2012 President

When it comes to presidents and reelection, two things seem clear. If they appear to be in control of events, they win. If events seem to be controlling them, they lose. Often the economy is their top concern, as almost certainly will be the case in 2012. In some elections, it is a foreign crisis or the shadow of a government scandal such as Watergate that drives debate. Yet the basic perception of whether or not the president is a competent leader often determines the political environment in which he seeks reelection. Embattled presidents—such as Jimmy Carter in 1980 or George H.W. Bush in 1992—usually find their party dispirited or divided, with a significant primary challenger to contend with before the general election. In addition, the weakness of the president often inspires unity in the opposition as they see victory readily attainable. Yet presidents riding high—such as Ronald Reagan in 1984, Bill Clinton in 1996 and George W. Bush in 2004—often find themselves surrounded by good fortune. Their party is confident and united. The president faces no significant primary opposition. And the other party must frequently search long and hard to find a respectable candidate to run against him. Where

Precisely two years from today, America will be inaugurating a president. But much sooner, the full-blown contest for the White House will begin. Just a year from now, we’ll all be watching presidential candidates slog through the snows of Iowa and New Hampshire (with sunny side trips to Nevada and South Carolina). There is only one guarantee: It will be a year full of tumult and unexpected developments. Presidential general elections are often far more predictable than the nominating contests. Why? The general elections are shaped by fundamental factors (shape of the economy, war and peace, scandal, presence of an incumbent, etc.), and these are not easily altered and can be seen–to a certain degree–well in advance. But nominating battles are very different. The vast majority of the voters agree with the vast majority of the candidates on a vast majority of the issues. They all share the same party label. So differences in personality and character, sectionalism, campaign spending, alliances with key constituencies, and other factors substitute for the fundamentals of a general election. Voters try to pick a candidate (1) who can win in November; (2) with whom they agree on issues; and (3) whom they like. And

The measures of Republican success in the 2010 midterm are familiar. The GOP gained: (1) a House majority, with a net pickup of 63 seats, (2) six Senate seats leaving Democrats facing a more challenging Senate playing field in 2012 and 2014, (3) seven governorships, and (4) twenty legislative chambers, giving Republicans control of both legislative chambers in 25 states—an increase of 11. Republicans now control more state legislative seats than any time since 1928. Republican gains include regional advances in the Midwest and Northeast, and important advances in ethnic diversity. Marco Rubio, Nikki Haley, Brian Sandoval, Susana Martinez, Allen West, and Tim Scott may soon become household names. More important, for the GOP, their minority recruits have proven appeal beyond so-called majority-minority House districts. Perhaps the most remarked-upon newly won GOP state-level advantage involves legislative redistricting. Republicans will completely control line-drawing in over 40% of congressional seats, their greatest such advantage “in the modern era of redistricting” according to the National Conference of State Legislatures’ Tim Storey. Yet two lesser-told tales of newfound GOP advantage are worth highlighting, one briefly, one at length. First, recruiting is as important as redistricting in House races because candidate quality is critical. Since

WARNING: READERS ARE NOW ENTERING “THE IRONY ZONE” The wreckage of the Democratic Party is strewn just about everywhere. President Obama’s carefully constructed 2008 Electoral College breakthrough is now just broken, a long-ago memory of what might have been a lasting shift in partisan alignment. We have just entered the 2012 presidential election cycle, and the news is grim for the incumbent. While at least one recent poll gives Obama the lead against Sarah Palin, he is trailing in hypothetical match-ups against former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney. Even worse, only 38% in another recent poll said they believed Obama “deserves re-election.” Take a look at this categorization of states that is based on the best estimate we can make of President Obama’s pre-election job approval level in each state. The Democratic states are those where Obama is still above 50%; the swing states have Obama between 47% and 50%; and the Republican states measure Obama’s job approval below 47%. Keep in mind that the president’s numbers are probably even worse now; they often drop after a devastating defeat such as the one Democrats suffered on November 2. Obama may be able to count on

On Tuesday, President Obama received an unpleasant wake-up call from the American electorate, as the Republicans scored their biggest electoral gains since World War II. In the U.S. House of Representatives, the GOP swept to their largest majority since 1946, a stunning gain of over 60 seats. While the Republicans did not take control of the Senate, they gained six to seven seats to move the Democrats to a minimalist majority that cannot function well under the rules of the upper chamber. Republicans’ greatest gains, however, occurred in the 37 states with elections for governor. The GOP swept normally Democratic states from Pennsylvania and Ohio to Michigan, Iowa, and Wisconsin, presenting serious difficulties for Obama’s reelection effort in 2012. Moreover, on the eve of the redistricting of all U.S. House seats, Republicans gained around 19 new state legislative chambers. When combined with seven to eight additional state governorships, Republicans will have an outsized influence that will stretch over the next decade. For the Tea Party, the closely-watched contingent of very conservative voters, the results were mixed. It would certainly be foolish to discount them as the GOP swept to victory at all levels of government, powered by uniquely motivated conservative

This year’s midterm election has been compared to a number of others. But few political observers have brought up the election of 1962, whose outcome should serve as a cautionary tale as the 2010 campaign winds down. That election nearly a half century ago was redefined in its closing weeks by one of the greatest and most dangerous international crises in American history. At issue, the introduction of Soviet missiles into Cuba capable of launching a nuclear attack on the American mainland. That, in turn, could have produced a full-scale nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. The crisis itself covered much of the latter half of October 1962 and froze the midterm campaign in its tracks as the world’s two superpowers stood eyeball to eyeball. It was the ultimate test of strength and judgment for the young president, John F. Kennedy. And he passed it. The Soviets backed down. The president’s popularity soared. And his Democratic colleagues in Congress, many of whom were bracing for significant midterm election losses, saw their numbers stay virtually unchanged on Election Day. The Democrats lost only four seats in the House, while gaining a handful of seats in the Senate

The truth gets lost in the ups and downs of the daily headlines. Not as much changes in politics as observers often assert. If you doubt this, take a look at the chart (below) comparing President Obama’s showing among various subgroups (gender, race, age, etc.) on election day 2008 with the average Obama job approval ratings in the Gallup poll for the same subgroups during his actual presidency. The stability is stunning. The correlation (R squared) is extremely high (.985), and on the accompanying scatterplot, almost all the data hug the straight line (which represents the expected values for an absolutely perfect correlation). Of late, President Obama has slipped with most groups as his overall approval rating has taken a nosedive from the 53% of the 2008 election to 43% in the latest Gallup survey. Even so, the shifts tend to be regular. For example, Obama is less popular with both men and women today than in 2008, when he received 56% of the female vote and 49% of the male vote in the election (a 7% gender gap). Yet note that, as of the latest Gallup sampling (August 22), there is still an identical 7% difference between the sexes,

With millions of gallons of oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico, 11 oil rig workers dead, thousands of jobs in the fishing and tourist industries in jeopardy, and untold damage to beaches, wetlands, and wildlife, the Gulf oil spill is already a massive human, economic, and environmental catastrophe. There is growing public frustration with the response of BP and the federal government to the crisis. All of which has pundits and media commentators asking whether this disaster could become President Obama’s Katrina. Whether the Gulf oil spill will do serious long-term damage to President Obama’s public support remains to be seen. Thus far, however, there is little evidence that it has hurt the president’s approval rating which is slightly higher in the most recent three days of polling by Gallup (50 percent) than it was immediately before the spill (48 percent). In fact, Obama’s approval rating is right where it has been for the past several months. Moreover, the question of whether this disaster will become Obama’s Katrina rests on an important assumption—that Hurricane Katrina did serious damage to President Bush’s public support back in the summer and fall of 2005. Despite the prevalence of this belief, however, a

In his first year in the White House, Barack Obama’s job approval fell about fifteen points. (The source for all poll data analyzed in this article is the Roper Center.) This steep decline was unusual but not unprecedented for a new president. Two others, one from each party, stand out: Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. From February of their first year in office (month 2), through February of their second year (month 14), their average approval ratings correlate strongly with Obama’s (Pearson’s r=0.88 and 0.79, respectively). This parallelism sets one to wondering whether Carter and Reagan mark out alternative futures for Obama’s presidency: continuing decline in approval ending in defeat, as in Carter’s case, or a recovery leading up to reelection, as in Reagan’s. To explore this idea, I proceeded as follows. First, I estimated job approval for all presidents from January 1959 through December 2008 with a multiple regression model consisting of the variables shown in Table 1. The model accounts for over 90% of the variation in approval. (The tight fit is partly an artifact of using lagged approval as one of the predictors, a routine procedure in models of this sort.)   Table 1. Presidential approval ratings:

Less than 16 months after an election in which Republicans lost the presidency along with 8 Senate seats and 21 House seats, giving Democrats full control of the federal government for the first time since 1995, the GOP appears poised to make substantial gains in the 2010 midterm elections. In the aftermath of Republican Scott Brown’s shocking victory in a special Senate election in Massachusetts a number of prominent political forecasters including The Crystal Ball’s Larry Sabato believe that Democrats could lose at least 25 House seats and 5 Senate seats in November. And those numbers will probably go even higher if the U.S. economy fails to show meaningful growth in the months ahead or President Obama’s poll numbers fall much further. A Republican takeover of one or both chambers of Congress now looks like much less of a long shot than it did just a few weeks ago. Indeed, the closely followed pollster.com average currently shows a generic Republican defeating a generic Democrat for Congress by about 2 percentage points—a dramatic reversal from the large Democratic advantage on this question in both 2006 and 2008. Given these trends, it is not surprising that many Republican leaders and activists are

Did you see the newly released color film clip of President and Mrs. Kennedy’s arrival at Love Field in Dallas on November 22, 1963? If you haven’t yet, you can see it here: http://jfk.org/go/collections/ward-warren-film Ward Warren, a 15-year old high school student, took his 8 millimeter camera to the airport that awful day, and captured stunning images of the president just about an hour before his assassination (you can read more about Warren here). JFK’s vigor, Jackie’s beauty, and the corralled ambition of the soon-to-be President Lyndon Johnson were on full display. Now 61, the videographer decided at last to share these haunting frames with his fellow citizens, via the worthy Sixth Floor Museum—the converted Texas School Book Depository from which some or (probably) all of the shots at JFK were fired. At one point Dallas actually had wanted to tear down the Depository, seeking to escape the long shadow it cast over the city. Luckily, wiser heads prevailed. These freshly circulated frames stir deep emotions. Knowing what is waiting on Elm Street, we still want to shout, “Get back on Air Force One! Don’t climb into the limousine.” But the celluloid figures can’t hear us. The grief and tears

This week, the Crystal Ball publishes another installment in our intermittent series of observations on the politics of the day. Jefferson aficionados will find the title familiar, as they know he penned just one book in his lifetime, Notes on the State of Virginia. As a salute to the man from Monticello, we bring you a few more modern tidbits. Doug Wilder: Obama needs a staff shake-up (Read Doug Wilder’s opinion piece in Politico here) For those of us who have known Doug Wilder for many decades—I first met him forty years ago when he had just become a state senator—this isn’t a surprise at all. As he has proven dozens of times, he speaks his mind. He’s the closest thing to a pure independent I have ever met in politics. As he approaches 80, he feels even freer to strike out on his own path. Some will dismiss this new statement by pointing to Wilder’s in-effect endorsement of GOP Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) in the 2009 campaign. He’s helped Republicans before, directly and indirectly. But Wilder is a good judge of the public mood in a critical swing state, and he’s made a major difference at election time for

The truth has triumphed, at least for those attending this week’s Tea Party convention in Nashville: Obama is a socialist fascist communist statist Muslim whose healthcare “reform” would destroy the world’s greatest healthcare system and force Americans to wait in long lines so that their medical requests could be reviewed by death panels. This is not truth as you and I know it, but this statement (or at least parts of it) is believed to be true by the millions of Americans who coalesced into the Tea Party movement of 2009, which reinvigorated the political right just a few months after it had been declared dead. “What is wrong with those people?” ask so many people on the left. The answer from research in moral psychology is: Nothing. Moral psychology historically confined itself to the study of altruism and justice. When morality is defined as being nice, then the angry rantings of right-wing protestors seem to have nothing to do with morality, and psychologists have long searched for non-moral explanations of conservatism. (Frustration? Racism? Fear of change?) In contrast, the righteous anger of left-wing marchers for peace and “social justice” was sometimes held up by social scientists as the pinnacle

The famous 2008 campaign poster of Barack Obama—a saintly visage of the candidate above one word, “Hope”—still hangs in many a Democratic home. But a year into his presidency, there is a good deal less hope than before. As Mr. Obama gave his first State of the Union address, it seemed at times more like a discussion of the state of his union with the American people. Millions watched to see if his second year offered more promise of successful action on the issue that trumps all others—the economy and high unemployment. Even most senior Democrats agree that their leader has badly spent his first year’s capital on health care reform, a matter of secondary importance to the voters, rather than economic revival. On Wednesday evening, the president talked jobs, all right, but he was all over the map. The speech included a laundry list of wishes and pledges, but the unspoken fear that Mr. Obama had too little mandate left to fulfill them hung heavy in the chamber. The president briefly expressed humility for unnamed mistakes made, but insisted that he would “stay the course” and continue to tackle the same agenda, including health care. He called for a