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Introduction: A lot of people are asking, How could the voters have swung so much in two years? And, why didn’t Obama give Americans a better sense of his long-term economic plan in 2009, back when he still had a political mandate? As an academic statistician and political scientist, I have no insight into the administration’s internal deliberations, but I have some thoughts based on my interpretation of political science research. The baseline As Doug Hibbs and others have pointed out, given the Democrats’ existing large majority in both houses of Congress and the continuing economic depression, we’d expect a big Republican swing in the vote. And this has been echoed for a long time in the polls–as early as September, 2009–over a year before the election–political scientists were forecasting that the Democrats were going to lose big in the midterms. (The polls have made it clear that most voters do not believe the Republican Party has the answer either. But, as I’ve emphasized before
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1 And, why didn’t Obama give Americans a better sense of his long-term economic plan in 2009, back when he still had a political mandate? [sent-2, score-0.426]
2 The baseline As Doug Hibbs and others have pointed out, given the Democrats’ existing large majority in both houses of Congress and the continuing economic depression, we’d expect a big Republican swing in the vote. [sent-4, score-0.281]
3 But, as I’ve emphasized before, given that the Democrats control the presidency and are still (at the time of this writing) likely to keep the Senate, it’s perfectly reasonable for swing voters to swing Republican in congressional voting. [sent-7, score-0.5]
4 Sure, it’s a good plan to run moderate candidates if you can, but the choice of ideology is really much more of a battle within the party than a concern in the general election. [sent-14, score-0.471]
5 According to Paul Krugman, for example, the economy would’ve been doing much worse right now had there been no stimulus plan and would be doing much better had a larger stimulus been enacted in 2009. [sent-24, score-0.786]
6 Economists on the right have a different view, but even those who think the government can’t do much to repair the economy tend to feel that the government has the ability to make things worse. [sent-25, score-0.553]
7 The next natural question is: Why, in early 2009, seeing the economy sink, did Obama and congressional Democrats not do more? [sent-28, score-0.409]
8 So they don’t gain from a Republican landslide, More to the point, the 55 or so Democratic senators who certainly wanted their party to remain in power could’ve done more, if they’d really felt it was a good idea. [sent-34, score-0.266]
9 Part of this can be attributed to ideology (or, to put it in a more positive way, conservative or free-market economic convictions) or maybe even to lobbyists etc. [sent-37, score-0.3]
10 Beyond this, there was the feeling, somewhere around mid-2009, that government intervention wasn’t so popular–that, between TARP, the stimulus, and the auto bailout, voters were getting a bit wary of big government taking over the economy. [sent-38, score-0.38]
11 Thus they had little personal reason to support policies with immediate effects on the economy and had more motivation to favor a go-slow approach. [sent-42, score-0.33]
12 In his first months in office, why didn’t he anticipate the example of the incoming British government and warn people of economic blood, sweat, and tears? [sent-44, score-0.303]
13 Carter, of course, was the original Gloomy Gus, and his term saw the resurgence of the conservative movement in this country, with big tax revolts in 1978 and the Reagan landslide two years after that. [sent-51, score-0.296]
14 Like Obama in 2008, Reagan came into office in 1980 in a bad economy and inheriting a discredited foreign policy. [sent-54, score-0.371]
15 The economy got steadily worse in the next two years, the opposition party gained seats in the midterm election, but Reagan weathered the storm and came out better than ever. [sent-55, score-0.769]
16 Avoiding the curse of Bartels Political scientist Larry Bartels wrote an influential paper , later incorporated into his book, Unequal Democracy, presenting evidence that for the past several decades, the economy generally has done better under Democratic than Republican presidents. [sent-67, score-0.335]
17 Overall, according to Bartels, the economy does better under Democratic administrations, but at election time, Republicans are better situated. [sent-70, score-0.497]
18 And there’s general agreement among political scientists that voters respond to recent economic conditions, not to the entire previous four years. [sent-71, score-0.404]
19 So, sure, he wanted a stimulus–he didn’t want the economy to collapse , but he didn’t want to turn the stove on too high and spark an unsustainable bubble of a recovery. [sent-77, score-0.329]
20 Rather, I’m putting the economic arguments in a political context to give a possible answer to the question of why Obama and congressional Democrats didn’t do things differently in 2009. [sent-79, score-0.403]
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Introduction: A lot of people are asking, How could the voters have swung so much in two years? And, why didn’t Obama give Americans a better sense of his long-term economic plan in 2009, back when he still had a political mandate? As an academic statistician and political scientist, I have no insight into the administration’s internal deliberations, but I have some thoughts based on my interpretation of political science research. The baseline As Doug Hibbs and others have pointed out, given the Democrats’ existing large majority in both houses of Congress and the continuing economic depression, we’d expect a big Republican swing in the vote. And this has been echoed for a long time in the polls–as early as September, 2009–over a year before the election–political scientists were forecasting that the Democrats were going to lose big in the midterms. (The polls have made it clear that most voters do not believe the Republican Party has the answer either. But, as I’ve emphasized before
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Introduction: I saw this picture staring at me from the newsstand the other day: Here’s the accompanying article, by Michael Scherer and Michael Duffy, which echoes some of the points I made a few months ago , following the midterm election: Why didn’t Obama do a better job of leveling with the American people? In his first months in office, why didn’t he anticipate the example of the incoming British government and warn people of economic blood, sweat, and tears? Why did his economic team release overly-optimistic graphs such as shown here? Wouldn’t it have been better to have set low expectations and then exceed them, rather than the reverse? I don’t know, but here’s my theory. When Obama came into office, I imagine one of his major goals was to avoid repeating the experiences of Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter in their first two years. Clinton, you may recall, was elected with less then 50% of the vote, was never given the respect of a “mandate” by congressional Republicans, wasted
Introduction: A few years ago Larry Bartels presented this graph, a version of which latter appeared in his book Unequal Democracy: Larry looked at the data in a number of ways, and the evidence seemed convincing that, at least in the short term, the Democrats were better than Republicans for the economy. This is consistent with Democrats’ general policies of lowering unemployment, as compared to Republicans lowering inflation, and, by comparing first-term to second-term presidents, he found that the result couldn’t simply be explained as a rebound or alternation pattern. The question then arose, why have the Republicans won so many elections? Why aren’t the Democrats consistently dominating? Non-economic issues are part of the story, of course, but lots of evidence shows the economy to be a key concern for voters, so it’s still hard to see how, with a pattern such as shown above, the Republicans could keep winning. Larry had some explanations, largely having to do with timing: under De
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Introduction: Bob Erikson, one of my colleagues at Columbia who knows much more about American politics than I do, sent in the following screed. I’ll post Bob’s note, followed by my comments. Bob writes: Monday morning many of us were startled by the following headline: White House strenuously denies NYT report that it is considering getting aggressive about winning the midterm elections. At first I [Bob] thought I was reading the Onion, but no, it was a sarcastic comment on the blog Talking Points Memo. But the gist of the headline appears to be correct. Indeed, the New York Times reported that White House advisers denied that a national ad campaign was being planned. ‘There’s been no discussion of such a thing at the White House’ What do we make of this? Is there some hidden downside to actually running a national campaign? Of course, money spent nationally is not spent on targeted local campaigns. But that is always the case. What explains the Democrats’ trepidation abou
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Introduction: A lot of people are asking, How could the voters have swung so much in two years? And, why didn’t Obama give Americans a better sense of his long-term economic plan in 2009, back when he still had a political mandate? As an academic statistician and political scientist, I have no insight into the administration’s internal deliberations, but I have some thoughts based on my interpretation of political science research. The baseline As Doug Hibbs and others have pointed out, given the Democrats’ existing large majority in both houses of Congress and the continuing economic depression, we’d expect a big Republican swing in the vote. And this has been echoed for a long time in the polls–as early as September, 2009–over a year before the election–political scientists were forecasting that the Democrats were going to lose big in the midterms. (The polls have made it clear that most voters do not believe the Republican Party has the answer either. But, as I’ve emphasized before
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Introduction: A few years ago Larry Bartels presented this graph, a version of which latter appeared in his book Unequal Democracy: Larry looked at the data in a number of ways, and the evidence seemed convincing that, at least in the short term, the Democrats were better than Republicans for the economy. This is consistent with Democrats’ general policies of lowering unemployment, as compared to Republicans lowering inflation, and, by comparing first-term to second-term presidents, he found that the result couldn’t simply be explained as a rebound or alternation pattern. The question then arose, why have the Republicans won so many elections? Why aren’t the Democrats consistently dominating? Non-economic issues are part of the story, of course, but lots of evidence shows the economy to be a key concern for voters, so it’s still hard to see how, with a pattern such as shown above, the Republicans could keep winning. Larry had some explanations, largely having to do with timing: under De
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