Matt Yglesias

Public Mostly Holds Republicans Responsible for Recession, But Democrats Now Catching More Blame

One reason that Barack Obama has stayed in pretty good political shape despite a terrible economic situation is that the public has consistently recalled that this recession began under George W Bush and reached its highest point of crisis under Bush. But as horrible labor market conditions persist, it’s natural that Democrats are attracting more and more ire:

A CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey released Friday morning indicates that 38 percent of the public blames Republicans for the country’s current economic problems. In May, 53 percent blamed the GOP. According to the poll, 27 percent now blame the Democrats for the recession, up 6 points from May, and 27 percent now say both parties are responsible.

I’ll just note that this highlights one important respect in which the filibuster undermines democratic accountability. It’s a good thing for the public to hold Democrats responsible for results even if the problems the Democrats are dealing with began under GOP rule. That instinct creates appropriate incentives for incumbent politicians to focus on solving problems rather than on allocating blame. But giving defeated electoral minorities veto power over large elements of national policy tends to undermine this dynamic. What’s wanted is an opportunity for the Obama administration to take its best shot at fixing the economy, followed by an “accountability moment” in which failure is decisively punished. Instead, especially if the GOP picks up two or three Senate seats in 2010, we’re likely to get a muddle that refocuses politics on blame-shifting efforts.

Public Has Crazy Opinions About the Budget Deficit

Steve Benen observes that the other thing about the CNN poll referenced below is that it shows that the public has absolutely insane ideas about balancing the budget. In particular, 67 percent of voters claim to believe that “the government should balance the budget even when the country is in a recession and is at war.” Take a look at the Congressional Budget Office’s latest report on the budget situation and consider what balancing the FY 2009 budget would entail:

As a first cut, we could return spending to its FY 2008 level (approximately at the historical average, and where we under the right-wing Bush administration) by entirely eliminating Social Security. Alternatively, we could keep Social Security as is, and entirely eliminate Medicare and Medicaid. Having done that, we would still need about $800 billion in additional tax increases. That’d be a tax hike of about twenty times the annual impact of the tax increases included in the health reform bill.

You could get this, maybe, by imposing a 10 percent Value Added Tax. But anyone who thinks that balancing the budget via a 10 percent VAT and the elimination of Social Security payments would be a popular agenda is certifiably insane. But there’s no other permutation of budget balancing that makes any more sense. For example, suppose you wanted to balance the budget entirely on the spending side. Well, the total 2009 deficit is $1.587 trillion. If we entirely eliminated discretionary spending—no electricity in the White House, no military, no FBI, no national parks, no nothing—we’d still have a $346 billion deficit.

People think they think they want a balanced budget even in a severe recession, but that’s because they obviously have no idea what balancing the FY 2009 budget would entail.

Health Care, Public Opinion, and Congress

Andrew Gelman, Nate Silver, and Daniel Lee bring the political science to try to understand senators’ behavior on the health reform debate. One interesting finding is that, at least as measured by answers to the question of whether the federal government should spend more money on covering the uninsured, geographic variation is real but much smaller than variation by age or income:

Another finding is that the state-by-state variation that does exist in terms of people’s level of support for health reform has very little to do with the stances taken by senators. Instead, the controlling concern of senators seems to be Barack Obama’s popularity rather than health care’s popularity:

For instance, Senator Blanche Lincoln, a Democrat who has been a less-than-strong supporter of the present health care bill, recently told The Times, “I am responsible to the people of Arkansas, and that is where I will take my direction.” But where does she look for her cue? Hers is a poor state whose voters support health care subsidies six percentage points more than the national average. On the other hand, Mr. Obama got just 40 percent of the vote there.

Likewise, in Louisiana, where the Annenberg surveys showed health care reform to be popular but where Mr. Obama is not, the Democrats are not assured of Mary Landrieu’s vote.

There are two kinds of ways you can think about the relationship between voters, public opinion, issues, and politicians. One, a hyper-rational way, is to say that voters will like politicians who champion popular causes. Another is to say that voters will like causes that are championed by popular politicians. My sense is that the press tends to implicitly assume the rational model, whereas the truth is mostly the irrational model. Senators, according to Gelman, Silver, and Lee seem to think that the irrational model is the key one in health reform.

This underscores the fact that the toughest “gets” are people over whom the White House has little practical leverage. Overt White House pressure on Lincoln might make her less likely to vote for reform, since an image of standing up to an unpopular-in-Arkansas president would be helpful to her.

The Appeal of Incoherence

Ross Douthat is back to blogging. Here he takes on the new conservative populism:

From Glenn Beck to the Tea Parties, much of the energy in the post-Bush G.O.P. is with people who have grasped, albeit sometimes in inchoate ways, that big government and big business are increasingly on one team, and the champions of free markets and limited government are on the other. But they don’t know what to do about it, and what they do seem to know — cutting taxes, and letting the rest take care of itself — is often non-responsive, not only to the problems the country faces, but to the problems they themselves have diagnosed.

Speaking as an Obama administration apologist, I’m glad to see the incoherence noted. But it’s also worth saying that incoherence strikes me as incredibly appealing. The main issue here is, I think, the incredibly unpopular TARP “bailout” bill. I believe that absent the bailout, we’d be looking at even higher unemployment today. But it was and remains incredibly unpopular and has done a lot to sour the public on the idea of activist government. It also raises, I believe, serious questions of moral hazard and social justice. These issues would best be addressed by more stringent regulation and higher taxes on high-income individuals that are used to fund more and better public services. And that’s what the administration is proposing.

But conservative populists, by insisting that the real answer is basically to go back in time and not do the bailout have created a win-win-win situation for themselves. In the congressional debate over financial regulation, conservatives have proven themselves to be slavishly loyal to the interests of large financial firms. And in the congressional debate over taxing the wealthy to expand access to health care, conservatives have proven themselves to be slavishly loyal to the interests of rich financiers. But via their meaningless denunciations of bailouts, they’ve positioned themselves as on the side of anti-banker public opinion. And yet precisely because this rhetoric is so non-credible, they continue to receive generous financial support from big finance and from big business in general. Meanwhile, the public largely holds Barack Obama responsible for public policy even though it’s possible for congressional minorities to thwart his agenda. Thus he so far bears the brunt of public distaste not only for the bailout, but also for congress’ unwillingness to enact his own regulatory agenda.

Moving to a less-incoherent posture would have some real benefits, but also disrupt the current sweet deal.

Nancy Who?

I personally love Nancy Pelosi. But her poll numbers aren’t so great. And they’re definitely worse than Barack Obama’s. So you see a lot of efforts by conservatives to rhetorically link every element of the progressive legislative agenda to Pelosi. This has always struck me as a dubious strategy simply because my sense of things is that most people don’t actually know who Nancy Pelosi is. And that appears to be the case:

As part of a recent national poll being chewed over at a University of Texas conference today, only one in five adult respondents correctly named John Roberts as the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. But 71 percent correctly named Joe Biden when asked to specify the vice president. [...] Only 49 percent named Nancy Pelosi as the current U.S. House speaker (though 83 percent correctly said Democrats hold majority control of the Senate).

The political press has a structural tendency to overstate the political importance of basically everything that happens. And one of the ways in which they do this is with a tendency to vastly overstate the extent to which people are paying any attention to what’s happening in Washington. 49 percent knowing who Pelosi is isn’t a terribly small share of the public, but that 49 percent is disproportionately going to be composed of strong partisans who don’t swing elections.

At any rate, I have no illusions about the public’s level of informedness, but I do think this is a disturbing result: “Sixty-seven percent of the respondents believe corruption is most widespread at the national level of government; 12 percent said it’s most widespread at the state level.” This will vary according to where you live, but for the vast majority of Americans this is going to be wrong. The quality of state government in the United States is generally pretty low, and this is a problem.

Public Skeptical of Afghanistan Troop Increase

Gallup’s latest polling reveals considerable public skepticism about the idea of sending 40,000 additional troops to Afghanistan:

It’s worth noting that the question, as worded, specifically mentions that a 40,000 troop increase is what “the U.S. commanding general there has recommended” and that increasing troop levels still doesn’t secure majority support. Especially complicating the situation is the fact that the median position—keep things the way they are—actually has very little support. An overwhelming majority either want fewer troops or many more troops.

Meanwhile, support for escalating is heavily concentrated among self-IDed Republicans who are unlikely to back Obama’s re-election no matter what happens:

This strikes me as a notably high level of ideological polarization for a foreign policy issue that hasn’t emerged as a high-profile partisan fight.

When gaming this out politically, however, as is often the case I think it’s worth being somewhat skeptical about the significance of these kind of questions. If the military is really solidly behind the idea of sending more troops, the real political issue is how damaging would a prolonged fight with the military be? Or how likely would such a fight be to emerged? One assumes that doing something that prompts General McChrystal to resign would be a big political problem. At the same time, that would be an extreme step for McChrystal to take.

Same Sex Marriage By Age and State

Lisa Wade shows us the shape of things to come:

This makes the triumph of marriage equality look fairly inevitable, but also frustratingly far off.

Survey Says . . . ?

I expressed frustration about this via Twitter, but I may as well take to the blog to point out that by far the most ridiculous thing about the impulse to point toward VA/NJ/NY-23 as indicators of the national mood is not so much the historical unreliability of these indicators, it’s the fact that we have statistically valid surveys of national public opinion available for our perusal.

For example, how do people feel about Barack Obama? Well:

And what are people’s intentions with regard to congressional voting? Well:

By the same token, you don’t actually need to know the outcome of the NJ gubernatorial election to know what New Jersey residents think—the polls are very clear that most people don’t like Corzine and most people don’t like Christie. The question of who wins the election in the end (which will come down to turnout issues, tactical voting, and second-choice preferences) is very important to the future of public policy in New Jersey but it doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know about underlying sentiments.

Update Also worth noting, Obama job approval: Of course this is national data. But again if we want to know whether Obama has become unpopular in Virginia, the way to do that would be to do a poll of Virginia and ask questions about Obama.

Place Matters in Cap-and-Trade Compliance Costs, Does it Drive Politics?

There’s a lot of variation from place-to-place in terms of carbon emissions. Some places are sprawling, others are dense. Some places are cold, requiring a lot of heating. Some places have coal-fired electricity, others rely much more on cleaner sources. That’s the upshot of this useful rundown of place-by-place variation in costs to households of clean energy legislation done by Jonathan Rothwell and Mark Munro at Brookings:

What do we make of these results? The first thing to say is: The household costs of cap-and-trade compliance vary quite a lot, and depend quite a bit on what metro you live in. Ranging above and below the average $160 cost to a household nationally in 2020, the average metro figures range from a high of $277 per household in Lexington, KY to a low of just $96 in Los Angeles. Low costs are registered all across the West’s metros and in Northeastern metros like New York, Boston, and Rochester. Much higher costs will be borne by households in metros all across the upper South and Ohio Valley—places like Cincinnati, and Indianapolis, and Nashville. So once again, as we keep saying: Place matters.

This is followed, however, by some back-of-the-envelop political analysis that I don’t think is correct:

Given these realities, you can see why the chief sponsors of climate legislation hail from California (Rep. Henry Waxman, Sen. Barbara Boxer) and Massachusetts (Rep. Edward Markey, Sen. John Kerry) while the leading opponents, like Rep. John Boehner, represent Ohio or the South. But you might also think that regions that want to do well for their citizens might want to manage growth a little better, provide transportation options, and think about cleaning up their energy sourcing. Look at the map, after all: Place matters!

I think it’s hard to leap to this conclusion. The Northeast and California are aligned on a wide array of political topics—gay rights, abortion, labor law—that have absolutely nothing to do with carbon emissions. In particular, I began to have serious doubts about this analysis when I went to this table and discovered that DC is one of the highest-cost metro areas and Boise is one of the lowest-cost ones. I made a table showing eight above average and eight below average metros, with selections made with an eye to problematizing this conjecture about the politics of the climate bill:

DC strikes me as a particularly good test case for this hypothesis. The DC area is generally quite left-wing. But apparently would feature high compliance costs with a cap-and-trade bill. So are Donna Edwards, Chris Van Hollen, and Jim Moran among the House Democrats who made the most trouble for Waxman and Ed Markey? Well, no, they’re not. Nor is Boise a hotbed of support for climate change legislation nor Austin a hotbed of opposition.

My counter-hypothesis is that, the primary driver of the politics of climate change is general ideological factors, followed by the interests of energy producers rather than consumers. The DC area relies on a lot of coal power, but it doesn’t involve a lot of coal-related employment.

White Men Are Not Very Progressive

A nice map from dreaminonempty at Open Left illustrates the vote share won among white men in the 2008 presidential election:

The take home message: expanding voting rights – a progressive position – resulted in the ability to elect more liberal politicians.

I would say that another message is that progressive politics is badly disadvantaged by a situation in which the overwhelming majorities of political leaders and prominent media figures are white men. There are plenty of white men with progressive views, but in general the majority of white men are not progressive and the majority of progressives are not white men. Drawing from the relatively small pool of white male progressives means drawing from a shallow talent pool.

Growth Growth Growth

Like Brad DeLong, I’m a bit puzzled by Bill Galston’s theory that adopting “a meaningful shift toward fiscal restraint” would be a good strategy for the midterms. People say they want this, but I can only assume that’s because people think such a shift would improve the economy. In fact, it wouldn’t. If Democrats implement policies that tank the economy, running around the country saying “well it polled well a year ago!” isn’t going to help them.

When it comes to macroeconomic management, you need to listen to your economists not your pollsters. Christina Romer’s analysis says we should be running bigger deficits, not smaller ones.

Afghan Public Opinion

Mark Kleiman summarizes some key bullet points from the Asia Foundation’s most recent survey of public opinion:

— In 2009, 42 percent of respondents say that the country is moving in the right direction.

— This figure is higher than in 2008 (38%). Similarly, 29 percent feel that the country is moving in the wrong direction compared to 32 percent in 2008, signaling a check on the trend of declining optimism that had been evident since 2006.

—The main reason for optimism continues to be good security which has been mentioned by an increasing proportion of respondents each year, from 31 percent in 2006 to 44 percent in 2009. More respondents in 2009 also mention reconstruction and rebuilding (36%) and opening of schools for girls (21%) as reasons for optimism than in previous years.

— Insecurity also remains the most important reason for pessimism, cited by 42 percent of respondents. However, the proportion of respondents that highlight insecurity in 2009 has fallen since 2008 when half of respondents (50%) emphasized this factor.

— Insecurity (including attacks, violence and terrorism) is identified as the biggest problem in Afghanistan by over a third of respondents (36%), particularly in the South East (48%), West (44%) and South West (41%). However, concern about other issues such as unemployment (35%), poor economy (20%), corruption (17%), poverty (11%) and education (11%) has increased in 2009 compared to 2008.

I think you can use this data to support a variety of policy conclusion. But it’s striking that the US debate between escalation and scaling-back tends to proceed from a shared assumption that Afghanistan is in a crisis point. But Afghans seem to think things are improving. Note also that corruption, which has been talked about a lot over the past month, rates relatively low on the complaint scale. In terms of unemployment it seems to me that the most helpful thing we can do would be to revise trade policies. Allow the duty free importation of Afghan textiles to the American market. See what it takes to persuade Turkey and India to stop putting such high taxes on Afghan agricultural products.

This kind of thing is very boring to talk about and isn’t amenable to David Brooks writing columns about how the real issue is whether or not Obama is manly enough to demand victory. But it’s really important. Poor labor market conditions make people disgruntled. In stable democracies they vote for opposition parties. In non-stable places they may take up arms.

The Trust Gap

Some data from Gallup:

Electorally vulnerable Democrats may have something to gain from the perception of triangulating away from their party leadership, but this sort of result tends not to support the idea that breaking with congressional Democrats to join congressional Republicans in a filibuster of Obama’s signature health initiatives would be a political winner.

Americans Favorably Disposed to Pro-Israel Lobbying, and Increasingly So

The Anti-Defamation League’s poll on anti-Jewish beliefs in America features a couple of instances of what I think are dubious statistical interpretation, but also a bunch of interesting stuff. This trend, in particular, is interesting and I think runs somewhat counter to media perceptions:

In the early nineties, public opinion was closely divided on the merits of the influence of pro-Israel lobbying organizations. More recently, however, support became pretty overwhelming reflecting, I would guess, the growing influence of Christian Zionist thinking.

A New Color Line

Ron Brownstein has an interesting piece about the gap in public opinion between whites and non-whites. But I think a lot of the analysis would benefit from additional demographic controls:

Only four in 10 whites say they support the health care reform legislation in Congress, compared with three-fourths of nonwhites. And just 30 percent of whites, compared with 45 percent of nonwhites, say that an Obama-like agenda of public investment in education and technology offers the nation its best chance at long-term prosperity. Far more whites than nonwhites would bet on a conservative approach of tax cuts and deregulation. The starkest finding of all is that three-fifths of nonwhites (including three-fourths of African-Americans) believe that Obama’s agenda will increase opportunities for people like them; but a plurality of whites — 38 percent — say his agenda will decrease their opportunities. College-educated white men believe, by 2-to-1, that Obama’s approach is reducing their prospects.

There are a lot of demographic differences between whites and non-whites. This raises a lot of interesting issues as to the extent to which non-racial issues are driving these differences. Are uninsured whites much less supportive of health insurance than uninsured non-whites? Do wealthy Latinos support tax cuts?

Epistemology With James Inhofe

Pew reports that the right is having a great deal of success in trying to mislead people about climate change. The header Pew put on the graphic notes that the decline is “across party lines.” But you should look at the magnitudes—the Republican line has fallen way further, and from a lower base, than the Democratic line. This is probably a rationalizing voter example where increased salience of the issue is bringing more Republicans into line with the beliefs espoused by their party’s leaders.

Meanwhile, James Inhofe says:

Perhaps the most interesting finding in this poll aside from the precipitous drop in the number of Independents who believe global warming is a problem, is that the more Americans learn about cap-and-trade, the more they oppose cap-and-trade. And this explains quite clearly why Democrats don’t want the public to know about it.

These are curious uses of the terms “know” and “learn” which are generally reserved for instances in which people form true beliefs. On the specific issue of cap and trade, the evidence has always been that the term “cap and trade” is barely in circulation outside the Beltway. Public support for clean energy legislation under different descriptions tends to be high. You can get poll results as good at 72 percent in favor of the American Clean Energy and Security Act under one favorable description.

UFO Conspiracy Theories More Popular Than Congressional GOP

The numbers on the public option in the new WaPo/ABC poll got all the press yesterday, but there’s other interesting stuff. For example, just 19 percent of the country trusts congressional Republicans to make good decisions:

Confidence in Obama is not sky-high, but confidence in the opposition is rock-bottom. By way of contrast, 37 percent of the population believes the US government has had secret contact with extra-terrestrials.

Pakistan in Denial

Via Spencer Ackerman, Jane Perlez writes that Pakistani security officials are concerned that anti-Indian extremist groups they’ve nurtured are building ties with al-Qaeda but they don’t know how to admit this:

The senior personnel in the security forces seem to understand the gravity of the militants’ strength and the durability of their network, Mr. Saleem said. But they cannot bring themselves to say publicly that those whom they created are coming back to bite them, he said.

The problem arguably runs even deeper than this. IRI’s May 2009 survey of Pakistani public opinion asked the following question: “Terrorists recently attacked the city of Mumbia, killing 164 people. The news is reporting that the attacks were planned in Pakistan and carried out by Lashkar-e-Taiba. Do you believe this is true.” 78 percent said no. Just seven percent said yes. By contrast slightly over eight percent of Americans claim to have personally witnessed an alien spaceship. In other words, it’s not just that Pakistanis don’t believe the anti-Indian terrorist groups their government has been nurturing are a threat to them, in Pakistan belief that anti-Indian terrorist groups are perpetrating attacks against India is a bit of a fringe idea.

So who do Pakistanis think was responsible?

India!

I bring this up not to rag on the population of Pakistan, but simply to point out that a lot of American commentary on Pakistani behavior seems to me to not seriously engage with the Pakistani epistemic situation. In our narrative about ourselves, Pakistan is threatened by trans-border Taliban operations and we’re working with our partners in Afghanistan to help stabilize the situation. The Pakistani view is that the Karzai government is a hostile, pro-Indian entity. The American view is that Pakistani security forces are playing a dangerous double game with lethal anti-Indian terrorists. The Pakistani view is, I guess, that terrorist attacks perpetrated in India are false flag operations designed to discredit them.

Public Perceptions of Crime Rate Becoming Unmoored From Reality

John Sides looks at some Gallup data and comes up with a fascinating finding. In the 1990s, public perception of whether crime was getting better or worse largely tracked objective reality. But in the past decade that relationship has broken down (click on the image for a bigger picture):

For 1991-2001, perceptions line up nicely with reality. But in 2002-2008, a larger percentage of Americans perceived an increase in crime than one would expect, given the actual crime rate. It appears that 2009 will only continue this trend. A graph with the property crime rate would show a similar finding.

One can speculate about the reasons. September 11th seems an unlikely cause, especially of the increase since 2005. Local television news consumption affects certain beliefs about crime, according to this research by Frank Gilliam and Shanto Lyengar. But I don’t really think there’s been a massive uptick in local news consumption, or local news coverage of crime (which seems a perennial staple — if it bleeds it leads, etc.).

Speculating . . . speculating . . . I feel that since the end of the 1990s, crime has really fallen off the map as an official topic of public and political concern. That could mean that people are seeing less reporting of actual facts about the crime rate and coming to be more influenced by the “if it bleeds it leads” phenomenon. But I don’t know how you would test that hypothesis.

Nobody Knows Who Max Baucus Is

I’m actually a bit surprised that the public is this well-informed since I always have low expectations:

The news quiz, which was conducted by the Pew Research Center, asked respondents to identify, from a list of public officials, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee tasked with writing healthcare reform legislation. Fifty-six percent of respondents said they did not know and 18 percent chose Baucus.

Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) were chosen by 11 and 7 percent of respondents, respectively, while 1 percent selected Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. Feinstein and McCain do not sit on the Finance panel.

By comparison, 40 percent of Americans know that the controversial Glenn Beck is a television and radio talk show host.

Of course on some level it doesn’t matter whether people know who Max Baucus is or not. Far less than one percent of the population actually lives in Montana and thus has some ability to hold Baucus accountable. The rest of us just live here.

Americans’ Rosy View of US Health Care

American health care is often said to be the best in the world. American liberals, however, are generally convinced that American health care is considerably worse than average. I’ve seen a few bloggers cite these new Pew results as indicating that the American people agree with liberals about this. It’s definitely true that relatively few people see U.S. healthcare as the best in the world. But I think Pew presented their data in an odd way, creating a misleading two-choice breakdown between “above average” and “average or below.” Check out a three-way split:

In all income cohorts the number of people who perceive American health care as above average exceeds the number who view it as below average. This applies even in the low income brackets where it’s clearly false. And politicians are much more interested in the views of their wealthy constituents than of their poor ones. Rich people contribute to campaigns, while poor people tend to vote at low levels and are often immigrants or ex-felons who aren’t even allowed to vote.

Petraeus’ Indifference Problem

Peter Beinart has a pretty clever column about how it would be good if David Petraeus ran for President as a Republican in 2012. It’s clever in the sense that he uses the conceit to make various smart points. But the conceit itself is dumb. Alex Massie makes some good points about this. But the larger issue is that there’s no evidence that the public cares at all about Petraeus’ signature issues. Stroll over to Polling Report’s problems and priorities page. A recent CBS News poll indicates that . . . nobody cares:

If you expand the choice set offered to people, you get somewhat different answers. For example, an August CNN/Opinion Research poll let people say “education” and it turns out that just as many people think this is the most important issue as think Iraq and Afghanistan is:

As it happens, former Bush administration Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings is, like David Petraeus, an example of a Bush administration official who you can find Democrats who’ll praise. But I don’t see anyone touting her as a likely presidential contender. Because, you know, she was a second-tier cabinet member working on a second-tier issue.

What Civic Engagement Looks Like

Via Chris Bowers, Gallup has numbers showing that Americans are paying closer attention to the news lately:

It’s probably worth emphasizing that a lot of the things that bien pensant types deplore—like this past summer of crazy rallies and political polarization more generally—are inextricably tied up with things that bien pensant types claim to want, namely an increased level of civic engagement. The politics of the late-19th century was incredibly vicious, polarized, and un-edifying. It was also an era of high turnout and booming newspapers.

Also interesting to note that Republicans, being older, wealthier, and maler also follow the news more closely:

I’m inclined to think that if the production of political news and commentary weren’t so dominated by the white dude demographic, that political news might get a larger audience among progressives. That, in turn, could help close some of the “enthusiasm gap” issues that frequently plague progressive activists.

Voting is Retrospective

Greg Sargent notes a public opinion paradox:

The new CBS/New York Times poll drives this point home as starkly as you could want — and suggests that Dems have failed at one of their core political missions.

The poll finds that an overwhelming majority of 64% think Republicans are opposing Obama’s health care plans mostly for political reasons. But it also finds that an equally large number, 65%, say Democrats shouldn’t pass a bill without Republicans — even if they think it’s right for the country — and should instead compromise to win over some GOPers.

I don’t know that I think this shows Democrats have failed at anything. I think it mostly re-demonstrates the familiar result that outside a fairly narrow band of questions the public doesn’t necessarily have detailed, stable, and coherent opinions. That these two views don’t really make much sense together suggests that a substantial swathe of the population just hasn’t thought these questions through very thoroughly. Which is to be expected—why would everyone have strongly-held opinions about obscure in-the-weeds process issues?

As Steve Benen says the bigger issue is going to be whether or not people like what they see after a new program is implemented. Nobody is going to say “this bill sucks, but I appreciate that the reason it sucks is compromises made in order to please George Voinovich which was a course of action I approved of at the time, so therefore I can’t complain.” How many people even know who George Voinovich is?

A bill that’s bipartisan enough to be supported by the opposition party leadership (like TARP or to some extent the Iraq authorizing vote) probably does buy you some political cover by actively compromising your potential critics. But it’s hard to see what difference one diffident minority legislator or four or zero or two is going to make.

The Generic Ballot and the Midterms

Andrew Gelman offers a more detailed perspective on the current generic house ballot polls and the 2010 midterms:

Bafumi, Erikson, and Wlezien’s analysis doesn’t go back before 300 days before the election, but if we take the liberty of extrapolating . . . The current state of the generic polls gives the Democrats .412/(.412+.377) = 52% of the two-party vote. Going to the graph, we see, first, that 52% for the Democrats is near historic lows (comparable to 1946, 1994, and 1998) and that the expected Democratic vote–given that their party holds the White House–is around -3%, or a 53-47 popular vote win for the Republicans.

Would 53% of the popular vote be enough for the Republicans to win a House majority? A quick look, based on my analysis with John Kastellec and Jamie Chandler of seats and votes in Congress, suggests yes.

Looked at this way, Democrats had better hope the economic situation starts improving (in the sense of conditions actually improving, rather than rate of change looking better) and that improvement starts lifting their fortunes. Alternatively, an optimistic congressional Democrat could try to take solace in the extreme unpopularity of the GOP. But I actually wouldn’t count on that. The electorate’s first choice may be for the Democrats to lose seats without John Boehner becoming Speaker, but individual voters have no way to ensure that their preferences are aggregated that way.