The Real Story Behind Those Negative Approval Ratings

           

The conventional wisdom is that the 2016 presidential is a “Stupor Bowl” because both the Democrats and the Republicans have settled on the two most hated people they could find to run for president.  The pundits point to poll after poll showing that when you subtract the percentages of survey respondents who disapprove of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, both have negative net public approval ratings.

            Here, for example are the results of the latest ABC News/Washington Post survey:

Figure 1

About 43% of respondents thought of Clinton in favorable terms, while only about 29% of respondents felt the same way about Trump.  Subtracting out the percentage of respondents who thought unfavorably about the candidates, Clinton has a net favorable rating of -12% and Trump has a negative rating of -41%.

            Hold your nose and vote, right?

            Wrong.

            By focusing on just these simple ratings, the pundits are missing the real story.

            Since at least 2004, when Karl Rove pulled Republicans out of the woodwork to re-elect George W. Bush, we have been having “base elections.” Base elections are about mobilization, not persuasion.  Politicians appeal to people in your own party because there aren’t very many people outside of their parties who can be persuaded.  In a base election, candidates only call and knock on the doors of people likely to vote for them.  They don’t bother with anyone else.

            With our current level of political polarization, we should expect that a presidential nominee will be popular with his or her own partisans, but hated by the other side.  Here is what the favorability numbers look like when we break the results down by party identification:

Figure 2

            Among Republicans, Donald Trump has a 65% favorability rating and, when you subtract out the percentage of Republican respondents who thought of Donald Trump in unfavorable terms, his net favorability among Republicans is 30%.

            Clinton does even better among her co-partisans.  74% of the Democrats surveyed thought of her in favorable terms.  Her net favorability rating is 49%.

            Considering only self-identified partisans, the data suggests that the reason both of these candidates have negative favorability ratings stems largely from the contempt members of the other party hold for them.  Only 5% of the Democrats had anything nice to say about Donald Trump while only 11% of the Republicans had anything nice to say about Hillary Clinton.

            Both candidates should want much higher approval ratings from their bases,  But, in understanding these numbers, we should remember the context.  This survey was in the field just after Clinton clinched the Democratic nomination and before she’s had a chance to reconcile with the Sanders voters in her own party.  And though Trump clinched his nomination several weeks ago, there is a simmering feud among the wings of the Republican coalition that may well explode at their convention in July.

            What about Independents? Here’s how people who claim to be Independents think about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

Figure 3

            Taking the data at face value, it appears that Independents don’t much like either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.

            The problem is that independents tend not to be really independent.  People who claim to be Independents are often just as partisan as people who openly admit their party affiliation.  Lincoln Park Strategies, a D.C. public opinion research firm, has calculated that only about 5% of the electorate doesn’t lean toward either party.  These folks are often so ambivalent about politics that they don’t vote.  Without knowing which way an independent leans, you have to take his or her opinion with a grain of salt. 

            To see what each candidate’s favorability rating is among self-identified partisans and Independents who are probably partisan leaners, we have to redistribute their ratings. Here’s how I do it:

            First, we need to know how many survey respondents are in each group.  That information wasn’t included in the results the Washington Post published, but the Washington Post was kind enough to let me know that, assigning required weights to conform their sample to national demographics, 35% of the sample identified as Democratic, 26% identified as Republican and 37% identified as Independent.  To simplify calculations, assume that there were 1,000 respondents.  That would mean that we start with 350 Democrats, 260 Republicans and 370 Independents.

            If Lincoln Park Strategies is correct, then only 50 of the self-identified independents are truly independent.  That would leave 320 Independents to impute to the two parties.

            I assume that the independent leaners identify with the two parties in the same proportion as the other respondents.  Since there were 610 self-identified partisans, the 350 self-identified Democrats amount to 57% (350/610) of the sample while the 260 self-identified Republicans constitute 43% of the sample.  That would mean that 184 of the Independents lean Democratic while 136 lean Republican.

           We know that among all Independents, Hillary Clinton had a 34% favorability rating while Donald Trump had a 30% favorable rating.  I attribute all of a candidate’s favorable ratings to the Independents who lean toward his or her party. 

            74% of the self-reported Democrats (259 respondents) rated Hillary Clinton favorably while 34% of the 184 imputed leaners (62 respondents) did so as well.  Thus, a total of 321 self-identified Democrats and imputed Democratic imputed in all rated Hillary Clinton favorably.  With 534 self-identified Democrats and imputed Democratic leaners, Clinton’s real favorability rating is about 60% and her net favorability rating is 20%.

            65% of self-identified Republicans (169 respondents) rated Donald Trump favorably while 30% of the 136 imputed leaners (41 respondents) did so as well.  Thus, a total of 210 self-identified Republicans and imputed Republican leaners in all rated Donald Trump favorably.  With 396 self-identified Republicans and imputed Republican leaners, Trump’s real favorability rating is about 53% and his net favorability rating is 6%.

            These partisan favorability ratings aren’t stellar, but they’re not awful either. Assuming no stumbles, each candidate is likely to improve his or her favorability rating after Labor Day as people begin to focus on the election and “come home” to the party with which they are most comfortable.

            If that’s true, then the pundits are telling the wrong story.  This election is not a “Stupor Bowl.” It is, instead, still a political Super Bowl. The real story is about the extent of our country’s political polarization.

            Come Election Day, most voters will go to the polls to vote for a candidate they happily support. But, unlike a true Super Bowl in which a team’s supporters hold at least a grudging respect for the opponent, the data is telling us that voters are holding their candidate’s opponent in high contempt.  They want the other side thoroughly defeated.

            And that means that on the day after the election, there will be no national healing, no coming together of political opponents, no honeymoon for the victor.  The winners will rejoice.  They will see their win as a democratic victory and a repudiation of the other side. 

            But, just as in 2008 and 2012, the losers will doubt the legitimacy of the election and work to undermine the winner.  They’re also likely to be very fearful about what the new president will do to them and the country they love.

Veepstakes

             So now we know who the major party presidential nominees are going to be.  We’ve known about Donald Trump for weeks, and Hillary Clinton nailed down the Democratic nomination on Tuesday night after the D.C. primary.

            That leaves us free to speculate about who will get the vice presidential nods.

            I’m not even going to try to guess who Donald Trump will pick.  The guy’s clearly a one-man show.  He relishes unpredictability and sneers at political convention.  There aren’t likely to be any criteria for whom Trump selects.  It will probably depend on what he has for dinner the night he has to decide.

            But Hillary Clinton is a conventional politician.  She’s likely to make a number of calculations in deciding who her running mate is going to be.  If I were her, this is how I would add it up.

            First, Clinton is likely to take the pick seriously and carefully consider whether the person she picks could step into the job if something happens to her.  The person must be somebody the country would view as a plausible president, and that requires somebody who has had experience with government at the highest level.  She needs a governor, a senator or a high-ranking cabinet or military officer.  Since at least the Eisenhower administration, all of our presidents and vice presidents have met this criterion except for Gerald Ford, who was the highest ranking Republican in the House of Representatives when named to succeed Spiro Agnew as Richard Nixon’s vice president.

            It would probably not be wise to tap anyone who currently holds a seat in the Senate.  Democrats should be able to take back control of the Senate, but I can’t yet predict how many seats they’ll pick up.  With a Clinton win, assuming that they hold on to the seats they already control, they’ll only need 4 more (a Democratic vice president will be able to break 50-50 deadlocks).  Otherwise, they’ll need 5 new seats in addition to the ones they already have. With an open seat on the Supreme Court requiring Senate confirmation and potentially two or three more in the next few years, doing anything that is likely to endanger a Democratic Senate majority is a big gamble.

            Second, she needs to make a concession to the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic party.  That’s probably part of the price she’ll have to pay in order to get Mr. Sanders out on the campaign trail as the same kind of enthusiastic advocate she was in 2008 for President Obama.

            Third, she’ll need somebody who is willing to stand in her shadow.  She can’t name anyone who is likely to eclipse her on the campaign trail or insist on legislation she doesn’t want.  Clinton is going to have enough opposition from what is left of the Republican party after November, and she simply can’t be in a position where she has to muzzle members of her own administration.

            And fourth, the smart play would be to choose somebody significantly younger than she is.  Not only will this be a tip of the hat to the young people who animated the Sanders campaign, but a younger person would be a smart, strategic play for the Democratic party.  History tells us that it’s difficult for the same party to keep control of the White House beyond three presidential terms, and so I’m counting on a bruising election fight in 2020.  Regardless of whether Clinton wins reelection in 2020, a person who served as vice president under Clinton would be an obvious choice for Democratic nominee in 2024.  Such a person would have to be young enough to run that campaign in 2024 and a reelection campaign in 2028.

            I don’t think it’s necessary for Clinton to tap an African-American, a woman, or a Latino for the spot.  First, running as the first female major party candidate for the presidency, Clinton is already a “minority” candidate.  While I think most people agree that people should be judged by the “content of their characters,” two minority candidates on the ticket might be too much for current American voters who are willing to give a woman a chance, but might blanche at a ticket that doesn’t include somebody more who is more ethnically mainstream (i.e. a white man).

            Second, as a matter of practical politics, these crucial Democratic constituencies, are far more concerned about policy matters, such as immigration reform, education and the Supreme Court than the purely symbolic gesture of putting “one of their own” on the ticket for an office that one Vice President colorfully described as not worth “a warm bucket of  (rhymes with “spit”).”  They are surely not going to vote for Donald Trump and, because of the danger of a Trump presidency, they’re also not going to stay home on election day.

            The current favorites on the Predict It prediction market include Senators Elizabeth Warren (25¢), Tim Kaine (23¢), Bernie Sanders (8¢), Sherrod Brown (8¢), Cory Booker (7¢), Mark Warner (3¢), Al Franken (3¢), and former Senator Evan Bayh (2¢).

            All of these people, except for Evan Bayh, are Democratic senators, and Hillary would be ill advised to give up their seats in the Senate.  Evan Bayh, by no means a liberal, gave up his red state seat in 2011 after having accomplished little as a Senator and probably wouldn’t be well loved by the Sanders wing of the party. 

            And I can’t imagine that either Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders would want to waste their newfound influence carrying water for Hillary Clinton.  They can accomplish much more and have much greater visibility as Senators, particularly if they are part of a new Senate Democratic majority.  They’re both too old to be able to make a serious run for the presidency in 2024, and so there probably isn’t anything about the vice presidency that would make it enticing to leave the Senate.

            Julian Castro (12¢), current Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and Tom Perez, current Secretary of Labor (9¢) are sandwiched in between Tim Kane and Bernie Sanders on the Predict It list of potential vice presidential candidates.  It doesn’t hurt that they’re both Latinos and well thought-of by the liberal wing of the party, but neither has held high elective office, and it’s doubtful that either has the political skill or gravitas to serve as president if Clinton were to die, resign or be removed by impeachment.  Under those circumstances, the nation would need a steady hand, both to calm the country and to reassure our international allies that the United States could still function as a nation.

            I’d disqualify Xavier Becerra (5¢) a Congressman from California for the same reason.

            Aside from current Vice President Joe Biden (3¢) who is probably too old, the next three names are Colorado governor John Hickenlooper (3¢), former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley (1¢) and former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick. All three generally meet my criteria.

            Of the three, I’d pick Martin O’Malley.  Though O’Malley ran an abortive campaign for president this year, he has a record that liberals should love.  While governor, O’Malley managed to get everything on the liberal checklist--gun control, an end to capital punishment, strong environmental laws, marriage equality, in-state tuition for children of illegal aliens, aid to education, decriminalization of marijuana—enacted.  He was a featured speaker at the Democratic National Convention in 2012, served as Chairman of the Democratic Governors Association, and despite his abortive run against Hillary Clinton this year, is still on good terms with the Clintons.  Having attempted a run for the nomination, O’Malley is also probably better known nationally than the other two.

            Oh, and he plays guitar in a rock band.

            Of course, the “investors” in the prediction markets apparently don’t agree with me, and to be fair, I did not predict that Joe Biden would be Obama’s pick.  But I did pick Paul Ryan as Mitt Romney’s running mate in 2012 before anyone else I know did.  Still, O’Malley fits the bill better than anyone else.

Paul's Poor Poverty Plan Gets an F

       

     Paul Ryan reminds me, certified nerd that I am, of the cool kids in high school.  They were always pretty—even the boys—they dressed better than everyone else, and they spoke a language you could only understand if you were one of them.  And they loved talking to themselves.

            Of course, they were all about appearances.  For the most part, they had nothing original to say.  They never did their homework, and, instead, always tried to rely on what they’d learned by watching TV or going to the movies.

            On Tuesday, Ryan and several of his Republican House colleagues chose a drug rehabilitation facility in Anacostia to unveil a 35 page report authored by his “Task Force on Poverty, Opportunity and Mobility.”  The report says that it is the “beginning of a conversation” about poverty and what to do about it.

            The problem is that we’ve had this vacuous conversation before.  It depends on assumptions that Ryan’s cool kids make about a world beyond their bubble of privilege, a world that they’ve never seen and don’t understand.  In it, they recycle pious moralizing about poor people without once looking at their own moral shortcomings. And it degenerates into farce once those assumptions are challenged.

            The basic assumption behind the report is that people are poor because they are lazy.  If poor people would only just get jobs, the report reasons, then they wouldn’t be poor.  Therefore, the solution to poverty is to incentivize the poor to start working by cutting off public assistance if they’re not actively employed, looking for work or training for a job. 

            It’s ironic that in the section of the report that addresses expanding vocational education, the report notes that “Industries critical to our economy . . . have vacant jobs to fill but not enough qualified applicants to fill them.  This is not due to a lack of willing applicants, but rather a lack of applicants who possess the right skills for the job. (Emphasis added)

            It might have been a good idea if Ryan had given the report to a proofreader to look for internal consistency before issuing it.  It can’t simultaneously be that most people are lazy bums who are looking for ways to defraud the beleaguered taxpayers—can anyone say “welfare queen”?—and that they are “willing” to work and would do so if they had the proper training.

            But that’s not all.  Like the good policy wonks the cool kids want the grownups to think they are, throughout the report, they insist that all poverty programs must survive rigorous tests of efficacy. They want to spend money only on poverty programs that “work.”  They want to terminate programs that can’t provide evidence that they “work” so that resources can be provided to people who truly need them.

            That sounds reasonable, except that when they talk about programs that work, what they mean is that they help people find jobs and leave the welfare rolls.  They’re offended by their observation that “even though the federal government has spent trillions of taxpayer dollars on these programs over the past five decades, the official poverty rate in 2014 (14.8%) was no better than it was in 1966 (14.76%).”

            In the first place, the correct comparison is not between the percentage in poverty in 2014 and the percentage in poverty in 1966.  As we nerdy geeks who understand science would tell them, you have to control for all factors except for the experimental treatment. The right comparison would be between a control group and a treatment group.  What we really want to know is what would have happened without the treatment.

            The answer, according to a report issue on the same day by the Center for American Progress is that between 1967 and 2012, social safety net programs have cut the rate of poverty by 40%.  That is, but for the treatment—Social Security, nutrition assistance, and tax credits for working families—there would be 40% more people in poverty.

            But second, Ryan and his cool kids are trying to insist that tools crafted for alleviating the social conditions that arise out of poverty do something that they weren’t designed to do.  Why is it fair or sensible to find fault with programs designed to provide shelter or fill bellies because they also don’t remove people from welfare rolls?

            If Ryan and his clique are so sure that “the best anti-poverty program is a job,” why have they said nothing in the report about the federal government’s ability to nudge the economy into creating the demand that, in turn, encourages the private sector hire more people?  There is ample evidence that by spending more money on repairing infrastructure, expanding research and development, and helping cities and states bolster the jobs of their teachers, police officers and firefighters can help do this.  Why is there no discussion about increasing the minimum wage so that people can earn what they need instead of having to rely, a la Walmart,  on public assistance programs?

            The answer is that more federal spending would eventually require tax increases, the bulk of which would have to be paid Ryan and his well-heeled cohort.  Higher minimum wages make it harder for Daddy to squeeze profits out of his non-union work force so as to afford those sweet little red ‘vettes or high horsepower beemers Paul and his crowd had been eyeing as rewards for their great achievements.  

            When they issue reports like this one, the cool kids make it hard for anyone to believe that they truly care much about helping people who live outside of their bubble.  They issue reports like this one because they just don’t want to look like they don’t care or because they want to camouflage their narcissism and greed.  Their life experience has taught them that when you’ve got power, grace and style, lip service is all that’s really required.