Warning, Republicans: Presidential Approval is Volatile

Barack Obama's job approval ratings are not very good right now. Pollster.com's average puts it around 43% nationally. And yet, in this environment, we have the scary-good polling firm PublicPolicyPolling showing that Obama is tied nationally with Mitt Romney, his most likely general election opponent and by far his most formidable potential foe, and leads Romney by 4% in Iowa. Moreover, that's in an Iowa poll where Obama's approval rating had declined by six net points since August and his lead over Romney had declined by... six net points. In other words, as I've long been suspecting, Obama's general-election vote share looks a lot like a direct, point-for-point translation of his approval rating, plus some handicap depending on who his opponent is. And notice that Romney's trailing Obama by four points in a state where Obama's net approval rating is -9. That's a 13-point net handicap. That's enormous! So it's not so much that Romney's a strong candidate, but rather that Obama is sufficiently vulnerable that even a very weak candidate like Romney is competitive against him, and all of Romney's primary competitors are incredibly vulnerable. Okay, fine, that's the situation. It looks pretty decent for Republicans, actually.


But here's the thing: that's when Obama's national approval rating is 43%. That's very low. It's fairly near the lowest that Presidential approval ratings ever like to get. And yet, with their best candidate Republicans are managing just a toss-up. So what happens if Obama's approval rating on Election Day 2012 is higher than 43%? Well, maybe it's not so much of a toss-up anymore? And sure, we can say that we don't have any good reason to expect Obama's approval ratings to go up in the next 13 months, but Presidential approval ratings are rather volatile. Here are the changes in (gross, not net) Gallup approval from October of the year before their re-election bid to the last pre-election poll, for all Presidents who took office under normal circumstances (i.e., not Truman, LBJ, or Ford, and not Kennedy 'cause he died):

Eisenhower: -10% (78% to 68%)
Nixon: +4% (52% to 56%)
Carter: +4% (33% to 37%)
Reagan: +13% (45% to 58%)
Bush I: -31% (65% to 34%)
Clinton: +8% (46% to 54%)
Bush II: -7% (55% to 48%)

Even a shift for Obama from 43% to 47%, equivalent to what befell Carter and Nixon, would produce a huge shift in the odds of a Romney match-up. And Carter's data point doesn't actually argue for stability as much as it looks like, because while his October '80 numbers looked a lot like his October '79 numbers, his approval had shot up to 58% in the meanwhile. Not so stable. The median absolute value of the shift was a change of eight points. The mean absolute value was a shift of 11 points. And 4 out of 7 shifts were in the positive direction. Also, those four were the shifts from starting points of 33%, 45%, 46%, and 52%, and the three shifts downward were starting from 55%, 65%, and 78%. In other words, if you just look at this data is suggests that Obama might be in line for an eight-point boost in his approval rating over the next year. In which case he wins, unambiguously.

Now, that might not happen. The fact that there appears to be a line around 53-54% where Presidents flip from gaining support in the year prior to their re-election bid to losing support is probably a slightly random artifact of the small sample size. But if Obama loses eight points of support, he'll be at 35%, which is insanely low historically speaking. That could happen. But I have a feeling that the odds that any shift we see in Obama approval are in the upwards direction are no less than 50%. People talk about "well, if the economy continues to stagnate...", but that cuts in several directions. You'd think that over time, as the economy continues to suck, people would start blaming the incumbent President more, right? Well, there was a poll asking people whether they thought Obama and the Democrats or Bush and the Republicans were more to blame for the economic conditions. In September '10 it was Bush/GOP 53%, Obama/Dems 33%. One year later, Bush/GOP 52%, Obama/Dems 32%. No change. My impression is that there was modest movement in the direction of blaming Obama during the unified Democratic government of the 111th Congress, but then there's been none since the divided 112th Congress convened. No particular reason to think that will change, especially if Obama demonstrates, as he's done with this jobs bill, that he has ideas that people like to fix the economy, and Republicans are preventing him from enacting them (perhaps deliberately, for political profit?)

And my hunch is that people already expect the economy to suck for the next year. I know I do, I know every economic headline suggests that the world basically expects that. And if that's true, it ought to mean that people are pricing the expected next year of suckitude into their opinions of Obama. Which, again, ought to mean that when the economy actually does suck for the next year, that won't hurt Obama any more than its expectation has already hurt him. Just a theory, and of course it could go wrong. But suppose the economy does start getting better: maybe some meaningful components of the American Jobs Act get passed, and the world doesn't suck as much as people expect it to. Then, I think the credit will be going to Obama, right? Republicans certainly seem to think so.

Then there's the basic fact that we don't know what's going to happen in the next twelve months. That's the big lesson of the Jimmy Carter Incident: he got an enormous random approval rating boost from the Iran Hostage Crisis, which then turned into an approval drag very quickly. Obviously, I can't know what might be such an event in the next twelve months, because the whole point is that it's unpredicted.

Anyway, the point of all of that is just that the simple fact that Obama's approval rating sucks now shouldn't convince Republicans that it will also suck on Election Day '12, and if it doesn't, then if Mitt Romney's the best they got, they're screwed.