Running The Numbers Wrong, Part 2

On Thursday I pointed out the weird subjective holes in Nate Silver's usually solid objective logic where he declared President Obama's re-election chances to be 50-50 at best, and basically doomed even against Rick Perry unless the economy picks back up.

I'm glad to see I wasn't the only one who noted that particular incongruity in Silver's work as Jon Chait picked up on that later on Thursday in NY Mag as he points out Bush 43 was in the same approval ratings boat in 2004 and still won (barely and because of seriously messy voting problems in Ohio, but that's another story) after attacking John Kerry.

If that’s correct then Obama has a chance to have his approval rating rise simply by drawing a sharp contrast against the Republican nominee. In other words, incumbent approval rating isn't something that's independent of the opposing candidate. Voters may shape their view of the incumbent by making a comparison.

I don’t want to overstate this. It may be wrong. (Or, as a great man once put it, "I don't have the facts to back this up.") But I think that we have to be a little cautious about interpreting the importance of Obama’s mediocre approval ratings in the face of a polarized electorate and a still-discredited opposition party.

In turn, Steve Benen took Silver to task as well as he finds Chait's number were indeed correct.

And why did Bush’s support grow from the mid-40s to the low-50s? Chait argued, persuasively, that voters starting seeing the president “within the context of a partisan choice,” and decided they liked him more after taking a look at the wealthy Massachusetts challenger with an awkward personality and who was often accused of flip-flopping.

Ahem.

Republican-leaning voters who weren’t sold on Bush — weak economy, awful job growth, etc. — became more inclined to support him after evaluating the alternative. Could that happen again with Democratic-leaning voters and Obama? Of course it can. As Chait put it, the president “has a chance to have his approval rating rise simply by drawing a sharp contrast against the Republican nominee. In other words, incumbent approval rating isn’t something that’s independent of the opposing candidate. Voters may shape their view of the incumbent by making a comparison.”

If Republicans were a popular party with a popular agenda, this would be a very different story. Likewise, if Obama were a poor campaigner facing a charismatic GOP frontrunner, I’d have a different set of expectations. But I’ve seen a lot of Obama political obituaries, and at this point, none of them have proven persuasive to me.

Michael Stickings over at The Reaction also disputes Silver's supposition.

Simply put, "Obama: Yes or No" is much different than "Obama or Romney/Perry." In the latter case, that is, in the election, the president will have an enormous advantage given the unpopularity of the Republican Party and its extremism and the lack of strong appeal of the Republican candidate to any constituency outside a certain part of the GOP -- for Perry, the right-wing base; for Romney, the somewhat more moderate but still deeply conservative establishment.

As well, Obama is an outstanding campaigner. He will draw sharp distinctions between himself and his Republican challenger, shaping the election's dominant narratives, and will likely energize voters much as he did in '08 -- perhaps not to that degree, but I suspect more than his detractors expect. He's got appeal that no one on the Republican side can even approach.

 

And that's the basic issue there.  An incumbent's approval ratings aren't equivalent to re-election polling of the incumbent against specific candidates.  Nate did everything to draw the correlation between the two but in order to bridge the gap, he filled the blanks in with some really silly Village "conventional wisdom" that liberals are disillusioned with the President enough that they will turn the White House over to the Republicans.

There are plenty of people who aren't happy with all of President Obama's policies.  I'm one of them, specifically he's dropped the ball on some economic and a lot of civil liberties issues in order to triage the country for the first two years, and I accept that.  I'm still going to vote for him over any of the specific Republicans in the race right now based on policy.  I suspect a whole hell of a lot of other people are out there in my situation as well.

More importantly, as more people begin to see the list of the President's accomplishments despite the GOP saying "Hell no you can't" to everything, they are starting to come around.  Hell, watch five minutes of any of the GOP debates and you'd want to vote for Obama too.