Why was Obama ahead of McCain before the crash?

Politics & Elections
1

This question came to mind after seeing the very good film Margin Call and reading the following in Roger Ebert’s review:

It reminded me that, as so often happens, the historical view of that election has already become simplified to “the bottom fell out from under the economy, voters blamed Bush, McCain reacted poorly, the end.” But this tidy little narrative ignores the fact that Obama was ahead of McCain almost all year (other than McCain’s post-convention bounce, happening ironically right when the stock market was starting to slide toward freefall).

And really, you can go back further, and make the question broader. Why were Bush, and Republicans generally, so unpopular before the crash? I don’t ask this from a perspective of having a hard time understanding why people would dislike Republicans but from a lack of understanding as to why they picked *then *to do so.

I didn’t like Bush or the GOP when he ran for president. I certainly didn’t like what happened in Florida and the Supreme Court. And I still didn’t like him after 9/11, when his popularity soared (I actually liked him less, as I thought he reacted very poorly on 9/11 though I’ll grudgingly credit him with a good moment with the bullhorn on top of the rubble). So clearly I’m not in tune with the hoi polloi on this.

The unemployment rate was at the lowest point it has been over the past decade-plus (4.4%), right when Bush’s GOP took a “thumping” in the 2006 midterms. Okay, so maybe that was Iraq?* But then in 2007, thanks at least in part to Petraeus and his focus on a “hearts and minds” counterinsurgency strategy (oversimplified as a "surge), U.S. combat deaths plummeted to a fraction of their former level. Yet Bush’s approval ratings continued to drop. Unemployment did creep up slightly throughout that year, but it remained below 6% until fall 2008.

There is Katrina, of course. But I have a hard time imagining that among white people (blacks already knew Bush didn’t like them, and vice versa), this permanently soured them on him even years later. Similarly, I can’t imagine Harriet Miers permanently tanked Bush and his party.

Is it as simple (and as retarded) as gas prices? Or maybe the common people were feeling the housing bubble start to deflate before the experts, and this led them to increasingly tell pollsters the country was on the “wrong track” despite what Ebert describes as a country seeming “awash in prosperity”, and that rapid post-surge decline in violence in Iraq. Thus maybe Ebert’s memory of pre-crash 2008 was not accurate at all, at least not from the quotidian person’s perspective.

*I almost forgot the Mark Foley sex scandal, which surely hurt the congressional GOP in that midterm election; but it’s hard to imagine that still mattered by 2008.

2

I think Ebert may just be comparing 2008 to now. Nobody thought the economy was booming, but the financial system hadn’t collapsed. With regard to Bush, I think you’ve missed the broader picture here. He was extremely unpopular by that point. Why? Well, the Iraq war was controversial when it started and then devolved into a fiasco. The surge helped repair the situation in the country but it didn’t erase the fact that the entire WMD thing didn’t pan out and that several years had been lost due to bad planning. Meanwhile that other war was going on and on with no end in sight and Katrina does seem to have hurt because you can see a significant dip in his popularity right around that time. And yes, I do think people actually were angry about that mess. Why do you think only black people would care about it?

3

I think analysts often overemphasize the role of the economy and state of the country in elections (they’re obviously very important, though far less important when there’s no incumbent running). In 2008 I think Obama was just a far better candidate running a far better campaign then McCain.

4

Thanks for edumacatin’ me about Bush’s approval rating; but I guess you didn’t notice that I linked to a graph of it and commented multiple times about it in the post. Did you actually read the whole thing?

My point, as I already tried to make clear, was not “Bush was great, so why did people stop liking him” but “Bush sucked all along, but a lot of people liked him in his first term and he doesn’t strike me as having a worse record in his second term” (his first term including, after all, Enron, a recession, and a catastrophic failure to heed the warnings about OBL, not to mention that the failure to find WMD was already very clear by Election Day 2004). It was also to point out that the narrative of “Obama was voted in to rescue the economy” is far too pat given the polling data.

5

I did. The chart you linked two showed the approval ratings of a bunch of presidents over a longer time frame and I was trying to provide more detail on the changes in Bush’s popularity during his terms.

Yes, and I was responding to some of the individual points you made. I discussed Iraq because you said this:

The fact that the surge helped clean things up in Iraq did not erase everything that came before.

I agree that Obama didn’t win just because of the economy and I meant to say that more clearly. Bush was unpopular enough by 2008 that Obama probably would have won even if the economy hadn’t fallen apart during the campaign (although even before the collapse in September, there were bad signs like Bear Sterns). Why did Bush get less popular? I think it was mostly the wars and the accumulation of a lot of things. The response to Katrina was really atrocious.

6

Andy, maybe it’s as simple as that. I’m still somewhat puzzled by Bush’s failure to rebound in the polls when the “surge” (again, Petraeus’s counterinsurgency tactics, aided by the so-called Sunni Awakening) was so successful, unemployment was low, the market was high, etc. Katrina plays a part, perhaps; but the graphs show no particular “reverse spike” in his popularity in Sept. 2006, just a steady continuation of the slide that had already been occurring for some time.

But I do have to wonder if it was simply high gasoline prices more than anything. Now they are pretty high again, but it’s possible people have gotten more used to it as a “new normal”, similar to unemployment.

ETA:

Whoops, it was supposed to link to just Bush. Apparently that page is some kind of little “app” or something that doesn’t treat different presidents’ graphs as separate URLs. Click just Bush’s name to the left and you’ll see what I was looking at when I copied the URL.

7

People were sick of Bush’s schtick, sick of the wars, aware that the wars had been a boondoggle, and looking for something that didn’t feel like more of that same boondoggly schtick. Enough time had passed since 9/11 that few people were feeling any sort of patriotic afterglow. Enough time had passed since Iraq started that few people not on this board were still arguing that it had been a good decision, so the surge just meant that the lousy decision wouldn’t hurt quite so much, but it was still a lousy decision. And the crash was hardly the first inkling that something was about to go very, very wrong.

8

Jsgoddess, I still wonder, more than anything: why did they ever like him? (I mean, beyond say 35-40 percent of the public.) The guy is such an obvious tool, even for a Republican. And in many ways, he was *more *of a tool at the beginning, when he was so callow (I will, again grudgingly, acknowledge that he matured a bit over the years.)

9

Why would the surge have caused a big rebound? It was four years after the invasion and long after everybody had figured out the war was based on bullshit intelligence. I’m sure most people were glad Iraq was more stable, but it didn’t undo all the damage that came before. The administration had predicted the war would be pretty cheap and simple, and that story had already been shot to hell. The surge didn’t fix that.

Do you have any evidence for this at all? That chart doesn’t prove it at all.

Of course gas prices plunged in the second half of 2008, but for some reason that did not help Bush’s popularity. (Because the economy was going to hell in a handbasket. I think you need to consider the underlying factors instead of just the surface gas price.)

Ah, that did it. I think the chart tells the story pretty well. I’m not sure why you’re convinced it was gas prices and not a series of much bigger issues.

10

I don’t know what to tell you, other than if that’s really what you want to talk about you probably want a new title on your thread.

The fact is that people liked him enough and then he did a lot of stupid shit and they stopped liking him enough, and McCain was standing there to catch the fallout.

11

I really hope that history remembers that it wasn’t that the Bush administration couldn’t find WMDs in Iraq, but that they lied about their existence in the first place.

12

Maybe the Bush administration just stopped caring if the public approved of them. After the 2006 mid-term elections, they no longer needed to worry about popularity. Bush couldn’t run for a third term and Cheney had no plans on running himself. So they no longer needed to worry about the consequences of public disapproval. They could devote the resources they had been spending on winning people over on other projects.

13

I don’t think the surge really helped peoples feeling that the Iraq War was a bad idea in the first place, and that it had been a waste of blood and treasure. That the rate of wasting those things slowed didn’t really retro-actively make it a good idea.

And I think Katrina was a problem for Bush not because it showed that Bush “didn’t like black people” but because he’d won in 2004 largely because he convinced people that he could keep them safe. When a major American city got blown away by a hurricane while the federal gov’t spent much of its time quibbiling with local authorities over who was screwing up the response worse, it damaged the source of much of the positive image Bush had with voters as the “security candidate”. After all, he was supposed to keep us safe from terrorist attacks, which are far harder to predict and plan for then hurricanes.

The nation was never super thrilled with Bush, his post 9/11 approval ratings aside. He lost the popular vote in 2000 and eeked out a close victory in 2004 by stressing security issues in the wake of two wars and a major terrorist attack. When events showed that he was a dope even on his strongest issue, his approval ratings plummeted and he dragged his party down with him.

14

People always rewrite history in hindsight, so there shouldn’t be any surprise that they’re doing here as well. But they’re ridiculously wrong, and I think you’re wrong to rule out Iraq and Katrina as well.

Look, the simple rule is that Americans like power and might and all displays of it, and that includes out-and-out war. They like the thought of it much more than the sordid realities, though. Iraq was promised as a brief and shocking display of our overwhelming might, just as the first Desert War was. That proved wrong. The 2004 election was held after about 18 months of war, not enough to really sour the public. The continuing slow drip of casualties and failures hurt Bush’s image after the election. There wasn’t an antiwar movement, but there was a great deal of disillusionment among former supporters of the war and the party. 9/11 was a long time back and instead of the satisfaction of punishing the perpetrators we got airport security lines. Obama’s one huge pitch that made him stand out was his early attack on the war, when it was a lonely and minority stand. That certainly was helpful in allowing him to win over Clinton, and it made a huge contrast to the image of war hero McCain, who couldn’t help but be a picture of Republican militarism no matter what he said.

Katrina added to the impression that the administration was not good at solving problems. The coverage of New Orleans went on forever and each picture was a reminder of a bad performance. What distinguished the 2008 election was a surge in minority voting. That demographic tends to be concentrated in urban areas. The Republican Party has since the Reagan years attacked, ignored, or underfunded urban areas because that’s not their power base. The death of New Orleans was symbolic of that lack of interest. Minority groups raised their voting participation to support a minority candidate.

So you have a decrease in white enthusiasm for McCain and an increase in minority enthusiasm for Obama. This was obvious long before the election. The Republican brand was hurting badly before the primaries started. Hope and change was a brilliant slogan because that’s exactly what people wanted and needed. There was no possible way that McCain would win and he understood that when he picked Palin for VP in a desperation play.

I don’t understand why you could think that the crash was necessary for a Democrat to beat an old white man who represented a party that had been losing favor for eight years. Of course the Democrat was ahead. How could it have been otherwise? And this has nothing to do with “why people ever liked Bush.” Half the people did but new people entered the voting pool.

15

Two things:

One, I think there was a point in Iraq where it became virtually impossible to save it in the view of public opinion. I mean, Bush was practically promising miracles in the 2004 election, it was inevitable he would not meet the expectation of the public.

Second, one of the curious things about the Bush economy is that unemployment and housing numbers were the only good numbers they ever had. I was often bemused when a week would contain nothing but horrible economic data, but hey, housing went up, so the market rallies for a gain! When you start factoring things in like GDP growth or the value of the dollar compared to other currencies, you’ll realize that things didn’t go from great to terrible, they went from mediocre to terrible, and all we ever had was a real estate bubble keeping things from being ruined earlier.

16

This is an oversimplification that completely elides the 2010 GOP blowout, the biggest wave election since 1938. So, okay: maybe you’ll counter that the young and minority voters who strongly Democratic don’t come out to vote in midterms. Then what about the Democratic wave of 2006? It’s just not that linear.

That’s a big “aside”. His approval ratings were in the 50s or higher for literally years. I can’t really count that as an ephemeral “bump”.

Randvek, good points.

17

He’s talking about 2000 to 2008, so he doesn’t have to explain 2010. And it’s true that Bush’s popularity steadily declined over the course of his terms, but there is at least one problem here: he won the popular vote in 2004 after losing it in 2000. So at least in comparison with the Democratic candidates his popularity wasn’t down. His approval did gradually go down over the years and after the 2004 election it was all downhill. People who had given him the benefit of the doubt on things like the war and national security turned against him and his supporters had less and less to approve of. So the explanation is oversimplified to an extent, but it’s not totally wrong. Based on how unpopular Bush was in 2007-08, after almost everything had gone wrong one was or another, I think you would have expected Obama to have an advantage over McCain even without the economy in freefall.

I’m not sure an approval rating in the 50s counts as “super thrilled.” His approval ratings surged after September 11th and shortly after the Iraq war started - a little more than 18 months later - they were about where they had been when he took office.

18

I think Obama would take it!

Again, though, my personal feeling is that it’s baffling that he ever managed any consistent period of time above 40 percent, and also that my own disapproval of him was actually slightly *less *intense the last couple years than it had been earlier. So I just can’t relate with the general public on any of this.

19

You asked about the 2008 election. The 2010 election is entirely separate from that. You cannot understand that election without understanding how much of a total aberration it was. It’s not just that “the young and minority voters who strongly Democratic don’t come out to vote in midterms.” It’s also true that conservative voters normally don’t show up. Turnout of both groups is usually 50% of peak. What happened in 2010 is that the very conservative voters came out in larger numbers than in the 2008 election. That has never happened before and it caught the Democrats totally by surprise. They won’t be in 2014 and they will do a presidential election year-style get out the vote campaign in the off chance that a new Tea Party movement might arise.

Bush won in 2004 because it is extremely unusual for a sitting president to be turned out of office. I kept telling people that all through 2011 and 2012 and they didn’t believe me. The evidence is certainly there, though.

In short, the 2004, 2006, 2008, and 2012 elections all came out the way that anybody could and should have predicted going into them. It’s the 2010 election that’s weird. And that’s why you have to discount it.

20

We’ll see. I think the GOP will do well in 2014, and then the Dems will come back strong in 2016, but I hope you’re right.