Category Archives: The Obamas

Obama’s Victory And The Power of Incumbency In The Modern Era

A reporter recently emailed asking me to comment on the following observation: “This is the first time in American history since Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and James Monroe that the United States has elected three consecutive presidents to two terms (Clinton, Bush, Obama). I was wondering if you had any thoughts regarding why there has been a gap of almost 200 years between the first and second occurrence of this?” Those who were in attendance on Election Night at the Karl Rove Crossroads Cafe heard me reference this fact in the form of a trivia question.

And that’s largely what I think this is: trivia. As I told the reporter, I think there’s much less here than meets the eye. That is, if you view this historical oddity as an indication of just how hard it is for a president to win reelection, you are likely misreading history. In fact, if you look at the so-called “modern” presidential era which scholars typically date to the post-FDR period, one is struck by the power of incumbency. Indeed, the more surprising fact is that there are incumbents who lost their bid for reelection in this era. Let’s run down the list:

There have been a dozen presidents in the post-FDR era. Of these, all but Kennedy had an opportunity to run for reelection. Among the remaining 11, only Ford, Carter and Bush I failed in their reelection bid. Ford’s effort fell just short which, in retrospect, was an impressive performance given the Watergate-induced backlash against all things Republican in 1976. Bush I’s 1992 reelection bid was undoubtedly negatively affected by the presence of a strong third-party candidate in the person of Ross Perot, who won nearly 20% of the popular vote. To this day Bush believes Perot cost him reelection. That leaves only Carter among the dozen who lost a straight up bid for reelection under “normal” political circumstances.

Put another way, if we “adjust” our calculations to address the modern presidents who initially took office by non-electoral means, the “gap” between Monroe and Obama seems much less meaningful. So, we can consider Truman, who took office less than three months into FDR’s final term, as essentially a two-term president. Similarly, the eight years under JFK-LBJ, and the eight years under Nixon-Ford, can also be viewed as two-term presidencies, since neither Kennedy nor Nixon were removed by electoral defeat. From this perspective, it turns out that from 1944 through 1976 we saw four consecutive two-term presidents. If we step back one administration, FDR makes it five-plus. Viewed in this way, the real question becomes: how did Carter lose?

My point is that it is difficult to defeat a sitting president in the modern era. Yes, I understand that both Truman and LBJ opted not to run again in part because of their electoral vulnerability, but both had won election in their own right at least one time. By comparison, if we look at the pre-FDR sitting presidents who won their party’s nomination, by my back-of-the-envelope calculation almost half – eight of 18 – went down to defeat in their first bid for reelection.

Why is it so difficult to defeat an incumbent president in the modern era? One likely reason is that the office is much more visible, so that presidents simply by virtue of carrying out their duties in a non-partisan way, such as providing disaster relief, can score political points. It may also be the case that in an era of nuclear weapons and other WMD’s, the presidents’ foreign policy role enhances their political standing. That is, as national security issues loom larger in voters’ calculations, the incumbent president’s foreign policy role is magnified. Moreover, despite the criticisms his comments entailed, Romney was right when noted – albeit perhaps not in the most diplomatic manner – that Presidents are relatively well situated to influence policies in ways that reward key voting blocs. All this is somewhat speculative, of course, but I am persuaded, in the absence of countervailing evidence, that modern incumbents generally run for reelection with advantages that their premodern forebears did not possess.

A note to readers: the audience for this blog has expanded considerably in the last year and for that I am very appreciative. Thus it is with some regret that I am announcing that I will be posting much less frequently during the next several months. I have a book deadline, and added administrative duties, that are cutting into my blogging time. This is not to say I will stop posting completely – I’m still going to respond to the most egregious punditry errors (“Obama Won A Mandate!” “Most Voters Want Unified Democratic Control!”), particularly when political science provides some insight and/or countervailing evidence. And I’ll try to keep up with the major events affecting the presidency, but perhaps not quite as regularly as in the past. Of course, I encourage you to submit questions – I will try to get to them in due time. And, as always, I thank you for reading, and for participating in what are almost always very interesting discussions – and for not turning this site into still another partisan-driven echo chamber. Lord knows we have enough of those out there already.

How True Drew? Linzer Still Sees Obama As A Heavy Favorite

Emory University political scientist Drew Linzer, who created and runs the Votamatic website, paid a visit to Middlebury College last Wednesday to discuss why, based on his forecast model, he believes President Obama is still the heavy favorite to win the presidential election. To construct his model, Drew uses his colleague Alan Abramowitz’ “Time for A Change” forecast model as his baseline starting point. You will recall from one of my earlier posts that Abramowitz’s forecast model uses three factors — the incumbent president’s net approval rating at the end of June, the change in real GDP in the second quarter of the election year and a first-term incumbency advantage — to predict the winner of the national popular vote. However, during the current election cycle Abramowitz updated his traditional model to include a “polarization” variable that, in effect, reduces the advantage enjoyed by a first-term incumbent running for reelection by about half – from a bit more than 5% to closer to 2.5%. Under his “new” model, Abramowitz projects Obama’s share of the two-party vote to be about 50.3%.

As I’ve discussed before, not everyone accepts Abramowitz’s rationale for updating his model. Drew is one of the skeptics, and so his forecast model starts with the “old” Abramowitz model which is decidedly more bullish regarding Obama’s chances. Without the polarization variable, Abramowitz’s structural baseline component has Obama winning 52.2% of the two-party national vote. That’s a much stronger starting advantage for the President than the “new” Abramowitz model suggests.

The second component in Drew’s model is the state-based polls, which he uses to “update” the Abramowitz baseline forecast. As we get closer to Election Day, state-level survey data influences his projection more and more, and Abramowitz’s structural component becomes correspondingly less important. At this point, 10 days out, the state-level polling component is really driving his forecast almost entirely.

So, where does the race stand, according to Drew’s model? As I discussed in my Economist post, as of today, he projects Obama to win 332 Electoral College votes, or 62% of the 538 Electoral College votes, compared to Romney’s 206.

Note that Drew makes several assumptions in his model. First, he makes no effort to adjust for the “house effects” of individual polls in the belief that in the closest states that are polled most frequently, polling biases will largely cancel out. Second, he essentially assumes that the “undecideds” will break in rough proportion to the distribution of the vote, as indicated by the polls, in each state. Third, since he is interested in forecasting the Electoral College vote, he pays no attention to national tracking polls.

It is doubtful that Drew, or anyone, could have constructed such a forecast model even eight years ago. But the proliferation of state polls, particularly in contested states, now allows political scientists to adjust their structural models in light of recent polling on a state-by-state basis. Of course, this type of modeling is in its infancy; Drew only has one previous election cycle, in 2008, to calibrate his assumptions.

I asked Drew what would happen if he changed his baseline starting point by, for example, substituting Doug Hibbs’ Bread and Peace forecast model, which predicts that Obama will win closer to 47% of the two-party vote – or about 5% below the Abramowitz projection. Drew acknowledged that this would shift the baseline parameter enough to move several swing states into Romney’s column. Nonetheless, based on a state-by-state electoral projection and given the current polling, even with this shift Drew does not believe that Romney would gain enough Electoral College votes to overcome Obama’s current projected advantage.

Is Drew right? Remember, for some time now I have been arguing that the state-level polls will gradually align with the national tracking polls, which as of today are showing a much closer race, with some indicating that Romney has pulled into a narrow lead. How much must Romney gain in the key swing states to overcome Obama’s polling lead? Using the RealClearPolitics state polling averages, Owen Witek created the following table showing the state of the race in the 12 closest state races as of today (Electoral College votes are in parentheses). The last column contains an estimate of the number of undecided voters in each state.

State	Obama	Romney	Obama Margin	Undecided
Michigan (16)	48.8	44.8	4.0	6.4
Ohio (18)	48	45.7	2.3	6.3
Pennsylvania (20)	49.5	44.8	4.7	5.7
Virginia (13)	46.8	48	-1.2	5.2
New Hampshire (4)	48.3	47.2	1.1	4.5
Colorado (9)	47.8	47.8	0	4.4
Iowa (6)	49	46.7	2.3	4.3
Florida (29)	47.1	48.9	-1.8	4
Wisconsin (10)	49.3	47	2.3	3.7
North Carolina (15)	46.5	50.3	-3.8	3.2
Nevada (6)	49.7	47.2	2.5	3.1

Source: Real Clear Politics, 10/27/12

Based on the RCP averages (and remember that Drew’s state-based polling formula includes a structural component and thus is different than the RCP simple averaging), Obama right now has 201 Electoral College votes in strong and lean states, compared to Romney’s 191. That leaves 146 electoral votes in the 11 swing states listed in the table still up for grabs. How likely is it that Romney can pick up the additional 79 needed to reach 270? If he holds his “lead” in Virginia, North Carolina and Florida, he picks up 57 more, leaving him with 22 to go. Assuming a small shift in voter sentiment, he might also squeak to victory in Colorado, earning another 9 electoral votes, leaving him 13 to go.

But here is where the math becomes difficult for Romney, and why Drew – as of today – believes Obama will hold on. Obama leads by more than 2% in all the remaining battleground states. His smallest lead is 2.3% in three states: Ohio, Iowa and Wisconsin. Looking only at these three, Romney needs to win either Ohio, or Iowa and Wisconsin, to reach the 270 mark. But, as Witek shows, there are not very many undecideds left in either Iowa or Wisconsin, so they would have to break strongly in Romney’s favor for him to eke out a victory in both states. That means Ohio may still be Romney’s best path to victory, and that assumes Obama loses the other states – no sure thing. Remember, Romney got perhaps a 2.7% boost from the first widely-watched debate that was generally viewed as a convincing win for him. How likely is it that he will be able to almost match that total in the last 10 days among the much small number of undecideds in the absence of a similar focusing event?

Keep in mind that all these calculations are based on polls that are, by nature, very squishy, so we ought not treat the RCP averages as having more precision than they do. In this respect, Drew’s model, which uses a different algorithm to analyze the polls and predict the final outcome in each state, presents a slightly different picture in the battleground states. Here are Drew’ state-based calculations, complete with the 95% confidence interval. (Note the cool color coding!). As you can see by the vertical line in the middle demarcating the 50% threshold, he projects that Obama will do slightly better in key states than a simple reading of the RCP polling averages might suggest. In contrast to my simple RCP average, he has Florida, Virginia and Colorado all leaning toward Obama (although with a confidence interval that suggests Romney might be leading in all three states). That means Romney has that much of a bigger hill to climb among the undecideds.

Of course, if Romney does begin to close the gap in the swing states, Drew’s model will pick that up, and it will adjust the forecast accordingly. Regardless of the outcome, however, there is one overriding reason why you should be visiting his site for the next 10 days: in contrast to other forecasters (you know who I mean), Drew’s methodology is completely transparent. Anyone can see and utilize his modeling equation, which he describes at length in this journal article (which has been peer-reviewed and accepted for publication). Moreover, as an academic, Drew’s rooting interest in this race is to see whether his forecasting tool is validated. He has much less at stake if the model turns out to be wrong. If it is wrong, however, he can tell us why. I call that progress.

P.S If you are coming to this site for the first time (there’s been a lot of traffic of late) I encourage you to follow me on Twitter at @MattDickinson44 – I tweet all new posts there.

Are Republicans Racially Biased Against Obama?

For several reasons I haven’t said much about the role of race in the current presidential election. The primary reason is that it is a difficult issue to address empirically, and in contrast to many blogs, my intent at this site isn’t to inculcate or reinforce a particular world view. If I can’t find at least some data on a topic, I typically don’t have much to say about it. A second reason is that I find that most discussions about race quickly degenerate into ad hominem attacks that begin with “Your mother” and include a reference to “Hitler” somewhere.

But because “Miscweant” raised the race issue in his comment to my last post, and because race received renewed prominence, particularly in the liberal blogosphere, in response to Mitt Romney’s comment during a recent campaign stop in Michigan that “No one ever asked to see my birth certificate”, I wanted to say a few words about race in this post. I have no illusions that I’m going to change anyone’s views regarding whether and to what degree issues of race are influencing evaluations of Obama and the election. But perhaps we can move the conversation away from unsubstantiated claims and counterclaims and more toward a fact-based discussion of this important issue.

If you missed the comments section, “Miscweant” writes, in the context of criticizing the “birthers” and others focusing on Obama’s failure to disclose his academic transcripts, etc.: “And if you’ll excuse me, I think it’s plain old all-American racism at the root of it all: a ‘colored person’ couldn’t possibly be smart enough to achieve Obama’s accomplishments – it has to be affirmative action opening doors for an unqualified person.” Miscweant’s comments pick up on a relatively common theme expressed by pundits on the Left, namely, that racism undeniably plays an important role in presidential politics today in ways that undermine electoral support for Obama, and make his presidency more difficult. Moreover, as Chris Hayes opined recently on NBC, there is a strong belief among many liberals that racism is predominantly a Republican trait.

Are those who propound this view right? The difficulty in evaluating such comments is that people generally don’t openly profess racist views. Indeed, they often go to great lengths to hide them – hence, the theoretical basis of the so-called “Bradley effect” (which, as it turns out, has not been empirically demonstrated to exist). When I give election talks, and am asked about the race issue, I always ask those in the audience to raise their hands if they are racist. Needless to say, no hands go up. This means discussion of race often take place in an empirical vacuum, which in turns allows the most strident voices to dominate the discourse. After all, who can refute their claims?

To get around this, we might ask people questions that we believe tap into underlying race-based sentiments. When we do so, what do we find? Both Alex Tabarrok and John Sides look at some survey questions from the General Social Survey and the National Election Studies designed to assess respondents’ racial views. Tabarrok finds almost no difference between Democrats and Republicans on their views toward interracial marriage, or whether they would vote for a black president. Sides finds slight differences between Republicans and Democrats on responses to questions asking about intelligence and work ethics, as this table indicates:

Sides concludes: “Overall, Republicans are slightly more likely to assess blacks unfavorably on these dimensions. For example, 39% of Republicans place blacks on the “lazy” side of the scale, while 31% of Democrats do. But by and large … both parties include substantial fractions willing to stereotype blacks unfavorably.” Moreover, when he tries to separate respondents by party based on their views toward blacks’ intelligence and work ethic, he finds that “identification with the Democratic Party tends to decline, and identification with the Republican Party tends to increase, as attitudes towards blacks become less favorable—at least when attitudes are measured with two different racial stereotypes. However, the relationship is far from deterministic: substantial minorities of those with unfavorable attitudes toward blacks identify as Democrats.”

This is by no means the final word on the subject – indeed, it barely scratches the surface of what is a very complicated topic. I urge you to read both posts in full. You may find that you read the data differently, and that there are alternative explanations dealing with class or other factors that may explain some of these results. You might also take a glass half full perspective, with substantial majorities of both Democrats and Republicans with positive racial views. But at least the two authors cite data. To be sure, as I said above, I have no illusions that survey data like this is going to sway very many people from their beliefs regarding the relationship between race and partisan identification. And these questions don’t necessarily do a very good job at measuring what many of us think of as racism. Nor do they address other facets of what is a multifaceted issue, such as racial conflict among non-whites.

So, does racism play a big part in presidential politics? In part my answer depends on what you mean by “big”. Based on the admittedly circumstantial evidence cited above, and on the success of forecast models in predicting Obama’s victory in 2008 without referencing race, I believe the answer is no. Fundamentals associated with the economy are going to be far more determinative come November. And too often I think critics begin with race as their first explanation for Obama’s difficulties in office, when other factors are likely more important. But this is different from saying race plays no part. If Obama loses this election, I don’t doubt for a New York minute that at least some of his supporters will blame racism, and that no amount of argument to the contrary will persuade them otherwise. And, in a very close contest, they may be right – race could conceivably swing enough votes to cost Obama the election. But that does not mean that race will be the primary explanation for the vote against – or for – Obama.

I’m Living the High Life (On The Lite Side)

Look, I admit it. After a hard day of blogging, I like to take out the pool chair, turn on the transistor to catch Joe and Dave describing the Red Sox game, and pop the tab on a refreshing Miller Lite. Sure, my choice of beverage might offend some of my colleagues, with their fancy degrees and their pinky-raised Chablis-sipping ways. But I’m all right with that. And do you know why?

Because Miller Lite tastes great.

And it’s less filling.

And nothing makes an intellectually-weighty tome like The Obamas go down easier on a hot summer day.

Miller Lite. The drink of non-partisan presidency scholars living in Vermont (when the weather is hot).

(P.S. If you are an Anheuser- Busch company representative, and you are looking for a low-cost way to advertise your product, I can’t think of a better way to spread your brand name than by sponsoring a non-partisan political blog. Just a thought.)

What Kantor’s The Obamas Really Reveals About The Obama Presidency

For my summer reading, I’m about half-way through Jodi Kantor’s The Obamas, her best-selling inside look at Michelle and Barack’s life in the White House. (Full disclosure: I was asked to review the book for a political science journal, or I never would have looked at it. And by summer reading, I mean a book I can read while floating in the pool drinking Miller Lite.) Some of you might recall that when the book was first published this past January, critics – including the First Lady – jumped on Kantor for, among other alleged vices, characterizing Michelle Obama as “an angry black woman” (the First Lady’s words – not Kantor’s) who repeatedly clashed with the President’s senior West Wing aides. (Note that the First Lady apparently did not read the book.) Others claimed that The Obamas was filled with factual errors but, for the most part, these turned out not to be errors at all. It is true that the book suffers from the flaws one often finds when journalists write about politics: it focuses on personalities as the primary explanation for political outcomes, tends to overdramatize and to find significance in often random events, and purports to reveal the thought processes of the First Lady and the President despite the fact that Kantor never interviewed either for the book.

But when Kantor sticks to doing what journalists do best – reporting rather than interpreting – the book is actually quite good. In particular, it reinforces a couple of points that long-time readers have heard me make before. The first is that presidential campaigns do little to prepare a president to govern, and in many respects they may make governing more difficult. In this vein, Kantor recounts a meeting between Obama and a group of law professors and civil libertarians early in Obama’s first year as president, when it was becoming clear that he had overestimated the ease with which he could close the Guantanamo Bay prison. Kantor writes, “He had made that promise before administration officials read the classified files on the detainees….” and goes on to note that many of the detainees were greater security threats than he realized. Ultimately, of course, Obama came to the same conclusion that Bush had: there was no other place to put most of the detainees, and so Guantanamo remains open as the least worst option available for holding suspected terrorists.

As I’ve noted many times, it should not be news that Obama’s anti-terrorist policies hew closely to Bush’s – they are dealing with the same set of problems under the same set of political incentives. It was no surprise to me, therefore, that “on a host of related matters such as releasing photos depicting detainee abuse, the administration seemed to be echoing Bush’s policies or adopting them with slight revisions (Kantor, p. 106.)” Not surprisingly, Obama’s policies did not sit well with his strongest supporters on the Left. (For that matter, they didn’t always sit well with critics on the Right, such as Dick Cheney, either.) In a classic acknowledgement of what it means to be president, Obama told the group: “When I was a senator running for office, I talked very firmly about what I thought was right based on the information I had. Now I’m the President of all the people, and the decisions I make have to be from that perspective based on the information I now have (Kantor, pp. 106-07.)” To drive that point home, Obama told those in the meeting that he was considering an indefinite detention policy, “allowing authorities to hold certain suspects without charges.” This was a far different policy than what candidate Obama had espoused, and not surprisingly those in the White House meeting were outraged. But despite that outrage, Obama has not only built on the Bush-era precedents in the War on Terror – he has sometimes gone beyond them as with his use of drone strikes.

The second revealing vignette occurs during the Gulf oil spill, which dragged on for months while the Obama administration waited with everyone else for BP engineers to plug the leak. Under pressure to show that he was doing something, Obama finally relented and gave a prime-time address from the Oval Office to describe the steps that were being taken to plug the leak. The setting of the speech was intended to demonstrate that Obama took the spill seriously, but as his aides conceded, the speech was “a wasted bullet”; “Oval Office addresses were supposed to make presidents look powerful, but the truth about the spill was that there was ultimately a limited amount Obama can do.”

These glimpses into the limits of presidential power are far more revealing about the Obama presidency, I think, than are the more highly publicized aspects of Kantor’s book, such as the segments dealing with Michelle’s fashion choices, her unwillingness to campaign during the 2010 midterms, the “secret” Halloween Party, or Obama’s alleged “women” problem within this White House staff. What Kantor’s intimate glimpse shows, once again, is that our expectations for what presidents can hope to accomplish far outstrips the capacity of the office to deliver. The presidency, simply put, is not very powerful. Even in those areas, like foreign policy, where we assume presidents wield the most power, they in fact find their choices deeply constrained by operating in a system of shared powers, but also by the unyielding pressure to do whatever it takes to protect the nation from attack. It may be that Candidate Obama was perhaps more naive about and thus less prepared for this reality than were many previous presidents. But he was not the only one who failed to anticipate just how limited his powers would be. All the evidence suggests that his strongest supporters overestimated the power of the presidency as well – and that many continue to do so. The question remains whether Obama will pay a price come November 2012 for their continued naiveté.