2012 Landscape

So, I took some data from Gallup's "State of the States" report, most notably about party ID and Obama approval. What I did was take their total 2009 Obama national approval number, 57.2, and then adjust it down to 50%, with a commensurate increase in disapproval. Applying this -14.4 shift to the 2009 approval data from each state, which is admittedly a net +9 landscape since there were, evidently, 9 points of "undecided" in 2009, I got an interesting landscape.

Dark colors indicate a margin more than 15 points. Medium colors are from 7.5 to 15, and light colors, obviously, are less than 7.5. Now, as I said, this is a somewhat optimistic world for Obama, since I'm giving him a +9 net approval rating. But here is what I find the most interesting: South Carolina, Georgia, Texas, Mississippi, Utah are all much better for Obama than one would expect. South Carolina is looking as good as North Carolina right now. That would be fun. Ohio's a little worse than I would've thought, but the most notable decline is in Colorado, which was nice and solid for Obama in his election but in the same league as, well, Utah and Mississippi now. Odd. New Hampshire looking somewhat weak.

For what it's worth, under these assumptions I've got Obama winning around 400 Electoral Votes, which would leave about 140 for the Republican. (Of course, I'm also assuming the election is solely a "referendum on Obama," which probably won't quite be true.) If I lower his national approval to even, then he would lose just around enough electoral votes to be very, very near the break-even point in the electoral college. So what we have is the following: assuming that the states don't move relative to one another for the next three years, and assuming also that voting patterns in 2012 are solely a reflection of Obama's approval rating (both assumptions that are wrong, but whatever), it looks like what Obama needs to do to win is keep his net approval rating positive. If he keeps his absolute approval rating much above 50, we might be looking at an even bigger landslide than in 2008. That wouldn't actually be surprising, as only two Presidents have ever been successfully re-elected but with a smaller percent of electoral votes than their initial election (James Madison and Woodrow Wilson). Of course, nine Presidents have lost their re-election bids, necessarily dropping their percentage of electoral-college votes, which leaves another 15 Presidential elections in which an incumbent bettered his initial performance (although three of those are Franklin Delano Roosevelt, soooo....).

Interestingly, the biggest initial popular-vote margin of a President who lost re-election was Herbert Hoover's 18-pointer. That's special circumstances, obviously, and clearly the worse swing for an individual between two elections since he lost his next by a very similar 18; the next "best" performance for a President who went on to lose re-election was Bush the Elder, who won by a margin slightly bigger than Obama's. The average popular-vote margin in the election of a President who went on to lose is 4.9, though that includes three who lost the popular vote. (Bush was the first to lose the popular vote and "win" re-election.) Presidents who won at least one re-election averaged an initial victory margin of more than 8 points (going back to 1824, when popular voting began; I imagine, honestly, that Messers. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe each did somewhat better than that...), which is actually quite similar to Obama's margin. Some of the biggest margins went to Presidents who didn't run for re-election as an incumbent, like Teddy Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Warren Harding (who would've lost), and LBJ. So the historical data suggest that Obama will probably win re-election; he would be somewhat of an outlier were he not to. But it's not an overwhelming conclusion.

To wit: I plugged all the data for popular-vote margins of people who run in consecutive Presidential elections, being an incumbent in the second one but not the first one. The straight-up linear trend line suggests that the re-election campaign gets about a 1.15% boost but that each point of the original margin is only worth .36 points at re-election time; this puts Obama's projected margin at about 3.8%. The R-squared value is really, really low, however, indicating almost no predictive value. However, I can identify a group who way underperformed their expected values (Carter, Wilson, Taft, Van Buren, Carter, Hoover, Bush I) and a fairly neat-looking line (Nixon radically overperformed, actually). Excluding all of these outliers, which is admittedly not a valid thing to do but which could be interesting, I get that there's still a boost of about 1.2 points, but now each point in the initial election is worth 1.3 points the second time around. This has a very high R-squared, of about .94 (of course, if you exclude outliers you'll always get a better fit!). So if we assume Obama will follow what appears to be the "usual pattern," he'll be around +10.8. (Including Nixon in the line boosts his projection up to around 12 points, but lowers the R-squared to .66). Now, I think there are "special circumstances" in each of the ones who radically underperformed: Van Buren had a major recession happen on his watch, Taft had the fiasco of 1912 happen on him, Wilson had been the beneficiary of 1912 but didn't have that benefit in 1916, Hoover had, well, the Great Depression happen on his watch, Carter had the Iran Hostage fiasco, and Bush had, well, the economy, stupid. It's very unlikely that anything like 1912 is going to happen in 2012, at least not on the Democratic side. So the lesson seems to be that if Obama avoids having a new recession happen during his term, or any sort of major foreign-policy debacle in his re-election year, he should have a pretty commanding victory, somewhat larger than what I outlined above. Otherwise he's in trouble (that's a no-brainer!).