Monthly Archives: November 2009

I want to follow up on my earlier post regarding Tuesday’s election, because evidently there is still confusion regarding what actually explains the recurring pattern in which the president’s party loses the off year gubernatorial elections, and the impact those losses are likely to have this year on pending legislation, particularly health care. It turns out that even those who recognize the historical pattern behind Tuesday’s results are still drawing the wrong lessons. Consider the following from Taegen Goddard, who writes for the Political Wire:  “In both states, it seems pretty clear that the voters tend to show their disappointment with the new President by voting for the other party, no matter which party controls the White House. Most likely many people had some expectations from the newly (re)elected President, didn’t see them satisfied and wanted to send the incumbent a message. The correlation (12 out of 12 and 14 out of 16  [he’s referring to combined results in Virginia and New Jersey governors’ races dating back to the 1980’s]) is too strong for just chance. This year’s results should be interpreted in this light. While the results are not encouraging for President Obama, they are hardly surprising.”

But let’s be clear here: that’s not what I believe happened.  Voters in the two governors’ races did NOT, in the main, express their disappointment with Obama. The pattern primarily recurs because turnout dips in the off year election, not because people invariably become disappointed with whoever is president. In fact, this pattern happens even when presidents are very popular nationally. Keep in mind that turnout dropped by almost a million voters in both states compared to the presidential election year. In short, the results primarily reflect a smaller voting pool that – because the president is not on the ticket – tends to include fewer voters who supported the president’s party in the presidential election.

Now, what impact will these results have on pending legislation?  Consider the following two observations from writers for the Wall St. Journal and the Washington Post.  Kim Strassel writes in the WSJ: “So long as the president looked strong, those Blue Dogs and freshmen and swing-state senators would stick. Show them any sign of weakness, however, and rattled Dems would begin to care more about their own re-elections than they did their president. Tuesday, the White House hit that tipping point.”

In the Post, Perry Bacon reports that all 177 House Republicans plan to vote against the majority party’s health care bill.  Bacon writes: “The universal opposition to the health-care bill, which Congress could vote on as soon as Saturday, was long expected, but Republican wins in the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races on Tuesday further emboldened the GOP in its stance.”

Tipping point?  Further emboldened?  Is Bacon suggesting that had the Democrats won the two governor’s races, some Republicans would have considered voting FOR the Democratic health care bill?  Is it really the case, as Strassel suggests, that Tuesday’s results suddenly reminded House Democrats to put their own reelection ahead of the president’s political interests? Remember back in January, when Obama was still being hailed as an agent of change, and with his popularity in the mid-60% range, he still couldn’t wring a single Republican House vote in support of his stimulus bill! (And we often forget that 11 House Democrats opposed the initial House stimulus bill and seven voted against the final conference bill.  Of the 11 House Democrats voting against the stimulus bill, 9 represent districts in which McCain beat Obama in 2008.)

My point is that the Republicans have already demonstrated a willingness to oppose legislation that they viewed as against their party principles. And blue dog Democrats have been battling the Democratic Party leadership long before Tuesday in an effort to moderate the fiscal impact of health care reform. The 40+ House Democrats representing districts that voted for McCain in 2008 didn’t need Tuesday’s results to understand what was at stake for them electorally.  (Note as well that some thirty-plus Republicans represent districts that went for Obama in 2008, and they too need to calibrate their votes accordingly.)

What we are seeing, I think, is another illustration of the structural bias in media coverage that tries to fit Tuesday’s results into a larger storyline.  But the evidence to support the claim that Tuesday’s results emboldened Republicans to oppose Obama and decreased support from moderate Democrats is, in my view, weak.   The political dynamics these articles cite were already in play.

With key votes coming up on health care, I’m going to try in my next post to see if we can make some sense of the politics of this legislation.

Meanwhile, here’s the data I promised on the New Jersey governors races dating back to the first election after the 1947 constitutional reform in that state which changed the governor’s term from three years to four.  You can see that the off-year loss pattern is a relatively more recent phenomenon.  Since 1949, it has held true in 10 of 16 gubernatorial races, including the last six in a row.  Frankly, I’m not sure why the pattern did not appear earlier, but my guess is that local issues in some of these years swamped the independent impact of the turnout factor.  But I’m open to anyone’s suggestions who knows something about New Jersey politics… .

What explains Tuesday’s election results?  I had suggested in my posts leading up to the election that the outcomes would not be a referendum on the Obama presidency, but instead would be driven primarily by combination of local factors interacting with a historical pattern of low turnout in the off-year elections that tends to disadvantage the president’s party.  Journalists, in contrast – although often acknowledging the importance of these structural and local factors – nonetheless found it difficult to resist interpreting the results within a single dominant narrative that focused on Obama.  Although not universally accepted, this was the overriding theme of most of the post-election coverage that I read.

Let’s look at the evidence. Most significantly, we see that the outcome in both the New Jersey and Virginia governors’ races follows the historical pattern dating back to at least the 1970’s that I traced out in my earlier posts: the candidate of the president’s party – whether a Democrat or a Republican  – lost the election.  That makes six times in a row in New Jersey, and 7 out of the last 10 elections there that this has happened. In Virginia, the pattern is even stronger: in the last NINE governor’s races dating back to 1977, the candidate of the president’s party has lost (see chart below).

Why does this happen?  I said it is partly because turnout tends to be down in off-year elections, particularly among the president’s party.  Did that happen again this year?  Yes it did.  Let’s look first at New Jersey, where the Democrat incumbent Jon Corzine lost to Republican challenger Chris Christie.  In the 2008 presidential race, Democrats turned out in greater numbers than Republicans in New Jersey, by 44-28%, (with 28% independents). Last Tuesday the Democratic dominance in a historically “blue” state receded by 6%, to 41-31%, with no change in the overall proportion of independents. In total, 2.3 million people voted on Tuesday, down from 2008’s presidential election total of almost 3.9 million. So, again, we see the impact of structural factors in the form of lower voter turnout particularly among the president’s party coming into play.

But how do I know that, despite the low voter turnout, this wasn’t a referendum on Obama?  In New Jersey there are two pieces of evidence: first, according to exit polls, 57% of those who voted approved of the job Obama is doing as president.  Nonetheless, 19% of those who signaled their approval for the president still voted for the Republican, Christie. Second, 47% of those who voted thought corruption and property taxes were the two major issues driving their vote, and they went predominantly for Christie by about 67-25% in both cases.  Another 32% thought it was the economy and jobs, and here Corzine won, albeit by a smaller margin, 58-36%.  We see then, that local issues tended to dominate the thinking of Christie’s supporters more than Corzine’s; they weren’t voting against Obama or his policies.

We see the same story in Virginia. Here, fortunately, the exit polls asked voters for whom they had voted in the 2008 presidential election. Remember, Obama carried Virginia in 2008 over McCain by 52.6-46.3%, and the exit polls put the proportion of Democratic versus Republican voters then at 39-33%. But on Tuesday, it was McCain supporters who turned out in force, 51-43%, over Obama supporters, and the party proportions were almost reversed, with Republicans outnumbering Democratic voters 37-33%.   Turnout, moreover, was down from 2008; then more than 3.7 million people voted while on Tuesday turnout totaled a bit less than 2 million.  We see, then, much as I predicted, that structural factors linked to the historical pattern of lower turnout by the president’s supporters played a huge role in McDonnell’s victory, just as they did in New Jersey.  And McDonnell did best among those voters (47%) who thought the dominant issue was jobs and the economy and those (15%) who believed it was taxes – both issues that have a strong local dimension.

Here, to give you some historical sense of the underlying pattern that partly explains these results, are the outcomes of the Virginia governor’s races dating back to 1977. Pay particular attention to columns 3 and 4 which list the governor’s and president’s party affiliations.

Isn’t this cool?  Don’t you love political science?

I will discuss the New York congressional outcome in a separate post, but by way of foreshadowing my comments, I believe that result also turned on factors not directly related to Obama or his policies.

A final point: Republicans, and not a few journalists, are suggesting that Tuesday’s results will make it more difficult for Obama and congressional Democrats to pass his major legislative initiatives, particularly health care, in part because “blue dog” moderate Democrats will think twice about the implications of supporting potentially costly government initiatives.  I think this is wrong for two related reasons. First, Tuesday’s results turned primarily (although not exclusively) on local factors, against the backdrop of low voter turnout.  More importantly, however, moderate Democrats already have concerns about supporting these major legislative initiatives – two governors’ races did not provide any additional information in this regard. In other words, the independent impact of the Democrats’ losses in these two races on major policy debates in Congress is likely to be nil because it does nothing to change the calculations of legislators in other states who must decide whether to support these bills. Admittedly, it’s hard to see this in the blizzard of media stories regarding the alleged “momentum” and “signals” conveyed by these races.  By now, however, you should understand that this prevailing narrative fits the media’s structural needs to create an entertaining, newsworthy storyline.

The real story, I submit – and one that I find most exciting – is how well these outcomes seem to fit within the long-term historical pattern of election outcomes in off-year elections.  It suggests that we (political scientists) understand some of the underlying dynamics of these races – dynamics that tend to get lost in the punditry-driven hype surrounding the latest elections results.

It may be less newsworthy, but for a political scientist, it’s pretty exciting!

p.s. Note also my response to Olivier’s query in the comments section to my previous post.  Thanks also to my New Jersey and New York students who filled me in on some of the local issues in both states (as noted above, I’ll deal with New York separately).

The off-year elections are still a day away but that hasn’t prevented pundits from already doing exactly what I predicted they would do after the election: interpreting the (anticipated) results as a referendum on Obama’s policies and as a bellwether for the future of American politics.  Steve Lombardi, at Pollster.com, suggests in a story today that, “many may be under-interpreting the meaning of a GOP sweep tomorrow. Yes, a lot can and will happen between now and Election Day 2010, but make no mistake: Republicans are likely to sweep all three races tomorrow and that does say something about the direction of the country and voter perceptions of the economy.” That’s right. We are under-interpreting the results.  Lombardo goes on to write, “Obama is personally popular but voters remain unsure of the effectiveness of his policies. That is why his personal popularity does not necessarily translate into help for either Corzine or Deeds. Poll after poll shows that the President is well-liked but voters are not yet convinced that his policies are moving the country in the right direction.”

I don’t doubt that Republicans may sweep all three races, and that a large part of their victories will be due to voter dissatisfaction with the economy.  But, for the reasons I laid out in my last post, I don’t agree with Lombardi’s implicit assumption that the elections will turn on voters’ views of Obama, or his policies.  Rather than repeat those points, I want to extend them here by responding to a couple of your emails regarding my claim that these results are more likely to be driven by structural factors, particularly the ebb in voter turnout characteristic of off-year elections.  You asked:

1. If the disproportionate decline in turnout from the president’s supporters largely explains the tendency for his party to lose the off-year election, shouldn’t we also see that trend in New Jersey?

In fact, we do – I probably should have discussed this in my last post.  The same pattern has held, by my quick count, in the last five NJ governor’s races, and in 6 of the last 9.  I haven’t gone back before the 1973 race, which is when I started my Virginia count.

1. If the structural explanation holds true, shouldn’t we see this type of pattern – the president’s party losing the governorship in Virginia and New Jersey – before the 1970s’ as well?

Not in Virginia – remember that until the 1960’s, Virginia was part of the solid Democratic south – no Republican could expect to hold state wide office.  If I get a chance, I’ll try to look up the data for New Jersey prior to 1974.

Interestingly, the House special election in New York’s 23^rd congressional district provides something of a test for my thesis that local fundamentals, and not views toward Obama, will drive the results.  Obama won this largely Republican district in 2008, 52%-47%, and as of this past Oct. 31, he was still very popular there. According to a Siena poll released on that date,  59% of those surveyed had a favorable view of Obama, with only 37% viewing him unfavorable.  And yet Republican Doug Hoffman was up 5% over his Democratic rival. How can this be?  A PPP poll released today suggests the answer – they polled likely voters and found that “While Barack Obama won a narrow victory in NY-23 last year, those planning to vote in this race supported John McCain by a 51-43 margin. Obama’s approval rating with likely voters is just 39%.”  While the Siena poll is also of likely voters, they start with a random digit dial survey, and then pare the respondents down.  PPP, in contrast, surveys only people who are on the registered voter list, so are more likely to be surveying those who will actually vote.  If I’m reading these two polls correctly, then, the PPP poll is more likely to be capturing those likely to vote tomorrow – and among that subset of voters, Obama is less popular.   This doesn’t mean his lack of popularity will cost Owens the race – it means that the voting pool for tomorrow’s special election will consist of a higher proportion of McCain voters who are predisposed to vote Republican (or Conservative in this case).

If Hoffman wins, then, it will be in part because of the drop in turnout among those who voted for the president the year before – the same factors that have historically hurt the president’s party in the off-year governors’ races in Virginia and New Jersey.  In contrast to what pundits would have you believe, one cannot blame tomorrow’s results on voter backlash to Obama or his policies, and one certainly can’t use them to forecast the 2010 midterm results.

I’ll try to post a quick response to the results tomorrow night.   Meanwhile, when the chorus begins warming up with the bellwether song, remember my warning… .