October 15: Biden Is the Early Favorite For Reelection Even If Dems Lost Ground in 2022
After absorbing a lot of Democratic gloom-and-doom about the midterms, I offered some silver lining at New York:
The 2022 midterms don’t look great for Democrats, who will try to buck history by hanging on to super-slim congressional majorities. Thanks to the particular lay of the land, Democrats have a decent chance of maintaining control of the Senate. But the House? Not so much: The two times since the New Deal when the president’s party won net House seats in a midterm (1998 and 2002), the president in question had sky-high job-approval ratings. Even if you believe Joe Biden’s plunge in popularity has been stemmed or even turned around a bit, he’s not going to have 60 percent-plus approval in November 2022 unless really crazy things happen. There’s just too much partisan polarization for that these days.
Thankfully for Democrats, even if they lose their congressional majorities next year, Biden himself won’t be an underdog for reelection in 2024. After all, the last two Democratic presidents were reelected after historically terrible midterms. Democrats lost 54 U.S. House seats in 1994 and 63 in 2010. Yes, they had bigger majorities going into those elections than Democrats have now. But they lost the national House popular vote by an identical 6.8 percent in both midterms, which is pretty bad, particularly since Democrats suffer from a voter-inefficiency problem in House elections (too many voters concentrated in too few districts).
It’s possible for a president’s party to lose a midterm so badly that bouncing back in the next cycle is all but impossible. Consider the man whose unique comeback accomplishment Donald Trump will be emulating if he runs in 2024, Grover Cleveland. The president Cleveland defeated in an 1892 rematch, Benjamin Harrison, was a Republican whose party lost an incredible 93 House seats in the 1890 midterms. This, mind you, was at a time when the House had only 332 members, which means the GOP lost over half their caucus in one cycle (an even worse percentage than in 1894, when Democrats lost a record 125 House seats during the midterm after Cleveland’s comeback triumph). In this era of polarization, nothing like that is going to happen to Democrats in 2022.
Looking more broadly at the power of incumbency, there have been 13 sitting presidents since World War II who were on the general election ballot. Nine of them won. The four losers all faced special circumstances. Gerald Ford had not previously been elected to anything more than the U.S. House; he ascended to the vice-presidency and then the presidency when disgraced predecessors resigned, and he pardoned the president who appointed him, the especially disgraced Richard Nixon. Jimmy Carter was caught up in a historical realignment that he had held off four years earlier by carrying his native South, which then resumed a massive Republican trend. George H.W. Bush suffered from a terrible economy but then also a party split (third-party candidate Ross Perot won a lot of previously Republican voters). And we all know about Donald J. Trump, who was impeached twice and seemed determined to offend swing voters.
In retrospect, what’s most remarkable is that Ford and Trump very nearly got reelected despite their handicaps, exhibiting not the weakness but the strength of incumbency. And it’s with that perspective that any early handicapping of a potential 2024 rematch should be considered. Trump benefited from incumbency in 2020, as will Biden in 2024. So the idea that the 45th president has some built-in advantage over the 46th — absent the renewed election coup so many of us fear — doesn’t make a lot of sense.
The MN numbers sure sound like they match on the Lawn sign war!
Since this is a thread on state data, I thought it would be helpful to have some pre/post debate apple-to-apple comparisons of state polling data. So…I went to race2004.net for a list of state polling data. Before examining the data, I selected surveys dated their from 9/15 to 9/30 as pre-debate, surveys dated 10/10 or later as post-debate. I found 36 polls across 22 states that were represented in both time periods. In 25 of those polls, Kerry gained. Another 6 showed no change. Another 5 showed Bush gaining. The median change was a 2% Kerry gain. The average change was 2.44% toward Kerry. I don’t know that this tells us where things stand in the electoral college right now, but it sure does suggest that Kerry gained some ground with the debates. Here’s the list, from largest Kerry gain to largest Bush gain:
Ohio, Ohio Poll, Kerry +11
Oregon, SUSA, Kerry +10
Iowa, Rasmussen, Kerry +7
South Carolina, SUSA, Kerry +7
New York, SUSA, Kerry +7
New Jersey, Rasmussen, Kerry +6
New Jersey, Strategic Vision (R), Kerry +5
Georgia, SUSA, Kerry +5
Michigan, Rasmussen, Kerry +4
Arkansas, SUSA, Kerry +4
Ohio, Strategic Vision (R), Kerry +4
Pennsylvania, Rasmussen, Kerry +4
New Jersey, Quinnipiac, Kerry +4
New Hampshire, Research 2000, Kerry +4
Alabama, Rasmussen, Kerry +3
Iowa, Strategic Vision (R), Kerry +2
Wisconsin, Strategic Vision (R), Kerry +2
Michigan, Strategic Vision (R), Kerry +2
Pennsylvania, Strategic Vision (R), Kerry +2
Rhode Island, SUSA, Kerry +2
Illinois, Rasmussen, Kerry +2
South Dakota, Rasmusen, Kerry +2
Washington, SUSA, Kerry +2
Minnesota, Strategic Vision (R), Kerry +1
Arkansas, Rasmussen, Kerry +1
Minnesota, Rasmussen, no change
Wisconsin, Rasmussen, no change
Ohio, Rasmussen, no change
Florida, Rasmussen, no change
Pennsylvania, Quinipiac, no change
New Jersey, FD Univ, no change
Oregon, Research 2000, Bush +1
Arkansas, Zogby, Bush +2
Texas, SUSA, Bush +2
Oklahoma, Wilson Res (R), Bush +5
California, Rasmussen, Bush +5
Could Ruy or someone else on the site comment on the WaPo and Rasmussen aggregate “swing state” poll numbers? These have been looking good, but I’ve never seen anything that discusses whether an aggregate result among a group of swing states really tells you anything useful about the EV outcome for those states would be.
No to mention that the Newark Star Ledger has Kerry up by +13 in God’s Country, and the CBS poll, which has the horserace tied, shows the prez approval at only 44%. Surely, if the latter is close to being right, Bush is in big trouble.
Anyone have a quote for Zogby calling a Kerry win ?
I just read that Zogby went out on a limb and predicted that Kerry was going to be the 44th president. He said that there is more to polling than statistics:
‘Polling can be uncertain only if you rely on statistics alone,’ is Mr Zogby’s riposte. ‘That’s why an effective pollster has to rely on culture, history and sociology. I repeat, polling is the study of human behaviour, not simply a sampling of people’s preferences.’
That may well explain his success. His big test will come on Nov 2. In Singapore last Friday, he flatly predicted that Mr Kerry would become the 44th President of the United States.
I sure hope he’s right. It’s comforting to know that he was one of the 2 polls to get it right in 2000.
Hg
I still say that the Kerry campaign must stop Dukakissing on the Bai article like they did on the flipflop spin. My guess is that, with the same performance in the debates, if he had prodded the press on the flipflop issue along the lines of Chait’s article in the 10/18 New Republic SIX MONTHS ago, and dismissed it as a mere spin in the ways I’ve suggested since, and put forward an NYU+ length speech to counter Bush’s monday blowout in NJ on terror, and challenged the Bai spin, and the media that have magnified its already distorted portrayal, he would be running consistently ahead by 4-5 points in the polls, and pulling along Democrats into the House and Senate too. In an honest election, where the Clarke interview with Michael Moore in Fahrenheit 9/11, where he points out 9/12 Bush was only interested in Iraq ACROSS THE COUNTRY — the Republicans would be in trouble in both Houses of Congress and would have a 92 type futile race for the White House. But that’s not the agenda.
In another thread I noted that it is probably appropriate for pollsters to assume a higher Republican turnout (as a percentage of registered Republicans) than Democratic turnout (as a percentage of registered Democrats). I was surprised that a few posters chose to attack this observation (some quite forcefully). This I believe is a well-documented phenomenon of American politics. It stems from the fact that Republicans tend to be more affluent, more focused on politics, have better access to the polls, etc. Some asked for statistics backing this up, so I went and looked up turnout statistics for some California counties. Obviously this is not a rigorous analysis, but what I found does indicate that Republicans turnout in greater percentages than Democrats. And I’ve read in many places that this is true nationally – I’ll provide cites as they turn up. Some people on this blog just don’t like to hear this apparently, and seem to suggest as a point of contention that I’m saying Republicans turn out in greater total numbers – I’m not. The advantage in Democratic party id partially or totally offsets the higher Republican turnout percentage to some extent. As an example, here’s results from Contra Costa county, which is heavily democratic and went for Al Gore in 2000:
Registration & Turnout
Democratic
Completed Precincts: 907 of 907
Reg/Turnout Percentage
Democratic Registration 223,155
PRECINCT REGISTRATION 223,155
PRECINCT BALLOTS CAST 99,416 44.6%
ABSENTEE BALLOTS CAST 37,480 16.8%
TOTAL BALLOTS CAST 136,896 61.3%
Registration & Turnout
Republican
Completed Precincts: 907 of 907
Reg/Turnout Percentage
Republican Registration 153,790
PRECINCT REGISTRATION 153,790
PRECINCT BALLOTS CAST 71,717 46.6%
ABSENTEE BALLOTS CAST 32,706 21.3%
TOTAL BALLOTS CAST 104,423 67.9%
Notice that Gore carried the county by ~31,000 votes, despite a registration advantage of 70,000. The reason for the narrower gap was the much higher Republican percentage turnout (68% R vs 61% D). If this is indeed indicative of national turnout habits, and I believe it is, then it is appropriate for Gallup to weight registered Democrats for 8% less turnout than registered Republicans. Alan asserts this is “totally unrealistic” – I disagree.
In my opinion, the big flaw in the Gallup polls is not the turnout weighting, but rather their insistence on oversampling registered Republicans. There just doesn’t seem to be a good reason for this. Their assertion that party id is fungible isn’t borne out by exit polls from the past several presidential elections. To gain an accurate sampling of the electorate, they should weight for best-known state or national party id distribution, as Zogby does, and also for expected party percentage turnout.
I think the NC poll is the most impressive. We’ll see how is really turns out though.
SUSA has the best record of any polling firm over the past 10 years.
I have to say, though, that I don’t place much trust in SUSA polls. These were the same people, after all, who called Maryland and New Jersey close in 2000, where Gore then went on to win by 15 points.
Although this isn’t the only poll I’ve seen with Kerry leading in Florida, so I’m inclined to believe he’s genuinely ahead.