It’ll take more than a presidential library to make George W Bush popular | Harry J Enten

Don’t be fooled by a new poll showing Americans think fondly of ‘Dubya’. Of recent presidents, only Richard Nixon was less liked

The George W Bush presidential library is opening this week. Not surprisingly, fans of the former president are out in full force trying to help with the rehabilitation’s of Bush’s image.

Bush, of course, ended his presidency with an approval rating around 30%. This previous low, combined with the library opening, has helped give an impression of elevation to a new ABC/Washington Post poll that put his retrospective job approval rating at 47%.

The fact that President Obama’s approval rating in the current HuffPollster aggregate is a similar 48% only helps with the intrigue. The Washington Free Beacon wrote an article titled “Dubya’s Approval Matches Obama’s”. Add on the fact that Obama’s approval rating and Bush’s retrospective approval on the economy approval rating are about the same, and you got the makings of a great press narrative.

Let me be the one who tries to nip this story in the bud. I have no clue what type of person George W Bush is, or how history will view him in the future. What I do know is that the 47% retrospective approval rating should be put in context.

First, retrospective approval ratings should almost never be compared to current job approval ratings. Humans have a tendency to remember their elected officials more fondly than they did when they left office. Back in 2010, Gallup asked Americans what their retrospective approval rating was for Presidents John F Kennedy through George W Bush. In every instance except for one, the retrospective approval was higher than the final approval was when they left office.

Most Republicans, for instance, love to make fun of Jimmy Carter. Carter was the only president of the 20th century to lose re-election after replacing a president of a different party. He left office with a 34% job approval rating. His retrospective job approval rating in the 2010 Gallup poll jumped by 18pt.

Second, Bush’s retrospective approval is the second worst among presidents in the last 50 years ago. To save you doing the math, Carter’s 52% approval rating is higher than Bush’s 47%. Only the Watergate-tainted Richard Nixon recorded a lower retrospective approval than Bush.

Most presidents have retrospective approval ratings above 60%. All but Nixon and Bush have +10 or better retrospective net approval ratings. Thus, not only did Bush tie for the second worst final approval rating while in office, but he is also has the second worst retrospective job approval rating.

Third, the Gallup data should make clear that George W Bush hasn’t seen much recovery over the past three years in his retrospective approval rating. The 47% in the latest Washington Post poll is the same as the 47% that Gallup found in 2010. The 50% disapproval now is nearly identical to the 51% three years ago. Yes, people view him more rosily now than they did during his presidency, but that effect has been baked in for a while now. He’s not getting more loved as time goes by.

Finally, the retrospective approval rating probably gives a false sense of how Americans view Bush now. Remember that a retrospective approval is exactly that – retrospective. The better way to view how Bush stands with the American public is his current favorable ratings. In the past two years, there have been five polls conducted that have asked about Bush’s favorable rating with the American public.

Bush currently holds an average -5pt net favorable rating with the American public. President Obama’s favorable rating is almost exactly the reverse of that, at +7pt in the HuffPollster aggregate. Indeed, even the losing Republican nominee Mitt Romney ended the 2012 campaign with a higher net favorable than Bush, at -3pt.

It’s no wonder that President Bush continues to hurt the Republican party. Mitt Romney tried his hardest to tie what many saw as a lackluster economy in 2012 to President Obama. The problem was that most Americans still blamed Bush over Obama. In the network exit polls, 53% said the economic problems were more Bush’s than Obama’s fault. Only 38% of Americans disagreed.

So, George W Bush may be more fondly thought of now than he was when he left office, yet this is to be expected – and discounted. Almost all presidents see a boost after they leave office. Bush is still quite unpopular compared with other former presidents, and his current favorable rating is far worse than President Obama’s. No library opening is changing that. Republicans would be wise to stay away from embracing George W Bush for the time being.

• This article has been amended to reflect updated polling data as of 25 April 2013.

Harry J Enten

Why Richard Cohen is mistaken about the Republican primary process | Harry J Enten

The thesis that the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary skew the GOP to pick a conservative candidate is simply wrong

My high school teachers and college professors always told me to look at the evidence and come up with a thesis that is supported by it. The completely wrong thing to do was to think up a thesis and then fit the evidence around it. But that, in my view, is exactly what the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen did on Monday.

Cohen believes that Iowa and New Hampshire should not be the first nominating contests during the primary season. He decries that the recent Republican “Growth and Opportunity Project” didn’t dare to make the suggestion that Iowa and New Hampshire lose their special “first in the nation” status. There’s nothing wrong with this belief, and many others support that position.

The problem I have is Cohen’s reasoning for why Iowa and New Hampshire shouldn’t be first. He thinks that their Republican electorates are too conservative compared to the Republican party as a whole. If this were true, then they would be likely to select a candidate who is very conservative. This is an issue because, as we know, the first contests help to winnow the primary field. If you don’t win either the Iowa caucus or New Hampshire primary, you probably won’t last too long as a serious candidate. Thus, he proposes, the Republican party ends up with its presidential candidates being too conservative.

On Iowa, at least, Cohen’s case can be made pretty strongly. After all, it’s where Pat Robertson came in second in 1988, and Mike Huckabee won in 2008. We know caucuses themselves are lower turnout affairs that require effort to attend and thus tend to be attended proportionally by more conservative activists than vote primaries, but let’s get more specific.

Using Ohio as a control case because it was right at about the center of where the primary electorate was at, we can see Iowa’s tilt strongly: 56% of Iowa’s 2012 voters self-identified as white, born-again or evangelical Christian. That’s far above Ohio’s level, at 47%.

Whereas 64% of Iowa’s 2012 voters supported the Tea Party, just 59% of Ohio’s voters did. And 47% of Iowa’s 2012 voters self-identified as very conservative. That’s not even close to Ohio’s 32%.

Not surprisingly, this led to Rick Santorum winning the Iowa caucus over Mitt Romney, even as Romney would go on to win Ohio and the nomination. Romney took only 24.5% of the vote in Iowa, while Santorum, Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Perry combined for an astronomical 53.2% – or double Romney’s percentage. When we combine all the nation’s caucuses and primaries, it was actually Romney who got 52.1%.

Here’s the rub: none of this same argument can be applied to New Hampshire. New Hampshire is actually pretty well to the left of the national Republican primary electorate. Again, let’s use Ohio as our control case.

Only 21% of New Hampshire’s 2012 voters self-identified as white born-again or evangelical Christian. That’s 26 points below Ohio. Only 51% of New Hampshire’s 2012 voters supported the Tea Party. That’s 8pt below Ohio.

Only 34% of New Hampshire’s 2012 voters viewed themselves as very conservative on spending issues such as taxes and spending. That’s not even close to Ohio’s 47%. Only 24% of New Hampshire’s 2012 voters, less than a quarter, self-identified as very conservative on social issues such as abortion. That’s 18pt below Ohio’s 42%. And only 21% of New Hampshire’s 2012 voters self-identified as very conservative overall. That’s 11pt down on Ohio.

As you can see, New Hampshire’s Republican electorate isn’t anywhere near being more conservative than the median Republican electorate. In fact, it’s a lot more liberal.

That’s why you see strict social conservatives hit a wall when they come to New Hampshire. After his Iowa victory, Santorum was uncompetitive in New Hampshire receiving just 9.4% of the vote. He, of course, got 37% of the vote in Ohio and nearly won that primary. The Bachmann, Gingrich, Perry, Santorum foursome, combined, got less than 20% of the vote, compared to their 53.2% back in Iowa.

It’s no wonder that the Republican mainstream candidate, Mitt Romney, won the primary by 16.4pt – far greater than his 1pt squeak win in Ohio.

Meanwhile, more moderate candidates thrive in New Hampshire as they do in few other places. Jon Huntsman, whose campaign was marked by speaking Mandarin Chinese during debates, saying he believed in global warming and evolution, and voicing support for civil unions, actually was competitive in New Hampshire. He still lost, with 17% of the vote, but he finished ahead of the eventual runner-up Santorum. Of course, Huntsman never finished much above 2-3% in national polls and had to drop out after losing New Hampshire.

Cohen could argue that New Hampshire did allow the very conservative Ron Paul to place second, with nearly 23% of the vote. Most of us would agree, however, that that is because Paul is a libertarian. He wanted government out of people’s lives, and so he fit New Hampshire’s “live free or die” motto to a tee. That’s not exactly the type of strong social conservatism that Cohen would argue is apparent in New Hampshire.

Finally, some might note that New Hampshire has an open primary (that is, independents can vote) – and that this skewed the 2012 results because there was no competitive Democratic contest in the state. That belief doesn’t hold water, either. For example, in 2008, the same percentage of New Hampshire Republican primary voters self-identified as very conservative, despite a primary between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton occurring on the Democratic side.

The truth is that far from New Hampshire’s Republican electorate obliging the party to select more conservative nominees, it’s actually making them more liberal and mainstream. New Hampshire helped propel John McCain’s Straight Talk Express to victory in 2000; it stopped social conservative Mike Huckabee after his Iowa win in 2008; and it put Mitt Romney on the right track in 2012.

Any view to the contrary just isn’t looking at the facts.

Harry J Enten

Has the Republican party lost young voters for good? | Harry J Enten

In 2012, millennials broke strongly for Obama. But Democrats cannot assume they’ve got the youth vote locked up indefinitely

Republican operatives all over the country are scrambling to figure out what’s wrong with the Republican party. Most have centered on analyzing the political leanings of millennials because they are a growing bloc, and because, for the past two elections, President Obama has won 60% or more of voters between the ages of 18 and 29.

The most common diagnosis is that Republicans are just too conservative for young voters. But I wouldn’t worry about, if I were a Republican …

1. Elections are still about the economy

Last week, I wrote about how President Obama was the economic favorite in the 2012 election. The economy was moving forward, albeit slowly. The economic situation was very similar to the 2004 election.

We can see this in the leading economic indicators (encompassing 10 economic variables) model of Bob Erikson and Chris Wlezien. It pointed to a 5pt Obama victory, slightly better than he actually did. The same model (without trial heat polls) gave Bush a 5.5pt edge (pdf) in 2004, slightly better than he did. Obviously, there is some error here in how the model performed, but that is to be expected without actually using polling.

The key takeaway is that an overarching measure of the economy forecasted the final result in both election years, even if the media argued the economy was in worse shape. The funny thing is that in both 2004 and 2012, Erikson and Wlezien noted in their write-ups before the election that the strength of the economy “may surprise” given what was being said about the state of the economy in the press.

The good news for Republicans is economies go up and they go down. If the economy turns south by 2016, as it did for 2008, the Republicans are going to start doing better again in the race for the White House. My friend Jamelle Bouie illustrated this point well in a column last week.

2. Ideology is overrated as a factor in presidential campaigns

Most smart analysts recognize that while Republicans hold deficits on who is trusted on many issues, that hasn’t stopped them from winning before. More voters approved of the Democratic party than the GOP in the 2010 election, yet Republicans won the House vote by 6.6pt.

In fact, the ideology of a presidential candidate makes only the slightest bit of difference. The generally accepted percentage among most academic literature is 1-2pt, from most extreme to most moderate. President Obama won by nearly 4pt.

Moreover, Mitt Romney, by almost any measure, was the second most moderate candidate next to Jon Huntsman in the Republican field. Romney was about as conservative as George W Bush in 2000. A more moderate candidate would have likely made little difference in 2012.

3. The GOP issue isn’t the youth – it’s everyone

Mitt Romney did worse across pretty much all age cohorts compared to President Bush in 2004.

Bush only won 43% of the 18-24 year-old cohort. There wasn’t much of an outcry about Bush’s young voter problem because he won. Two elections later, Romney won about 40% of the now 26-32 year-olds. This 3pt drop was entirely consistent with a national Republican drop of 3.5pt from Bush’s 50.7% to Romney’s 47.2%.

Other age groups are consistent with that effect. Bush won 53% of the then 30-44 year-old vote. This time, Romney nabbed 50% of the now 40-49 year-old cohort, which again matches the Republican drop of 3pt nationally. Same with the then 40-49 year-old vote, where Bush grabbed 54% and Romney walked away with 52% of the now 50-64 year-old cohort.

None of this is too surprising. As I wrote last week, age cohorts tend to remain at the same level of partisanship relative to the mean. A cohort’s “liberalism” or “conservatism” is dependent on the success of the presidential administration they come of age under. The now 26-32 year-olds came of age during the not too successful Bush administration and pretty solid Clinton years.

The factor, as discussed above, that moved all these groups slightly to the left is the economy.

4. The next generation of new voters will probably be more Republican-inclined than this one

Very well, you might say, but what about the addition of voters who turned 18 since 2004? Surely, they have tilted the electorate. Yet, the now 18-25 year-olds mostly took over for the 75-plus year-olds in 2004, who were very Democratic. That’s why age cohorts who cast a ballot in 2004 and 2012 voted the same relative to national vote, even as more millennials have turned 18.

Of course, a steady parade of Democratic millennials could make hell for the Republican party. They will be replacing the 60-74 year-olds of 2004 and now 68-82 year-olds, who have been 6-8pt more Republican than the nation as whole.

The good news for Republicans is that the new 13-18 year-olds don’t seem to be like today’s 18-32 year-old voters. As I noted last week, the men and women college freshmen of 2012 were 4-5pt less liberal than those of 2008, which brings them closer to middle-of-the-road freshmen of the beginning of the Carter and Clinton administrations.

High school students can’t vote yet, but scientific polling on them can be predictive. In 2004, 13-17 year-olds would have voted for John Kerry in the same numbers as those 18-24 per Gallup/Knowledge Networks. That translated into a huge win for Obama among 18-24 year-olds in 2008. In 2008, Harris Interactive found that those under 18 would have voted in a similar manner to their older co-millennials. And that, too, translated into a huge Obama win among 18-24 year-olds in 2012.

In 2012, high school students seem to be far more conservative. The margin among high school students in an American University/GfK poll between Obama-Romney was 20pt closer than among all college students, who as a group voted in the same fashion as all 18-29 year-olds. These high school students were also far more likely to be against abortion than their college counterparts.

The more limited liberalism of these 13-18 year-olds has, again, to do with youth responding to the president they grew up under. President Obama’s administration has been, by historical standards, middlingly successful – as can be seen in his projected historical ranking, so the voters who grew up under him are more oriented to the middle ground of politics, too.

Conclusion

None of this is to say that Republicans shouldn’t make changes. They should invest in better get-out-the-vote efforts. President Obama’s team clearly dominated the get-out-the-vote campaign in 2012, which may very well have won him the key state of Florida.

You’d also rather be the better-liked party. In an election where the fundamentals don’t favor either side, it could make the difference.

Yet, both of these examples are the exceptions that prove the point: ideological or infrastructural changes will really only matter in 1pt- or 2pt-margin elections, not 4pt ones. Republican losses in 2012 had little to do with demography.

The main problem Republicans faced in 2012, and will face in the next few years, is the same one Democrats confronted in 2004. The economy is picking up speed and the incumbent president’s party is being rewarded.

Harry J Enten

It’s not Romney’s fault – the economy helped re-elect Obama | Harry J Enten

Conservatives won’t let go of the notion that Romney wasted an election, even though Obama benefited from economic growth

Sometimes there are beliefs that just won’t die, no matter how false they are. Witness a new article in Commentary by Michael Gerson and Peter Wehner. The authors argue that given the weak economy, Mitt Romney should have won the 2012 election. To be fair, these authors didn’t invent the claim, but they do take it to next the next level.

If you believe Romney lost when he should have won, then he must have made a fatal mistake which needs to be fixed so that Republicans can win again. For Gerson and Wehner, this logic led them down the path of demographics: they conclude that Romney’s biggest problem was a lack of minority outreach in a changing country. I don’t think you can say that Romney had a racial rainbow of support, exactly, but I do want to answer their basic question: did Romney flush away a victory that the economy should have delivered to him?

Actually, Romney always had an uphill battle: the economy narrowly favored President Obama’s re-election. Jamelle Bouie has stated this fact over and over again. John Sides, too, has stated this fact over and over again. Nate Silver has stated this fact over and over again. Have you noticed a pattern here? Smart experts reached the same conclusion. It’s part of the reason we all correctly called a close, but comfortable Obama victory in 2012. It’s why I said way back in September that it wouldn’t be Mitt Romney’s fault if he lost.

What are some people not seeing about the relationship between the economy and elections? For starters, most people don’t vote over absolute numbers, like an unemployment rate of near 8%. Voters choose whether to re-elect based on changes in numbers, like the unemployment rate dropping from 10% in 2009 to 8% in 2012. That’s why voters still overwhelmingly blamed Bush for bad economic conditions and not Obama, even if the unemployment rate remained high in a historical context.

To make the point mathematically (yes, that thing some fear), we can run a regression equation to predict Obama’s chances in 2012 – it’s not so bad: the equation compares growth in different sectors of the economy during prior elections. There were a few faulty models that were either based off of one economic variable or over-fit to match past results. The majority, however, favored Obama. Most of these either utilized just one economic variable or included a presidential approval variable. But in my opinion, one economic variable doesn’t tell the whole story and approval ratings can be influenced to some degree by the economy.

There are two models I know of that employed multiple economic indices and no approval ratings: Bob Erikson and Chris Wlezien’s leading economic indicator model and Nate Silver’s economic index. Erikson and Wlezien’s model simply takes into account continued quarter growth for elections since 1952, and uses the 10 leading economic variables (which are shown to be representative of overall strength in the economy), with quarters closer to the election weighted more heavily. Silver’s model takes into account rolling averages of a month to a year of seven economic variables, which range from personal income growth to forecasted GDP to the stock market for elections since 1968.

The results of these models were remarkably similar: small Obama victories. Erikson and Wlezien, who authored the great book The Timeline of Presidential Elections: How Campaigns Do (and Do Not) Matter, actually overshot Obama’s 3.9pt win by about a point, calling for a 5pt Obama victory. Silver’s model slightly undershot it by having Obama take the election by about 3pt. The average of their results equals a 4pt Obama victory, or for Romney to hit the infamous 47%, which is pretty much where the numbers fell.

The average of the two most thorough economic models nailed the election results. This clearly indicates that given the economy, Obama should have won in 2012. A one or seven point victory would still indicate that 2012 was mostly about the economy – precision is more luck than anything else.

It’s important to remember that these models have margins of errors and elections aren’t only about the economy. Candidate ideology, for example, is generally worth a few points. Romney was generally seen as one of the more mainstream Republican candidates of 2012. Perhaps the even more moderate Jon Huntsman might have lost by only 2-3pt nationally.

Field work may have put Obama over the top in Florida – the closest state in 2012. But even if a better field organization yielded Romney those 29 additional electoral votes, Obama still would have had a major win.

The general point, though, is 2012, like most national elections, was mostly about the economy. A Mitt Romney victory would have actually been a surprise.

So, what about the Gerson and Wehner argument that Republicans will continue lose elections in which they are favored, unless they adjust to a new reality? It comes from a flawed premise of what happened in 2012, and doesn’t have much bearing on how the economy affected the race. It’s a completely different question as to whether or not Republicans will lose elections that the economy hands them. I’ll have more to say about that coming days.

What I’ll say for now is President Obama won the 2012 election because of the state of the economy, not in spite of it.

Harry J Enten

Marco Rubio for 2016? Five reasons I wouldn’t bet on it | Harry J Enten

Recent prominence on the national stage leads some to tout Rubio as the Republican party’s possible saviour. I doubt it

Every once in a while, there is a political leader who comes along as a saviour for his or her party. Names like Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan are examples of politicians who marked the beginning of new political eras. Many have pointed to Marco Rubio as one who may follow in these men’s footsteps – and lead his party to victory in the 2016 presidential election.

Rubio is said by some to be the candidate who could reverse the Republicans’ very poor electoral showing with the growing proportion of the electorate that is Latino. He has emerged as the leading GOP figure among the “gang of eight” senators proposing bipartisan reform of the nation’s immigration law – as a Tea Party favorite, he has even made strides in winning round opinion among strongly conservative talk radio audiences on this policy. And finally, he has been anointed to deliver the Republican party’s response to President Obama’s state of the union address on Tuesday night: the gift of a national stage to a rising star.

But at this point, I just don’t see the 2016 saviour scenario happening for the senator from Florida. Why not?

1. Republicans like to choose the next in line

Since 1960, it’s been fairly easy to predict who would be the Republican nominee. Every candidate except for Barry Goldwater has either run for national office previously or been the son of someone who has. Mitt Romney ran in 2008, before winning the nomination in 2012. John McCain took on George W Bush in 2000, before clinching the nomination in 2008. Bob Dole ran as a vice-presidential nominee in 1976 and a presidential candidate in 1980 and 1988, until he finally broke through in 1996. The list goes on and on.

The best example is Ronald Reagan. He was someone who supposedly took on the Republican old guard, who thought he was too conservative and distrusted his “voodoo economics”. The fact is that Reagan had actually first run in 1968 as a conservative outsider and lost. He was more successful in his challenge to Gerald Ford in 1976, but still came up short. It wasn’t until he was well-established and entered 1980 as a front-runner that he took the nomination.

Marco Rubio has never run for president, nor appeared on a national ticket. That’s not to say this rule is ironclad, by any means, but Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, and most importantly, Paul Ryan are all in better position per this criterion.

2. Republicans choose the candidate backed by the establishment

One could argue that rule 1 is a manifestation of rule 2, but the fact is that Democrats and Republicans tend to pick the candidate with establishment support. That’s the thesis of the book The Party Decides. The idea is that the candidate who has the most party backing almost always wins.

Thus George W Bush in 2000, who had never run for national office before, won lots of endorsements from the party bigwigs. And we saw how elected officials carried Romney to victory by coming out and bashing Newt Gingrich in 2012, at the moment when he threatened Romney’s lead in the primaries.

Marco Rubio is, at this point, almost the antithesis of the Republican establishment. He won his Senate seat in 2010 by challenging the party pick Charlie Crist. Once in Washington, Rubio has continued his anti-establishment ways. His second-dimension “DW-Nominate” score, which has been a pretty good measurer of establishment activity, is negative. From the debt ceiling to the fiscal cliff, Rubio has consistently voted against legislation that the leadership voted for.

3. Rubio is likely too conservative

People may be being fooled, currently, into thinking that Rubio is a middle-of-the-road politician. After all, he’s from the swing state of Florida and is sponsoring immigration reform. Rubio was, in fact, the seventh most conservative senator in the 112th Congress. His voting record puts him sandwiched between arch-conservatives Jim Inhofe and Ron Johnson.

Very conservative nominees can win a party’s nomination, as did Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. The issue for Rubio, though, is that these folks became nominees when the party had just recently been in the White House. When the party has been out for two terms or more, the nominees tend to be a lot more moderate – because the party wants to win and wants a centrist pick. The most conservative nominee after the party had been out of office for more than two terms was George W Bush, the “compassionate conservative” who, at the time, was not seen nearly as rightwing as he later was.

Rubio running from the right doesn’t make too much sense, especially considering that, these days, somewhat conservative and moderate voters hold a 2:1 advantage over very conservative voters in Republican presidential primaries.

4. Rubio is largely an unknown

How much do we really know about Marco Rubio, and how he’d perform on the big stage? I mean, besides making a Time Magazine cover story, Rubio is quite untested. With relatively little media scrutiny, he had to fight through a credit card expenses scandal (an Ethics Commission ultimately threw out the case); he has also been exposed as having embellished his family history about his parents’ flight from Fidel Castro’s Cuba.

The fact is that we are almost always surprised by what candidates look like once they are under the spotlight. We found out that Rick Perry couldn’t debate to save his life. Newt Gingrich’s outsider status was severely compromised by his lobbying activity when he was out of office. Gary Hart had, in fact, been involved in a sexual affair.

If past experience holds, there are bound to be more awkward questions for Rubio than he has hitherto faced.

5. A Rubio run would face a competitive GOP field

This one is, perhaps, the most obvious: there are potentially a lot of very plausible Republican nominees. Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Mike Huckabee, Bobby Jindal, Rand Paul, Rick Perry, and Paul Ryan are all not so far-fetched names for a run in 2016. Half of these candidates are more impressive than the Republicans that ran in 2012. Even if Rubio leads a very, very early field, the other candidates combined total 80%. The probability of one of these other hypothetical candidates winning is far greater than Rubio’s chance of taking the pie.

Conclusion

If Rubio takes the plunge for 2016, I would bet against him. Given the hurdles a Rubio candidacy would face, I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if he never runs at all.

Harry J Enten

Dick Morris exits Fox News: even he might have predicted this correctly | Harry J Enten

I’ve nothing personal against Morris, but I believe the public has a right to expect pundits to be accountable for their forecasting

I’m not a big one for schadenfreude but I confess to feeling a little frisson on hearing the news that Dick Morris was not getting his contract renewed by Fox News. It’s not that I wish Morris ill tidings; it’s that I want pundits to be held accountable for their incorrect forecasts.

Dick Morris has one of the worst electoral prediction records known to man.

I wrote last August on 10 Morris predictions that turned out to be not just wrong, but horribly off the mark. There were many more I didn’t even cover.

In the 2012 election, Morris topped himself. He kept insisting that Mitt Romney would win the presidential election. He had the “real polls” (whatever those were). His final prediction was Romney taking 325 electoral votes and the national vote by at least 5pt. Of course, it was Obama emerging victorious with 332 electoral votes and a 4pt national vote edge.

Morris’ performance earned him the title of “Worst Pundit of 2012” by Pundit Tracker. That’s an impressive achievement considering all the competition. In mathematical terms, Morris was wrong 80% in his prognostications: if you had placed a dollar bet on each Morris prediction in a prediction market, you would have lost 70% of your money.

I would be more forgiving of Morris if he had just said he was wrong, provided a real reason for his forecasts, and promised to be better in the future. After all, none of us is perfect or even close to it (see my mea culpa for slips in 2012). Instead, Morris blamed the usual “Hurricane Sandy allowed Obama to win” hypothesis, and then said he knew he had been wrong, yet he’d wanted to raise the spirit of Republicans. This sort of action from a person who is supposed to inform the public simply isn’t acceptable.

Analysts and pundits must be held accountable for their misses. They should not just be able to appear on television or in print the next day and say “oops!”, without consequences. Which is why I was glad that Fox News actually acted on Morris’ embarrassingly poor performance. It suggests that Fox executives do actually care, at least at some level, about the accuracy of the electoral analysis being broadcast.

Now, I just hope Fox doesn’t put Pat Caddell on again. They would be far better served by putting their own director of public research, Dana Blanton, on the air.

The only part of the Dick Morris departure that saddens me is that he has been booked to appear on Piers Morgan’s CNN show Wednesday evening. This can only be a misguided ploy to boost ratings, because if Morris’ appearance has anything to do with expertise, then I can only assume Morgan and his producers know very little about American politics.

In the past, Morgan has actually had a couple of great analysts on the show. Republican pollster Kristen Soltis was on more than a couple of times during the campaign. Soltis, part of the great Winston Group, really knows stuff.

Responding to the Morris news Tuesday night, I tweeted Morgan that he’d better off having Soltis back again. Soltis responded that she’d be “more than than happy to debate Dick Morris about the future of election forecasting!” I hope Morgan takes Soltis up on her offer: that would be worth watching.

But at least, Dick Morris being off the air at Fox is a win for anyone who cares about the quality of information being fed to the viewer.

Harry J Enten

The weighting game: why Rasmussen has Democrats winning 2014 midterms | Harry J Enten

To mend its 2012 reputation for leaning Republican, Rasmussen tweaked its methodology. Now the pollster has overcompensated

Throughout the 2012 election season, it became a commonplace that Rasmussen Reports had a consistent pro-GOP bias. Well, get ready to be surprised: Rasmussen now leans more Democratic than the average pollster.

This from the pollster that projected Mitt Romney to win the popular vote and did not call an Obama victory in six of the states he actually carried. Clearly, Rasmussen needed to change, and it did. But rather than solve its problems, it has ended up overcompensating by mistakenly weighting its surveys to the national exit poll demographics.

What do I mean? Let’s take a look at some of Rasmussen’s new demographic weighting.

Prior to the 2012 election, whites made up a little over 73% of the electorate in Rasmussen world. Now, non-Hispanic whites make up 72% of Rasmussen’s sample; blacks make up 13% and Latinos are at 10% – just like the exits.

So much for demographics. The biggest noticeable change, however, is Rasmussen’s party identification.

Rasmussen is one of the few pollsters to actively weight by party identification. It interviewed thousands upon thousands of voters, and then utilized a “dynamic weighting” scheme to get the correct percentage of Democrats, Republicans, and independents in the lead-up to the 2012 election. It ended up with a three-month rolling average of 4.2% more self-identified Republicans than Democrats.

The exit polls, though, had Democrats with a 6pt party identification advantage. Sure enough, Rasmussen now weights its polling to 38% Democratic and 32% Republican – the same exact spread as the exit polls gave.

Here are my qualms about Rasmussen’s methodology. First, I dislike weighting polls by party identification. Party ID is an attitude that isn’t consistent from election to election. Given Rasmussen’s major problems in correctly tracking party identification, I have zero faith it will be able to track any deviation from the 2012 exit polls.

Second, I’ve never heard of any reliable pollster weighting their polls to match the exits. The exit pollsters certainly do not. Exit polls are great surveys with error, just like any other poll.

Any pollster using random digit dialing, like Rasmussen, should start off with the census as a baseline for weighting. You should call cellphones or substitute with an internet sub-sample; Rasmussen tried the latter and seemingly failed. If you wish to see a smaller subsection of the population, like registered voters or likely voters, you ask a short battery of simple questions to determine who is a registered or a likely voter.

Third, exit polls often differ from most pre-election polls on demographics. As I discussed earlier this cycle, exit polls tend to have more minorities and young voters than other surveys. Democracy Corps, 2012′s most successful national telephone pollster, is a case in point.

Corps had non-Hispanic whites at 74% of the electorate – 2pt higher than the exits, which matches the average of national pre-election pollsters. Democracy Corps had 18-29 year-olds at 16% of the electorate (3pt lower than the exit polls), and people 65 and older at 18% (2pt higher than the exit polls).

And what about the infamous party identification? Democracy Corps had Democrats with only a 3pt edge over Republicans, 35% to 32%, respectively. If Democracy Corps had re-weighted its final poll using the 2012 exit polls, it would have found a result too favorable to President Obama.

Fourth, Rasmussen is weighting its likely voter model to 2012. In presidential years, most registered voters are likely voters. In midterm years, as 2014 will be, however, turnout is down and the electorate tends to skew towards voters who are, on average, older and whiter than voters in the registered electorate. That makes midterm electorates more favorable to the Republican party.

Democracy Corps recently tested the likely voter electorate for 2012 and 2014 (pdf), and discovered what you’d expect: the 2014 electorate is, at this point, projected to be 2pt whiter and have 2pt fewer 18-29 year-olds, proportionally, than turned out in 2012.

So, it’s no surprise that Rasmussen’s choice to weight its results by the 2012 exit polls creates a Democratic “House effect”.

Obama has a House effect, too. Among pollsters who surveyed registered or likely voters (besides Rasmussen), his controlled average net approval since his re-election is +6.8pt. (I only averaged registered and likely voters here because the general electorate has fewer minorities than the adult population at large, which makes it more conservative.)

Obama’s average net approval in Rasmussen’s polling since re-election is +10.6pt, which is nearly 4pt higher than the other pollsters’ results. ABC/Washington Post and Quinnipiac are the only pollsters who had it higher among registered or likely voters. That’s quite the turnaround from before the election, when Rasmussen rarely gave Obama a positive net approval, and was more Republican-leaning than actual results in 81% of the races it polled.

This Democratic House effect can likewise be seen on the national House ballot for 2014. Since the election, Rasmussen’s 11-week average has Democrats with a +7.4pt advantage. Even with biases against Democrats winning seats, a 7.4pt margin would almost certainly get them back the House – and with room to spare. For 96 weeks before the election, Rasmussen only found the Democrats ahead 5% of the time in the on the national House ballot, despite the fact that Democrats won it by a point.

There have only been two other pollsters since the election to survey likely voters on the House ballot: Democracy Corps and GWU Battleground. Democracy Corps pegged the Democratic lead at 4pt, while GWU Battleground put it at 3pt. Again, Rasmussen is nearly 4pt more Democratic than the average of non-Rasmussen results.

The Democracy Corps result demonstrates the problem with polling to the 2012 electorate. Democracy Corps has the Democratic lead on the House ballot at 7pt, which matches Rasmussen – under 2012 demographics. Under 2014′s likely demographics, the lead shrinks to 4pt.

All in all, I’m not really sure what Rasmussen is up to now. Its methodology has always been somewhat odd, but its response to a tremendous Republican bias in 2010 and 2012 is even stranger. It shouldn’t be weighting to the national exit poll, since this bad decision only shifts to a Democratic House effect. For its own sake, I can only hope that Rasmussen modifies its methodology again – and this time, improves it.

Harry J Enten

Five reasons Republicans won’t win Latino voters with immigration reform | Harry J Enten

If the GOP has decided to embrace immigration reform to bolster its electoral chances with Hispanic voters, it should think again

Republicans may feel electoral pressure to vote for comprehensive immigration reform. They shouldn’t – at least in the short term. Latino voters are Democrats, and Republicans would gain little even by making a 180-degree turn on immigration reform in the next 15 years. Here are five reasons why.

1. ¡es la economía, estúpido!

Latinos didn’t vote for President Obama because Mitt Romney was seen as insensitive on immigration. According to a Fox Latino poll before the election, only 6% of Latinos said that immigration was the most important issue to their vote. A Latino Decisions (LD) election eve poll allowed multiple answers to issues that were important and, still, 65% did not say immigration was important to them.

Latinos instead cared about the economy. About 50% said the economy was the most important issue to their vote. By a 75% to 19% margin, Latinos are more likely to believe in a bigger government, with more services, to a smaller one. President Obama got 75% of the Latino vote in the LD election eve poll – a perfect match.

2. Latinos are liberal

Latinos have said openly they won’t change their vote because of immigration policy. Only 31% of Latinos in the LD survey said they would be more likely to vote GOP, if the Republican party took a leadership role in immigration reform. A full 58% said they didn’t know or it would have no effect, while 11% said it would actually make them less likely to vote Republican.

The reason is that Latinos are 9pt more likely to say they are liberal than the general population. Most of that has to do with the economy, but even on social issues, Latinos, especially second- and third-generation, are no more conservative than the general population. In fact, second- and third-generation Latinos are more likely to believe abortion should be legal and homosexuality accepted by society than the general population.

3. Even “Latino-friendly” GOP politicians never did that well

The best Republican performances among Latinos have still been a big bag of “meh”. Ronald Reagan only got 37% of the Latino vote in 1984, despite winning 59% of the overall vote. Much has been made of George W Bush’s exit performance with Latinos, but it’s important to remember that pre-election polls showed Bush in the low 30s. In fact, a Latino-specific election day poll, with a high number of Latino voters, pegged Bush’s Latino support at only 35%.

The “worst” Republican showings among Latinos haven’t differed much. Bob Dole got 23% of the two-party vote in 1996, which is the same as Mitt Romney in 2012. This narrow band of difference tends to follow the voting patterns of African Americans and American Jews (staple demographic groups in the American electorate) in the past 30 years. We also haven’t seen much movement among these groups – even with extensive voter outreach.

4. Demographics don’t swing elections

Even if Republicans did bring up their percentage of the Latino vote, it wouldn’t make a great difference nationwide. Say Mitt Romney won George W Bush’s percentage of the Latino vote, he still would have lost the nationwide vote by 1.4pt. The reason is that the Latino vote still only makes up 9-10% of the vote in the national exit polls, and slightly less in most other surveys.

The rate of growth of the Latino vote nationwide has been relatively slow. A solid estimate matching past trends from David Broockman and Ethan Roeder put the Latino vote growing about 0.6pt as a portion of the electorate every presidential election through 2024. Obama’s margin of victory would be just 0.7pt higher according to projected demographics for 2024. That puts an onus on Republicans to win more Latino votes, though it’s not as large an imperative as one might assume.

5. Most Latino voters don’t live in swing states

Most of the growth in the Latino vote is occurring in non-swing states. California and Texas are where most the Latino voters are and will continue to be. California will be blue for the foreseeable future, and Texas isn’t going to turn blue for another decade and a half. Arizona is an intriguing state for Democrats, though the recent Republican turn of the white vote makes it a non-swing state.

The only swing states in which Latinos make up the same or a greater percentage of the electorate than nationally are Colorado, Florida, and Nevada. A modest improvement for Republicans in these states could make a difference in a close election. That’s nothing to sneeze at, but the majority of swing states like Iowa, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia are more likely to be determined by African-American and non-Hispanic white voters.

All in all, Republican appeals to Latino voters are not likely to win the party many more votes in elections. That’s the bad news for the party of Lincoln.

The good news for Republicans is that Latino voters are, and will continue to be, only a slowly growing portion of the American electorate. And by the time Latinos make up 15% or more of the electorate, in 30 to 40 years, most of them will be second-generation or beyond. As Jamelle Bouie points out, they are likely to assimilate in similar ways to Italian and Irish immigrants before them. When that happens, Latinos’ stances on a whole range of issues will evolve.

Harry J Enten

The top five polling lessons from the 2012 election | Harry J Enten

Cellphones, internet tactics and other vital things we should take with us as we close the books on last month’s election

The 2012 election is in the books, and as we head into the new term filled with new elections, there are polling lessons we should take with us. Yet, as this list of the top five polling rules from 2012 will demonstrate, there will always be exceptions to the rule.

1. When likely and registered voter polls disagree in high turnout elections, you should usually go with the registered voter surveys

Likely voter (LV) models at their heart are trying to separate the LV electorate from the larger registered voter (RV) unit. That just creates unnecessary noise in a presidential year because, as I’ve noted, almost all RVs cast a ballot.

This year LV samples were more favorable to Mitt Romney throughout the entire campaign. Among pollsters who conducted a poll among both LVs and RVs in the final week, Obama was ahead in thefinal LV aggregate by only 1.3 points. The RV average had him by 3.9 points and was thus far more accurate given Obama is leading by 3.7 currently. This follows a trend from past presidential years when RV polls were more accurate than their LV counterparts.

Exceptions to the rule:

Pew Research’s final LV margin of three points for Obama was more accurate than their RV margin of seven points. That’s noteworthy because Pew Research has one of the tighter LV screens in the polling business. Pew’s LV success marks three consecutive presidential elections where their LV model was more accurate their RV model.

The RAND poll LV model, which allowed voters to assign themselves a percentage likelihood of voting, had Obama leading by 3.3 points and was only 0.4 points off the mark. The RV RAND model had Obama ahead by 6.3 points – a 2.6-point error.

2. Cellphones are generally needed for an accurate telephone poll

If you’re trying to poll the overall population, and part of the population no longer has a landline, then you need to call cellphones. This “fact” has become especially true as the cellphone-only population explodes, and those with cellphones have different political ideologies even when controlling for demographics.

During the course of the 2012, polls without cellphones consistently painted a false pretty picture for the Romney campaign. Polls without cellphones in the final 21 days were more than a point more inaccurate than those that included cellphones. This includes some of the worst pollsters of 2012 such as Gravis and the infamous Rasmussen.

Exception to the rule:

Public Policy Polling was arguably the most accurate large-scale pollster of 2012 and didn’t compensate for not calling cells by utilizing an internet subsample. Their secret? They simply were able to correctly model the election day electorate, which is what polling is all about.

3. Internet polling is the wave of the future

Once upon a time, internet polling, and specifically non-probability internet polling, was shunned. Now with cellphones popping up everywhere and poll response rates plummeting, internet polling has gotten a second look because it’s cheap and accurate. Almost all age groups now use the internet and weighting can compensate for people who don’t.

Google, Ipsos, RAND, and YouGov performed at least as well as telephone polls, if not better. RAND was by far the most accurate national pollster of 2012. RAND and YouGov also tended to be stabler than telephone surveys in their results after the first debate.

Exception to the rule:

Zogby (JZ Analytics) is awful at internet polling. Their poor performance in 2004 delayed the acceptance of internet polling in the mainstream by at least five years, and they were again in 2012 one of the least accurate pollsters.

4. Internal polls published publicly generally should not be trusted

This one is fairly simple. Internal, or campaign, pollsters usually only release surveys to the public that are most favorable to their candidate. They may also only pass polls to the press that are based on turnout models more favorable than probable for their candidates.

In 2012, we saw that Mitt Romney’s internal polls were hilariously bad. We also witnessed that polls conducted for Republican groups such as Citizens United in the swing states that were way off the mark. During the Wisconsin gubernatorial recount, Democratic internal surveys were on average six to seven points more favorable to Democrat Tom Barrett than public polls.

Exception to the rule:

Any poll conducted by Democratic pollster Mark Mellman. He was most accurate state pollster of 2012. Mellman is the only pollster I’d trust in the state of Nevada where Latinos are generally undercounted by pollsters. He also did well in North Dakota when he argued early on that Democratic Senate candidate Heidi Heitkamp was competitive, even though most of us thought she had little chance.

5. When state and national polls disagree, you should generally go with the state data

The state polling always had President Obama winning a second term and state polling averages were correct in 49 or 50 states. The national polling had Romney much closer and even pulling into the lead after the first debate. It was only in the final week that it became clear judging off the national polls that Obama was going to win the nationwide vote. Even then, 90% of the polls underestimated Obama’s lead.

This was not the first time that national and state polls disagreed. In 1996 and 2000, national polling incorrectly had Bill Clinton winning by double digits and George W Bush winning respectively. This year also continued a streak wherein no presidential candidate won a state where they were not leading in at least one non-partisan statewide poll in the final weeks.

Exceptions to the rule:

The state polling was atrocious in a number of states. Twenty-eight of 29 polls in Colorado, 20 out of 21 polls in Michigan, 16 of the 18 polls in Nevada, and 33 of the 38 polls in Virginia during the final month were biased against Obama. Fortunately for pollsters, Obama was leading by a comfortable enough margin in these states that this bias did not effect the projected winner in the polling aggregates.

Harry J Enten

Margin of Σrror

Category Archives: Mitt Romney

It’ll take more than a presidential library to make George W Bush popular | Harry J Enten

Why Richard Cohen is mistaken about the Republican primary process | Harry J Enten

Has the Republican party lost young voters for good? | Harry J Enten

It’s not Romney’s fault – the economy helped re-elect Obama | Harry J Enten

Marco Rubio for 2016? Five reasons I wouldn’t bet on it | Harry J Enten

Dick Morris exits Fox News: even he might have predicted this correctly | Harry J Enten

The weighting game: why Rasmussen has Democrats winning 2014 midterms | Harry J Enten

Five reasons Republicans won’t win Latino voters with immigration reform | Harry J Enten

The top five polling lessons from the 2012 election | Harry J Enten

1. When likely and registered voter polls disagree in high turnout elections, you should usually go with the registered voter surveys

2. Cellphones are generally needed for an accurate telephone poll

3. Internet polling is the wave of the future

4. Internal polls published publicly generally should not be trusted

5. When state and national polls disagree, you should generally go with the state data