which was arguably their party's top policy priority after the 2008 election. Parties are frequently willing to pay an electoral penalty to enact their preferred policy agenda. What our analysis shows, however, is that the costs of passing the legislation were significant.

* As Kevin Collins and Jonathan Chait point out, it's possible that news coverage and GOP ads would have focused on the other roll call votes and that they would have had correspondingly greater effects on vulnerable Democrats. In that case, the net effect of supporting health care reform on Democratic losses in 2010 might have been reduced or eliminated. For more on these counterfactuals, see the responses from John Sides and Eric McGhee. See also Seth Masket on how some media coverage has distorted our findings.

Cross-posted to brendan-nyhan.com

The Attack on Election Forecasting Straw Men

2011-11-16T10:47:00-05:00

In recent days, journalists, bloggers, and commentators have reared up to bash a fictitious conventional wisdom about election forecasting.

The premise for many of these statements is that political scientists believe that campaigns and other non-economic factors don't matter in presidential elections. For instance, The Daily Beast's Michael Tomasky describes "the political-science theory of presidential elections and economic determinism" as "pretty much strictly a function of economic conditions." At Real Clear Politics, Sean Trende states that Emory's Alan Abramowitz thinks "presidential elections can be reduced to a simple equation." And in a Bloomberg View column, Ronald Klain, the former chief of staff for Al Gore and Joe Biden, writes that "a group of political scientists, mathematicians and scholars have argued that a handful of factors determine of presidential elections, irrespective of the campaigns."

But as the political scientists John Sides and Seth Masket have already pointed out, these are straw men. Very few political scientists think campaigns don't matter or that elections can be perfectly forecast in advance. In an earlier post, Sides expressed this point well:

Because people continually overestimate the effect of campaigns, this blog holds up the other end of the dialectic by emphasizing the economy and defending those who do. But plenty of research has identified the effects of campaigns too... it's time to abandon this whole it's-either-the-economy-or-the-campaign dichotomy...

Even New York Times blogger Nate Silver, who has become something of a professional critic of political scientists, concedes the point in a post today, writing that the view Klain ascribes to forecasters "is certainly not the majority opinion within the discipline."

What's bizarre about this flurry of articles is that election forecasting is such an obscure topic in the political press. The conventional wisdom that presidential election outcomes are largely unpredictable in advance and that the outcomes we observe are primarily the result of campaign strategy is vastly more prominent. So why is everyone so worried about forecasting models?

A related straw man is the idea that political scientists think their models make perfectly precise predictions. Here, for instance, is what Silver wrote:

[P]olitical scientists as a group badly overestimate how accurately they can forecast elections from economic variables alone. I have written up lengthy critiques of several of these models in the past...

The three posts that Silver links to critique a historian's non-quantitative model which few political scientists would endorse, Ray Fair's forecasting model, and the "Bread and Peace" model of Douglas Hibbs. Only the last two are representative of the field, and political scientists have criticized Fair's model at length in the past (PDFs).

More generally, as Jacob Montgomery and I wrote last week, there is certainly reason to be concerned that these models are too confident about their predictions, but most sophisticated quantitative researchers in political science are aware of these concerns and do not interpret the forecasts so literally. Moreover, we can evaluate which models perform well in making forecasts beyond the data used in estimation and combine their predictions to create more accurate forecasts with appropriate estimates of uncertainty, as Montgomery and his co-authors do in their article (PDF). Silver dismisses this exercise as a "game show" and disparages any attempt to evaluate the models by their future performance -- "most of how they perform over the next few elections will be determined by luck" -- but we can and should aspire to better.

Cross-posted to brendan-nyhan.com

Forecasting 2012: How Much Does Ideology Matter?

2011-11-10T09:36:21-05:00
(Co-authored with Jacob Montgomery, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis)

One year in advance of the 2012 election, New York Times blogger Nate Silver published a presidential forecasting model. The model includes measures of presidential approval and economic performance -- standard variables in election forecasting models -- as well as a novel measure of challenger ideology that appears to have substantial effects. Based on this model, Silver estimates that "The difference between [Mitt] Romney and [Rick] Perry amounts to about 4 percentage points" -- a huge predicted effect that could easily swing the outcome of the election. Consider, for instance, Seth Masket's graphic illustrating how the predicted probability of a Republican win depends heavily on the estimated ideology of the GOP candidate:

Though candidate positioning is likely to influence presidential election outcomes, there are important reasons to question whether the challenger ideology effect Silver identifies is so powerful.

First, when the economy is growing and presidential approval is high, strong moderate candidates may be scared off from entering the race, leaving only ideologues. A similar effect has been shown when one party has held the presidency for a long period of time. When this happens, the opposition tends to perform better due to the perception that is "time for a change", and opposition parties are likely to nominate more moderate candidates in the hopes of regaining control of the White House at the expense of ideological purity.

Second, the estimates of challenger ideology that Silver uses are primarily drawn from voter perceptions of the candidates. However, these perceptions are driven by the content of the campaign, which is itself shaped by the economic context. Candidates who appear extreme in one era may seem less so in the next (consider the changing perceptions of Ronald Reagan between 1976 and 1980, for instance). For all of these reasons, Silver's estimates of the effects of challenger ideology and election outcomes are likely to be significantly exaggerated.

In addition, as we demonstrate below, Silver's model does not substantially improve the accuracy of presidential election forecasts, which casts further doubt on the importance of candidate ideology (see also Alan Abramowitz).

Silver's model includes three predictor variables - presidential approval one year in advance of the election, election year GDP growth, and an estimate of challenger extremism (i.e., the extremism of the candidate of the party that doesn't control the presidency at the time of the election). Using just three variables to predict the outcome of a presidential election may seem simplistic, but in forecasting simplicity is a virtue. With only 17 elections since 1944 to work with, including many indicators in a statistical model is likely to result in the identification of factors that are highly correlated with the election results we have already observed, but which do a horrible job in predicting the future.

For related reasons, Silver criticizes other forecasting models that use relatively obscure economic variables such as growth in real per-capita disposable income:

The government tracks literally 39,000 economic indicators each year.... When you have this much data to sort through but only 17 elections since 1944 to test them upon, some indicators will perform superficially better based on chance alone.... The advantage of looking at G.D.P. is that it represents the broadest overall evaluation of economic activity in the United States.

As Silver notes, there are legitimate reasons to worry that the search for statistically significant predictors will result in identifying indicators that perform well by "chance alone" (an extreme example: Washington Redskins home wins). Using such indicators can cause us to be overconfident in our statistical models (what statisticians call overfitting the data) and tends to make accurately predicting future events -- like next year's election -- very difficult or impossible.

As you might expect, scholars have spilled a lot of ink debating the best forecasting indicators for outcomes ranging from the paths of hurricanes to stock prices. But rather than have a philosophical debate, we can evaluate this concern empirically to determine the extent to which specific forecasting models can successfully predict election outcomes beyond the range of the data used to estimate them. In particular, if models are spuriously identifying chance relationships, then they should perform relatively poorly after the point at which they was first published.

To do so, we began with Silver's source data, which was compiled from the New York Times website and generously shared with us by Harry Enten.* Using a standard linear regression model, we almost precisely replicated the coefficients in the Javascript code for the interactive calculator on the Times website.

As a starting point for evaluating Silver's model, we first compare it with the Douglas Hibbs' "Bread and Peace" model, which uses the real per-capita disposable income variable described above. Silver has previously criticized the Hibbs model as performing relatively poorly outside the range of the years in which the model was first estimated (1952-1988). Here is the key graphic in question:

However, when we estimate both models using the same data as Silver's graph above (1952-1988) and predict the outcome for the 1992-2008 period in terms of the share of the two-party vote received by the party of the president (the standard outcome variable in the literature), we find that Hibbs's model generally performs better than Silver's (Stata data and do files available upon request):

Of course, these are not the only available models for comparison. Indeed, political scientists and economists have estimated dozens of other presidential forecasting models over the past twenty years. For example, PS: Political Science and Politics published a pre-election symposium in 2008 that included presidential election forecasts from numerous scholars (see also here, here, here, or here). Most such models make predictions based on economic conditions and/or public opinion, but they typically do not include a measures of candidate ideology.

While it is fun to compare the performance of these forecasts, we should be clear that there is no one "correct" model. Rather than relying on a single model, we can instead combine the forecasts of numerous models using a technique called ensemble Bayesian model averaging, which creates a composite forecast weighted by the predictive performance of the component models. This approach was developed for combining weather forecasting models (see here) and has been applied to political outcomes in a paper (PDF) by Montgomery, Ward, and Hollenbach.

The figure below, which uses the methodology described by MWH to create Figure 3 in their paper, compares one-step-ahead predictions from Silver's model, the most recent versions of six prominent models in the literature (Campbell's "Trial-Heat and Economy Model," Abramowitz's "Time-for-Change Model," Hibbs's "Bread and Peace Model," Fair's presidential vote-share model, Lewis-Beck and Tien's "Jobs Model Forecast," and Erikson and Wlezien's "Leading Economic Indicators and Poll" forecast**), and a composite forecast created using the ensemble technique. The forecast of each model is plotted with its 67% and 90% confidence intervals against the eventual outcome, which is represented with a dotted line:

Silver's model performs well in some elections, but it is very inaccurate in comparison to its peers in 1992 and 2008. With those exceptions, it does not appear to differ from other models dramatically, though its overall performance is worse on average than the comparison models. The ensemble forecast appears to perform quite well, producing predictions that are relatively close to the actual outcome.

The figure below, which is adapted from Table 4 in MWH, compares the accuracy of the models more precisely using mean average error -- an intuitive (though imperfect) metric for comparing forecasting models that measures the average amount by which they mispredict the final outcome.

We can see that all of the models are relatively accurate on average. They mispredict the vote share for the incumbent party by an average of 1.7 to 3.4 percentage points -- an impressive record given that most models include only two or three variables. By this metric, Silver's forecasts are the least accurate in the group and the ensemble forecast is the most accurate. (See MWH for a discussion of the extent to which these models appropriately express uncertainty about their predictions.) Since some of these models -- and implicitly the ensemble model that relies on them -- have been around for twenty years, this result should not be especially surprising. The literature on presidential forecasting is relatively mature.

At this point, we should note two important but wonky caveats. First, we follow MWH in using the most recent version of each of the forecasting models from political science. In some cases, model specifications may have been revised to account for previous results, which could artificially improve their performance in one-step-ahead prediction tasks (see footnote 14 in MWH). Second, these models differ in the extent to which we would even expect them to make accurate forecasts far in advance of a presidential election. For instance, Campbell's model includes the president's trial heat performance on the Labor Day before the election. Silver's model, on the other hand, takes on the more ambitious challenge of using approval data from a year before the election (though it relies on GDP growth during the election year, which is of course not available in advance).

Ultimately, almost every analyst agrees at this point that it is still too soon to say with much confidence whether President Obama will win in November. In particular, there is still too much uncertainty about the state of the economy next year. However, both theory and data suggest that the conservatism of his opponent is likely to matter less than Silver's model suggests.

Correction 11/10 1:19 PM: A previous version of this post stated that James Campbell's "Trial Heat and Economy" model uses presidential approval on the Labor Day before the election as a predictor. It actually uses the president's performance in a trial heat poll against his opponent on Labor Day.

Update 11/11 10:57 AM: We would like to be clarify that the model comparison we performed did not directly test whether adding estimates of challenger ideology to existing forecasting models would improve their performance. It would be desirable to do so. In the time that we had, our goals were to (a) raise concerns about causal inference and the difficulty of measuring challenger ideology and (b) compare the performance of Silver's model against others in the forecasting literature.

Update 11/16 1:48 PM: See also Silver's followup post and my response to him and other recent critics of election forecasting.

Cross-posted to brendan-nyhan.com

* Silver's challenger ideology data are primarily derived from The Party Decides by Marty Cohen, David Karol, Hans Noel, and John Zaller. We used the exact data underlying Figure 4.1 in The Party Decides as provided by Noel. The Times presents these data on a 0-100 scale but the underlying data are actually on a 0-7 scale based on estimated distance from the ideological center. We used Silver's challenger ideology estimates for John Kerry in 2004 and Barack Obama in 2008 but convert them from the 0-100 scale to the original Party Decides metric.

** All of these authors generously shared their data with MWH.

Perry's Challenges in Dartmouth GOP Debate

2011-10-11T09:19:54-04:00

Going into tonight's GOP debate at Dartmouth College (where I am a faculty member), the challenge for Rick Perry, as TAP's Jamelle Bouie notes, is to reassure nervous elites that he's a capable national-level candidate while attracting support from anti-Romney conservatives who have swung toward Herman Cain:

Romney is leading the field with 38 percent support among likely voters in the New Hampshire presidential primary. Herman Cain takes the second place spot with 20 percent of the vote, and Ron Paul finishes third with 13 percent of the vote. The remaining candidates, including Rick Perry, poll at 5 percent or less.

This obviously isn't great news for the Texas governor. But it's not terrible news either. The simple fact is that Herman Cain isn't a serious candidate. His policy knowledge is slim and his political organization is nonexistent. Yes, he's traveled to a few primary states, but that has more to do with book sales than it does with actually running for president. Sooner or later, his bubble will pop, and he'll fall back down to earth.

But while Cain's candidacy is a sideshow, his constituency is not. Cain represents the largest faction in the anti-Romney wing of the Republican base, which is as large -- if not larger -- than Romney's own base of support. In New Hampshire and elsewhere, these voters have attached to Cain for lack of a better choice.

To put this another way, Herman Cain has sucked the oxygen out of Perry's bid for anti-Romney conservatives. As such, Perry's task for tomorrow's debate and the weeks ahead, is to reassure Republicans of his conservative credentials and re-establish himself as the real alternative to Romney. Part of that, as I noted earlier, will involve attacks on Romney's record. But part of it, I think, will require Perry to gently show conservatives that while Herman Cain is a great guy, he's not quite presidential material.

The problem is that Perry is uniquely ill-suited to go after Cain. First, the former Godfather Pizza CEO's primary vulnerability is his lack of detailed policy knowledge, but the same is true of Perry. In addition, it would be awkward for Perry to target Cain so soon after the controversy over a racially offensive term painted on a rock at a hunting camp leased by Perry and his family. Cain, the only African American running for the GOP nomination, said afterward that Perry showed "a lack of sensitivity."

For these reasons, it's likely that Perry will instead focus his fire on Romney as he did at the Value Voters Summit and in an online video. He has to hope that other contenders will take on Cain in the hopes of attracting some of the gadfly candidate's supporters once his boomlet dissipates.

What's been strange to observe, though, is how Perry's handlers and allies have failed to play in the expectations game in a savvy way. Rather than downplaying his likely performance in the debate tonight, they seemed to promise a major improvement in a New York Times story on Perry's struggles that included an unfortunate comparison of the candidate to a "tired puppy." By comparison, expectations for George W. Bush were set so low that it was considered a victory when he "survived" his first debate in 1999 "without any major gaffe" and the AP later reported that "Even the Texan's allies sounded underwhelmed" by his early debate performances. If Perry's camp is smart, they will avoid creating an expectation of a dramatic turning point that he is unlikely to deliver.

Going forward, Perry's principal challenge is to stay viable so that more elites don't defect to Romney. He is well-funded and has a favorable primary calendar. Regardless of his standing in national polls, he has a decent chance to mount a comeback against Romney because support in multi-candidate primaries is so fluid. When there are relatively minor ideological differences between candidates, it's possible to make rapid gains as voters shift to their second or third choices for strategic or stylistic reasons. If Perry can adapt to the rigors of a national-level campaign, his odds of consolidating enough of the anti-Romney vote to win the nomination are significantly better than the current Intrade estimate of 18.9%.

Cross-posted to brendan-nyhan.com

Does Obama Face a Racial Double Standard?

2011-09-28T10:16:47-04:00

Writing in The Nation, Tulane political scientist Melissa Harris-Perry suggests that President Obama may be suffering from "liberal electoral racism," which she defines as "the willingness to abandon a black candidate when he is just as competent as his white predecessors." After arguing that Obama's record of progressive achievements is comparable to President Clinton's, she argues that "[t]he 2012 election is a test of whether Obama will be held to standards never before imposed on an incumbent," which could be seen as "the triumph of a more subtle form of racism":

These comparisons are neither an attack on the Clinton administration nor an apology for the Obama administration. They are comparisons of two centrist Democratic presidents who faced hostile Republican majorities in the second half of their first terms, forcing a number of political compromises. One president is white. The other is black.

In 1996 President Clinton was re-elected with a coalition more robust and a general election result more favorable than his first win. His vote share among women increased from 46 to 53 percent, among blacks from 83 to 84 percent, among independents from 38 to 42 percent, and among whites from 39 to 43 percent.

President Obama has experienced a swift and steep decline in support among white Americans--from 61 percent in 2009 to 33 percent now. I believe much of that decline can be attributed to their disappointment that choosing a black man for president did not prove to be salvific for them or the nation. His record is, at the very least, comparable to that of President Clinton, who was enthusiastically re-elected. The 2012 election is a test of whether Obama will be held to standards never before imposed on an incumbent. If he is, it may be possible to read that result as the triumph of a more subtle form of racism.

Since 2008, there has been a disturbing accumulation of evidence that race affects how Americans view Obama. You can't understand Americans' views of Obama without considering the role of racial affect. With that said, however, there are other explanations for the differences in the support received by Obama and Clinton.

First, it's not surprising that Obama's approval numbers are relatively weak because the economy -- which plays the dominant role in presidential approval and electoral performance -- has performed worse under him than it did under Clinton. Here, for instance, is a comparison of how nonfarm employment has changed under the two presidents relative to their first month in office:

Even if Obama is not held responsible for the economic downturn he inherited, job growth since the recession ended has been weaker than it was during the comparable period in Clinton's term.

In addition, Harris-Perry cites Clinton's increased support among various groups in 1996 compared to 1992. However, much of the difference between the results is attributable to the decreased performance of Ross Perot in 1996 -- Clinton only increased his share of the two-party vote marginally between those elections (53.5% in 1992 versus 54.7% in 1996).

In addition, the decline in Obama approval among white Americans since 2009 is not strictly comparable to the change in Clinton's electoral performance between 1992 and 1996. Gallup data show that Clinton actually only averaged 44% approval among whites during the third year of his term (he reached 52% approval among whites during 1996 as the economy continued to strengthen).

It is far too early, of course, to know how race will affect Obama's performance in the general election in November 2012. It may also be true that liberals do not give Obama sufficient credit for his legislative accomplishments. But for the moment at least, I don't think we can't confidently attribute the differences between Obama's and Clinton's support among the general public to race.

Cross-posted to brendan-nyhan.com

Beware Early General Election Trial Heats

2011-09-14T12:01:41-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cross-posted to brendan-nyhan.com

Why Candidates Win: Tactics vs. Fundamentals

2011-09-07T09:22:57-04:00

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

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

First, as Mark Blumenthal notes, the comparison to Reagan and Clinton may be overstated. At this point in their terms, the Gallup approval ratings for Reagan and Clinton were 47 percent and 44 percent, respectively, compared with 42 percent for Obama.

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

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

Cross-posted to brendan-nyhan.com

Judis Wrong on Reagan, Bush Popularity

2011-07-30T12:46:38-04:00

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

Obama's political team appears convinced that by positioning the president as the Great Mediator, they will win over independent voters in the 2012 election... Still, his advisers might want to look at a recent Pew poll that shows Obama losing ground with self-identified independents during the last two months. It just might be that what these and other voters want from a president is leadership and not mediation

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

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

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

Cross-posted to brendan-nyhan.com

Third Party Hype: Thomas Friedman Redux

2011-07-25T11:41:40-04:00
Yesterday Thomas Friedman proclaimed that a viable third party presidential candidate will emerge in 2012:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Cross-posted to brendan-nyhan.com]

Why are GOP Governors Unpopular?

2011-07-22T11:25:01-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

[Cross-posted to brendan-nyhan.com]

Obama Advisers Looking for Wrong Lessons

2011-07-21T16:01:27-04:00

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

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

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

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

[Cross-posted to brendan-nyhan.com]

Who Would Be Blamed For a Debt Default?

2011-07-15T16:42:03-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Cross-posted to brendan-nyhan.com]

Why Did Birther Support Drop So Much?

2011-05-13T12:17:14-04:00

When President Obama released his long-form birth certificate, I was skeptical about its chances of killing the myth that he was not born in this country:

Will Wednesday's release of Obama's long-form birth certificate put an end to the birther myth?

The odds aren't good. The problem is that people can be extremely resistant to unwelcome factual information...

Given how much evidence is already available, it's hard to see why a long-form birth certificate would suddenly change the minds of people who are predisposed to believe in the myth. The hardcore are already shifting to new rationales for questioning Obama's right to hold office and deconstructing the PDF released by the White House for supposed evidence of forgery.

As expected, the fringe continues to search for rationales to discredit the birth certificate -- the birther movement isn't going away. However, the Washington Post released a poll conducted after the birth certificate's release (but before news of Osama bin Laden's killing was released) showing that that birther beliefs dropped by half compared to April 2010:

I've been waiting to see if any other polls were conducted, but it looks like the Post is the only media outlet that polled on this issue. Since bin Laden's killing created a bounce that will affect responses to questions about Obama for a while, it's probably the only clean pre-/post-comparison of birther beliefs that we're going to get.

So why was this correction so effective when others tend to fail? (PDF) The answers aren't entirely clear yet, but here are some initial thoughts. First, the birth certificate's release was an unusually definitive debunking that became a major news event, so there was saturation coverage of some very strong corrective information. Second, no prominent elites on the right contested the validity of the birth certificate, which meant that coverage of its release was almost entirely one-sided. Finally, it's possible that support for the myth was soft because poll respondents didn't really believe it but were using poll questions about Obama's religion and place of birth as a way to express disapproval (as some commentators and pollsters have argued).

Does this mean that people's minds can be changed? Yes (though I will be curious to see if these effects hold over time). In cases where the first and second conditions described above hold (very strong corrective information, saturation coverage, no elite controversy), it is possible to convince people who aren't hardcore believers and conspiracy theorists. However, these conditions rarely materialize for prominent political misperceptions, which tend to be controversial among elites and harder to definitively debunk.

To underscore why misperceptions are so difficult to correct, consider the case of the Duelfer Report, a comprehensive CIA-commissioned report released in September 2004 which found no evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or an active weapons of mass destruction program. Even though the release of the report was a major news story confirming that Iraq did not have WMDs, no one could not prove they hadn't been hidden, moved to Syria, etc. and conservatives continued to dispute the claim. As a result, half of Americans were still telling pollsters that Iraq had WMDs as late as 2006.

In short, the release of the birth certificate is something of a best-case scenario for misperceptions. The Post poll results are a victory to be celebrated, but we should be cautious about extrapolating from this case to other, more stubborn myths.

Update 5/13 2:03 PM: Gallup just released a poll conducted May 5-8 (after bin Laden's killing) confirming that birther beliefs were cut roughly in half:

As in the Post's poll, Gallup found that the decline was most significant among Republicans (who were most likely to endorse the claim before the release of the birth certificate):

These results are an encouraging sign that the effects of the birth certificate's release are persisting, though we should be cautious given that the Gallup poll was conducted after bin Laden's death.

Cross-posted to brendan-nyhan.com

Do Early Polls Matter?

2011-05-09T13:56:42-04:00

Can early primary polls tell us who is likely to win their party's nomination for president? In a post a few months ago, I argued they provide little information:

If we exclude sitting vice presidents (George H.W. Bush, Al Gore) and the vice president from the previous administration (Walter Mondale), the horse race polls [early in the year before the presidential election] only correctly predict the nominee two times out of eight (Bob Dole and George W. Bush).

New York Times blogger Nate Silver caricatured this position in a post yesterday. After stating that "[t]he correlation" between early polling and share of the primary popular vote "is far from perfect" but "also far from zero (in fact, it's a moderately strong 0.72)," he wrote the following (I'm linked in the parenthetical about "smart people"):

There is a fairly strong relationship between the candidates' polling and the number of states and votes they won during the primary process -- as well as their chances of winning the nomination...

One could take a variety of more sophisticated approaches with this data -- for instance, by accounting in some way for the relative standing of the candidates in addition to their raw numbers. Nevertheless, this underscores that it's simply quite wrong to suggest (as some smart people have) that early primary polls are meaningless. Instead, they have a reasonable amount of predictive power.

A more defensible hypothesis might be that one should account for any number of objective and subjective factors in addition to the national polls. It also might be the case that an expert could reliably identify candidates who were considerably stronger or weaker than suggested by their polling alone.

While I appreciate the compliment, I don't think it's a fair representation of my position. The fact that polling is correlated with primary performance shouldn't be surprising. Silver's data includes incumbent presidents who faced primary challenges and sitting vice presidents (who we would expect to poll well and win their party's nomination) as well as fringe candidates with no chance of winning the nomination (who will poll and perform poorly). In both cases, candidates' poll performance is largely a reflection of their institutional advantages or disadvantages rather than an independent factor predicting success or failure. (Jonathan Bernstein made a similar point this morning.)

To understand how much polls can tell us about who wins their party nomination, it's necessary to more carefully account for the "objective and subjective factors" to which Silver alludes, which is precisely what I did (crudely) in my previous post when I excluded cycles in which the incumbent vice president or the vice president from the previous administration was running.

Since Silver generously provided his data online (see links in his post), we can do this a bit more systematically. First, no candidate has won their party's nomination without serving as president, vice president, senator, or governor in the contemporary era. I therefore exclude candidates who lacked those qualifications (polls aren't necessary to tell us that these candidates will most likely lose) as well as incumbent presidents and vice presidents (polls aren't necessary to tell us that they will most likely win). Similarly, early polls often include candidates who are unlikely to run (past presidential nominees, celebrities, etc.) or longshot candidates who are unlikely to win, so I limit my focus to the top-tier candidates who are polled most frequently (a proxy for perceived viability). Specifically, I restrict the sample to the six most frequently polled candidates by party/election cycle, including more when there is a multi-way tie (no candidate outside the top six has won the nomination in this period).

Among this elite subset of non-incumbent candidates, the relationships are much weaker. When we disaggregate the results by party, we see they are largely driven by Republicans and a handful of celebrity Democrats (results shown are for states won but are similar for popular vote):

When we try to predict who wins the nomination using polling averages among these groups, the overall relationship is significant but appears to be driven by Republicans.

Even these graphs overstate the relationship between polling and primary outcomes, however, because they fail to account for other structural advantages held by candidates that were known at the time. When we exclude those candidates who previously came in second in their party's last contested primary (a group that includes Ronald Reagan in 1980 and John McCain in 2008) and those who are related to a previous president (Ted Kennedy, Hillary Clinton, and George W. Bush), the relationship is weaker still:

In this case, we can't even estimate the relationship between the probability of winning and the candidate's polling average among Republicans because all of the contested nominations in the data were won by incumbents (Ford in 1976), sitting vice presidents (George H.W. Bush in 1988), previous runner-ups (Reagan in 1980, Dole in 1988, McCain in 2008), or people related to a previous president (George W. Bush in 2000).

In short, the evidence again suggests that early polls don't tell us much about who will win party nominations -- they're largely the result of name recognition and the structural (dis)advantages held by candidates before they enter the race. My headline "Early primary/straw polls don't matter" may have been too strong, but I stand by my conclusion that "At this point in the election cycle, the preferences that matter are those of the activists, elected officials, donors, and party elites who take part in the so-called 'invisible primary.'" Among the subgroup of viable GOP candidates, that's where the most important action is taking place right now -- and it's why I'd bet on Tim Pawlenty despite his low poll numbers.

Cross-posted to brendan-nyhan.com and WashingtonMonthly.com