|
Article Excerpt
"Hello, I'm Jim Greer, chairman of the Republican Party of Florida. As the party of Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan prepares to choose its nominee for president of the United States, Florida is honored to host tonight's Republican president debate." (1) The seven Republican candidates invited to Orlando for the October 2007 event also seemed to have forgotten about their current leader, George W. Bush; he was mentioned only twice, once critically and once neutrally, while Reagan's name was invoked reverently a dozen times, a pattern repeated throughout the Republican pre-primary debate season. (2) The party's lineup of speakers at the Republican convention in August was equally reluctant to acknowledge the man who had led the party to victory in 2000 and 2004, referring to Bush by name only six times over four days--with Laura Bush accounting for five of the mentions. (3)
A party cannot, however, expect voters to overlook an unpopular incumbent president no matter how convenient it might be, even in the unlikely event that the opposing party were to let it happen (the Democrats' speakers mentioned Bush's name more than 140 times at their convention (4)). Like it or not, a sitting president is his party's public face. Although presidents sometimes deemphasize party ties and, sincerely or for strategic reasons, aspire to public images that transcend partisanship (Eisenhower, Carter, Clinton's "triangulation" strategy), the president's party cannot escape the shadow cast by its leading figure. For better or worse, the president's words and actions largely define his party's current principles and objectives. Judgments about his competence in managing domestic and foreign affairs inform assessments of his party's competence in such matters. The components of a president's supporting coalition, and the interests he favors while governing, help to define the party's constituent social basis and thus appeal as an object of individual identification. In short, every administration inevitably shapes public perceptions about who and what the president's party stands for and how well it governs when in office.
All of this is arguably even truer of George W. Bush than of any recent predecessor. With few exceptions, his administration pursued a partisan agenda using partisan tactics while receiving extraordinarily high levels of support from Republican leaders in Congress and elsewhere. Even as Bush's approval ratings drifted well south of 50% after the start of his second term, congressional Republicans remained largely supportive, if only because their own core Republican constituents continued to give the president high approval ratings (Jacobson 2008). Bush also devoted more energy than any other modern president to party building, fundraising, and campaigning for his partisan team (Milkis and Rhodes 2007). Finally, there is little ambiguity about the coalition he represented and served: social and religious conservatives, the corporate sector, antitax enthusiasts, and foreign policy hawks.
The unusually close connection between Bush and the Republican Party makes his presidency particularly useful for examining the effect of popular assessments of a president on his party's standing with the public. Like party politicians, political scientists believe that a president's popular standing matters for his party; no one has to my knowledge argued that a party is not better off with a popular than an unpopular standard-bearer. There is no consensus, however, on exactly how and to what extent the public's reaction to the president shapes the partisan landscape. The research literature has addressed two main aspects of the relationship between president and party: how presidents have affected their party's electoral fortunes and how presidents have influenced individual and mass partisanship. Data are now available for examining the president's effect on his party's popular standing between elections as well. In this article, I examine survey data covering Bush's two terms in order to revisit some of the central questions motivating this literature and to begin placing the Bush presidency within it.
I begin by reviewing the independent variable: Bush's extraordinary rise and fall in public esteem over his eight years in office. I then examine Bush's effect on the approval ratings of the parties, comparing his influence to that of his predecessor, Bill Clinton. Next I consider how presidential approval affects individual partisanship, using the available National Election Studies (NES) panel studies to compare Bush to his father, Bill Clinton, and Gerald Ford in this regard. The aggregate consequence of these individual effects--shifts in macropartisanship--is the subject of the next section. I then consider what is potentially the most enduring effect of the Bush years on partisan fortunes: the unusually lopsided Democratic preferences of voters who entered the electorate during his administration. I finish with a brief examination of the impact of these trends on Republican electoral fortunes in 2006 and 2008.
George W. Bush's Approval Ratings
The George W. Bush presidency is useful for examining the effect of a president on his party's standing with the public, for reasons that go beyond the unusually close association between Bush and his party. His approval ratings varied more widely--by a remarkable 65 percentage points in the Gallup series--than any previous president. They also underwent a sustained downward trend and remained in negative territory--disapproval higher than approval--from early in his second term onward. Moreover, Bush's approval ratings were dominated between 2003 and 2007 by popular evaluations of a venture for which he was unambiguously responsible: the war in Iraq. Only when the economy fell into recession and then off the cliff in 2008 did his job approval ratings decouple somewhat from views of the war, and not to his advantage. This is the unmistakable message of Figure 1, which displays the monthly averages from 1,013 polls asking the presidential approval question and 874 polls asking diverse questions designed to tap support for the Iraq War. (5)
The terrorist attacks of 9/11, and Bush's forceful response to them, provoked the greatest rally in public support ever observed for a president; in the months after the attacks, most Americans, believing that Saddam Hussein bore at least some responsibility, supported military action in Iraq to remove him from office (Jacobson 2008, 96). After the administration mounted its campaign to generate public backing for military action against Iraq in late 2002, levels of support for Bush and the war drew close together and moved in parallel for the next five years. They both rose to a peak in April 2003 just before Bush's "mission accomplished" moment on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, then began a long gradual decline, occasionally but temporarily interrupted by positive developments in Iraq (Saddam Hussein's capture, parliamentary elections). The association between the two trends is not accidental; respondents to individual surveys asking both the approval and war support questions offered consistent evaluation of the war and the president--positive toward both or negative toward both--at rates averaging about 84% during this period (Jacobson 2007a, Figure 4).
[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]
The connection between opinions on the Iraq War and the president, and the decline in support for both, imply that gradual disillusionment with the war bred gradual disillusionment with the president. But the huge partisan differences in evaluations of both the war and the president, and their distinct trajectories over time, suggest that a more complicated process was at work. Most ordinary Republicans remained loyal to the president and supportive of the Iraq War despite the collapse of its original justifications and its escalating human and material costs. Their faith in the president was sufficiently powerful to induce most of them to interpret virtually every aspect of the war in a way that was consistent with this prior attitude (Jacobson 2007c); in short, their views on the war were determined by their commitment to Bush. Democrats and most independents had no such commitment, and they were largely responsible for the trends in Figure 1. Most were willing to support Bush and the war as long as they believed that invading Iraq and deposing Saddam Hussein were necessary to remove a threat to the United States and would lead to peace and democracy in the Middle East (Jacobson 2008). The failure to find weapons of mass destruction or evidence of Saddam's involvement in 9/11, and the continuing chaos and sectarian bloodshed in Iraq, removed the war's primary justifications in their minds. Thus, for Democrats and independents, perceptions of the war shaped attitudes toward Bush.
The strong correlation between the two monthly series in Figure 1 (r = 0.97) is a product of both of these distinctive causal paths. But because the overall decline in support for Bush can be attributed mainly to the falloff in approval among Democrats and independents, it makes sense to model the relationship in a way that treats attitudes toward the war as the independent variable. When approval is regressed on support for the war from the time the administration began its campaign to whip up public support for military action in September 2002 until the end of 2007, the estimated coefficient is 1.07. That is, the public's approval of Bush's performance and support for the war had almost a one-to-one correspondence for more than five years. When data for 2008 are included and variables representing economic conditions are added to the analysis (customary in models of presidential approval; e.g., Brody 1991; Hibbs, Rivers, and Vasilatos 1982; Kernell 1978; MacKuen 1983; Monroe 1978; Newman 2002; Norpoth and Yantek 1983), the economic variables add only modestly to the equation's explanatory power.
This is not the final word, however. Because autocorrelation is an inherent feature of presidential approval time series, models used to estimate the effects of national conditions on approval typically include lagged approval or make other more elaborate adjustments to correct for the bias it introduces (Beck 1991; Green, Palmquist, and Schickler 1998; Kernell 1978). A simple model with lagged approval added confirms the powerful relationship between attitudes toward the Iraq War on the Bush's public standing. The first equation in Table 1 estimates that a one-point drop in support for the war is associated with a 0.33-point reduction in Bush's approval rating; the coefficient on lagged approval indicates that this effect will be propagated forward, albeit with diminishing force, so that, for example, after four months, a one-percentage-point decline in war support is associated with about a one-point reduction in support. The second equation suggests that economic conditions by themselves had little measurable effect on Bush's approval rating; the joint effect of the three variables is insignificant (p = .31), while the coefficient on lagged approval approaches unity.
The third equation, however, suggests that economic conditions were not inconsequential; taking opinions on the war into account, unemployment and inflation affected Bush's approval ratings in the expected direction. (6) Thus, the president did receive some benefit as the unemployment rate fell steadily from 6.3% in June 2003 to 4.5% three years later while inflation remained in check and then suffered as unemployment increased to 7.2% by the end of 2008. Still, the estimated effects are small compared to those of opinions on the Iraq War.
Estimates of the relationship between opinions on Iraq and Bush's approval ratings are insensitive to particular modeling decisions; I also estimated Prais-Winsten and ARIMA models of approval (some with lagged independent variables, some examining first differences rather than levels of approval), and in every case, the estimated relationship approximated that found in Equation 1.3. An example is the AR1 model in Equation 1.4.
In light of the trends displayed in Figure 1, statistical confirmation that opinions on the Iraq War were strongly related to Bush's approval rating is scarcely surprising. It is also obvious from the figure that the consequences have not been favorable to the president. This is not to say that, absent the Iraq War, Bush's approval levels would have remained at their prewar level (around 58%), at least until the sharp economic downturn in 2008; the natural decay of the post-9/11 rally might have continued a bit longer, and other events, such as the administration's slow and inept response to Hurricane Katrina, would have cost the president support. But economic growth and declining unemployment from mid-2003 through early 2007 would almost certainly have provided a good boost had it not be overshadowed by the Iraq War, and it is hard to conceive that, without the war, Bush's job approval ratings among ordinary Democrats and independents could have become so abysmal. (7) In any case, Bush decided for war, and as large segments of the public gradually soured on the enterprise, they also soured on the decider. What effect did this long period of relative unpopularity have on the president's party?
Party Evaluations
If parties are judged by the performance of their presidents, the Republican Party could not hope to avoid collateral damage during the Bush presidency. A dynamic picture of how opinions of Bush's performance has influenced the popular standing of the Republican Party--and its rival--can be gleaned from survey questions about the parties asked at irregular intervals during his presidency. The NBC News/Wall Street Journal Poll asks respondents to evaluative various leaders and institutions, including the Republican and Democratic parties, as very positive, somewhat positive, neutral, somewhat negative, or very negative. Figure 2 displays the trends in Bush's approval rating and the proportion of respondents who rate the Republican Party positively rather than negatively (with the neutral category, typically about 15% of respondents, omitted). The Gallup Poll asks respondents whether they view each party favorably or unfavorably;...
|
