I’ve mentioned a flurry of recent national polls that show Bush’s support plummeting to new depths. The public thinks little of the president’s stewardship of the economy and even less of his handling of Iraq. Overwhelmingly, Americans feel like Bush has led the country onto the wrong track.
And yet he’s still neck-and-neck with Kerry. What’s the deal?
There are a variety of possible explanations. Some say there’s a lag time and the general election match-up numbers trail the data on approval ratings. Others say Bush’s attack ads have effectively raised doubts about Kerry. Still others insist that international crises have focused the election onto the issues where Bush is allegedly strongest — national security and the war on terrorism — and so bad news is actually good news for the Bush campaign.
But Andrew Kohut, director of the highly respected Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, lays out another explanation in a New York Times op-ed today that I found very persuasive.
The real reason that Mr. Kerry is making so little progress is that voters are now focused almost exclusively on the president. This is typical: as an election approaches, voters first decide whether the incumbent deserves re-election; only later do they think about whether it is worth taking a chance on the challenger. There is no reason to expect a one-to-one relationship between public disaffection with the incumbent and an immediate surge in public support for his challenger.
While I was skeptical of this initially, Kohut draws on some valuable historical analogies to bolster his case.
For example, looking back at the 1980 race, we all remember that Reagan crushed Carter after the incumbent’s approval ratings plummeted throughout the year. On Election Day, Reagan had collected almost 500 electoral votes on route to a convincing 10-point victory. What is easy to forget, however, is that polls throughout 1980 showed a close general election match-up, even as the public soured on Carter.
President Jimmy Carter’s favorable rating in the Gallup surveys sank from 56 percent in January to 38 percent in June, yet he still led Ronald Reagan in Gallup’s horse-race measures. For much of the rest of the campaign, voters who disapproved of Mr. Carter couldn’t decide whether Mr. Reagan was an acceptable alternative.
In fact, Kohut notes a similar trend in 1992.
[I]n May 1992 President George H. W. Bush had only a 37 percent approval rating according to a Times Mirror Center survey, but the same poll showed him with a modest lead, 46 percent to 43 percent, over Bill Clinton. Only the Democratic convention and the debates brought about an acceptance of Mr. Clinton (even though his negative ratings were higher than Mr. Kerry’s are now). It took a long time for him to be seen as an acceptable alternative to Mr. Bush.
This makes a lot of sense. In the last four elections in which an incumbent was seeking a second term, two won and two lost. With the two that won (Clinton in ’96 and Reagan in ’84), the incumbent enjoyed high approval numbers and large leads over their respective challengers in the polls. On Election Day, it wasn’t close. The two that lost (Carter in ’80 and Bush in ’88), meanwhile, reflected the opposite — low approval numbers but slim leads over their opponents.
The fact that Carter and H.W. Bush led their challengers wasn’t a meaningful sign of public support; it was just, as Kohut put it, that the public was more focused on the incumbent than his would-be replacement.
With this in mind, as Ruy Teixeira noted yesterday, Kerry’s six-point lead among registered voters (up from dead even at 47% just a week before) is even more encouraging than previously considered.
Kerry, in other words, is right where he needs to be.