Bush's Approval Research Articles

Polls and Elections: Terror, War, and the Economy in George W. Bush's Approval Ratings: The Importance of Salience in Presidential Approval

George W. Bush's presidency provides a fertile ground to further develop the standard model of presidential approval. In contrast to the vast presidential approval literature, early studies of Bush conclude economic conditions had no effect once the war in Iraq began. Rather than require a fundamental rethinking of presidential approval theories, we argue that approval models must take into account issue salience. When a factor is salient, it has a stronger effect. During the Bush presidency, with considerable over‐time variation in the salience of the economy, terrorism, and the war in Iraq, each, in turn, powerfully affected Bush's approval.

Politics Is a Joke! How TV Comedians Are Remaking Political Life

Politics Is a Joke! How TV Comedians Are Remaking Political Life

The Surprising Robustness of Surprising Events

Paolino presents two core critiques of “Performing on Cue.” First, he suggests that my dichotomous measures of support for the Iraq War bias against finding evidence of reinforcing cues. Second, he suggests that using party identification (ID) as a moderator for the treatment effects biases against finding an impact for elite cues. Unfortunately, Paolino’s statistical modeling choices do not reflect these theoretical concerns. His arguments about attitude strength and source credibility imply that the experimental treatments should have nonlinear effects. Yet Paolino relies on an ordinal logit model with a linear interaction of the treatments with a six-point index of party ID and Bush approval. A more appropriate approach for capturing Paolino’s critiques would estimate a multinomial logit model with categorical interaction effects between the treatments and the source credibility. These more appropriate statistical modeling choices reveal that the findings of “Performing on Cue” are very robust to the concerns raised by Paolino.

Finding Jumps in Otherwise Smooth Curves: Identifying Critical Events in Political Processes

Many social processes are stable and smooth in general, with discrete jumps. We develop a sequential segmentation spline method that can identify both the location and the number of discontinuities in a series of observations with a time component, while fitting a smooth spline between jumps, using a modified Bayesian Information Criterion statistic as a stopping rule. We explore the method in a large-n, unbalanced panel setting with George W. Bush's approval data, a small-n time series with median DW-NOMINATE scores for each Congress over time, and a series of simulations. We compare the method to several extant smoothers, and the method performs favorably in terms of visual inspection, residual properties, and event detection. Finally, we discuss extensions of the method.

9/11 and Presidential Support in the 107th Congress

Immediately following the tragic events of 9/11, President George W. Bush's approval rating shot from 51% to 86%; a record 35-point rally effect according to the Gallup Poll. President Bush set another record on September 24th, 2001, as 90% of Americans approved of his performance. If public support is indeed an important president's legislative resource, President Bush should have been his most influential during his record rally. To get a sense for President Bush's support in Congress following 9/11, I examine how members of Congress (MCs) voted on issues in which President Bush took a position in the 107th Congress. I analyze 83 votes identified by the Congressional Quarterly to determine the effect of 9/11 on presidential support in Congress. I find that MCs’ support for President Bush did in fact increase immediately following 9/11. But the unequivocal support did not last long. Despite still high approval ratings, President Bush's congressional support returned to pre-9/11 levels in 2002. These findings, I believe, have important implications for the study of rally effects specifically and congressional-executive relations in general.

Explaining the Horse Race of 2008

October 2, 2008, the New York Times presidential campaign coverage carried the headline “Poll Finds Obama Gaining Support and McCain Weakened in Bailout Crisis.” Similarly, the headline on October 21 read “Obama Appeal Rises in Poll; No Gains for McCain Ticket.” The 2008 presidential election, more so than any previous campaign, was presented as a horse race between senators Barack Obama and John McCain. In the midst of president George W. Bush's plummeting approval ratings, a growing discontent among the American people about the continued U.S. presence in Iraq, and the largest economic recession since the Great Depression, the media did not cast the election as a debate about issues. Rather, the 2008 election was about the candidates' relative positioning, how they got there, and what strategies they would employ to secure victory.

It's about time: Forecasting the 2008 presidential election with the time-for-change model

The popular vote for president can be predicted accurately before the national nominating conventions based on three factors: the incumbent president's approval rating at mid-year, the growth rate of the economy during the first half of the election year, and the length of time that the president's party has controlled the White House. Regardless of who wins the Democratic and Republican nominations, 2008 will be a time-for-change presidential election. Based on President Bush's approval rating in June of 2007, the recent growth rate of the economy, and the fact that the Republican Party will have controlled the White House for eight years, the Democratic nominee would be predicted to win the national popular vote by a comfortable margin. For the Republican nominee to have a reasonable chance of winning the 2008 presidential election, there would have to be a dramatic improvement in President Bush's approval rating during the next 12 months.

America's election choices

The US presidential election battle has begun in earnest, with the first primaries due in January and at least 20 states planning to hold them on 5 February 2008. Republicans could face a long fight for the nomination, while Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have emerged as leaders in the Democratic party race. With George W. Bush's public approval ratings very low, Republicans hope to be rescued by national security issues, on which they have long held the advantage among voters – though this is awkward as the biggest source of Bush's unpopularity is the war in Iraq. However, Iraq and national security pose problems for both parties.

The Polls: Presidential Referendum Effects in the 2006 Midterm Elections

Many commentators saw the 2006 midterm elections as a referendum on George W. Bush's presidency, especially his unpopular Iraq War policy. Presidential referendum effects may be highly likely given the degree of party polarization and the concomitant attachment of large numbers of voters to the Democratic and Republican parties. But local factors, especially incumbency effects, may also have affected the outcome of the 2006 midterm contests. Using state-level presidential approval polls, analysis finds that Bush's approval, an indicator of referendum voting, had little impact on voting in Senate contests, once applying controls for the ideological and partisan composition of state voting populations. In contrast, even with these controls, Bush's approval influenced voting in gubernatorial contests. But Iraq War battle deaths affected voting for senators, suggestive of another type of referendum effect. Battle deaths, however, did not affect the gubernatorial races.

The Civil Rights Movement, C'est Nous

On July 20, 2006, President George W. Bush addressed the annual convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Washington, D.C. He described the modern civil rights movement as the nation's founding. Led by men such as Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King, Jr., the second founders trusted fellow Americans to join them in doing the right thing.... They toppled Jim Crow through simple deeds: boarding a bus, walking along the road, showing up peacefully at courthouses or joining in prayer and song. Despite the sheriff's dogs, and the jailer's scorn, and the hangman's noose, and the assassin's bullets, they prevailed.' It is tempting to read President Bush's remarks as political pandering. He was, after all, the first president since Herbert Hoover to serve a full term without addressing the NAACP. Bush's approval rating among African Americans, which were low to begin with, had dropped to around 2 percent in the wake of the administration's dilatory response to Hurricane Katrina.2 The analogy of the civil rights movement with the nation's founding seems a fulsome rhetorical choice. The more common comparison-used by commentators at the time and historians since-has been with Reconstruction. Perhaps the Second Reconstruction sounded tired to the president's speechwriters; it lacked the rhetorical gravitas, the historical resonance that they needed for a president so unpopular among African Americans. From another view, however, the president was merely summarizing what has become the official, state-sponsored memory of the civil rights movement. The United States Congress, by honoring Martin Luther King as the only American with his own national holiday, has implicitly placed the civil rights hero alongside the nation's founders. Every January, the nation celebrates a man and a movement that used moral persuasion to urge Americans to live up to their own ideals. This is appropriate enough, a significant memorial for a remarkable man and an extraordinary movement.

National Conditions, Strategic Politicians, and U.S. Congressional Elections: Using the Generic Vote to Forecast the 2006 House and Senate Elections

W ith the 2006 midterm election fast approaching, Democrats' chances of regaining control of the House of Representatives remain unclear. On the one hand, national political conditions appear to be more favorable for Demo crats than at any time since the Republi can takeover of the House in 1994. A pickup of only 15 seats would give Dem ocrats control of the House in 2007 and, since the end of World War II the aver age midterm seat loss for the president's party is 24 seats. Moreover, when the president's approval rating is below 50%, the average midterm seat loss is 38 seats and, according to data compiled by poll ingreport.com, George W. Bush's average approval rating during the month of June was only 37%. Recent national polls also show Dem ocrats with a strong lead in the "generic vote" for Congress. Between September 2005, and June 2006, 64 national polls asked Americans which party they pre ferred in the 2006 House elections. Dem ocrats led in every one of these polls with an average advantage of about 10 percentage points among registered vot ers. In nine polls taken in June, the aver age Democratic advantage was 11 percentage points. This is the largest margin Democrats have enjoyed in the generic vote since the early 1990s, be fore the Republican takeover of the House. So, if the national outlook for the Democrats is so rosy, why are many pundits and journalists skeptical about the Democrats' chances? The answer is that a midterm election is not just a na tional election. It is also a collection of 435 individual House and 33 individual Senate races, and right now the evidence from those individual races does not clearly point to big Democratic gains in November. Because of the tremendous advantages enjoyed by incumbents in House elec tions, open seats generally present the best opportunities for opposition party takeovers. But so far only 18 Republican incumbents, along with nine Democratic incumbents, are not seeking reelection in 2006. And many of those retiring Repub licans represent safe Republican districts. Only 12 House Republicans won by a margin of less than 10 percentage points in 2004 and only 16 House Republicans represent districts that were carried by John Kerry. So, among Republican in cumbents, there is relatively little low hanging fruit for Democrats to pick. And thus far, Democrats have had limited success in recruiting top-tier challengers to run against potentially vulnerable GOP incumbents (Cook 2006).

The Polls: Public Opinion and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has been characterized simultaneously as a central political figure in the executive branch as well as one of the most controversial and contentious cabinet members of the Bush administration. This article assesses Americans’ impressions of Secretary Rumsfeld's job performance and reveals that evaluations of Secretary Rumsfeld's performance have steadily declined since 2001. Over the same period, President Bush's approval ratings have dwindled, although the evidence I present indicates no relationship exists between the two. The broader implications of this research suggest that public evaluations of a president's key subordinates may not necessarily influence levels of presidential approval.

Congress's Hybrid Problem

No, you haven't accidentally picked up a copy of Oilman Today. The hybrid problem of which I write is a bump on the road toward the United States Senate's passage of a bill to expand federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. It's a classic case of cutting-edge science signifying very different things to different observers, complicated by confusion about what the symbol at the heart of the controversy really means. Stem Cells on the Hill Redux The House passed its version of a bill to expand federal funding last year, after which Senator Bill Frist (R-TN), the majority leader who is also a cardiac surgeon, surprised observers when he announced that he supported the measure. These unexpected developments excited supporters of embryonic stem cell research. At one time, momentum looked rather favorable for majority passage sometime this summer. The politics of this issue give opponents of the research headaches. On the one hand, clear majorities of those polled by the Genetics and Public Policy Center last year favor expanding federal funding, currently limited to support for research with a limited number of approved stem cell lines. (1) With President's Bush's approval ratings hitting record lows, Republican candidates in some states where the stem cell issue has been especially heated don't need more to worry about. Democrats have said that stem cells might be the domestic wedge that can nationalize local races in their favor. One object of Democratic yearning is the seat held by Senator Jim Talent of Missouri, who looks vulnerable and has said he opposes embryo-destructive research. A Senate vote would make it official, if nothing else. So the Senate leadership has some reason to want to take the issue off the table for the fall elections by approving the expanded federal funding, even if they later run into a presidential veto; at least they could tell constituents they tried. On the other hand, with the conservative base already potentially dispirited, Republican operatives don't want to hand them another reason to be annoyed and stay home in November by appearing to retreat from one of the battlegrounds in the culture wars. Better to focus on an issue that will keep conservative voters happy and perhaps take advantage of crossover appeal to conservative Democrats and independents. A good candidate for this role is a constitutional amendment to define marriage as between a man and a woman, which could well occupy whatever space there is for values issues in the coming months. The Minotaurs Are Coming Underlying much of the political and philosophical opposition to emerging biotechnology, including stem cell research, is of course popular anxiety about a slippery slope toward fundamental and unmanageable changes in the nature of the human person. Much of the work of the President's Council on Bioethics has given scholarly voice to this worry. A particular symbol of this concern is the chimera. A creature in Greek mythology, the chimera is a fire-breathing animal with a lion's head and front paws, a goat's middle, a dragon's rear, and a snake for a tail. Notably, the chimera was killed by Bellerophon on another chimera, the winged horse Pegasus. In modern medicine, the term chimera has been adopted to describe any individual with cells from more than one source. Unfortunately, this description is rather vague, so that a chimera can be anything from an animal with cells from another individual in that or another species, an individual that is the product of fused embryos, or a cardiac patient with a valve from a pig. Biologists mainly think of their lab animal models with tissues from different sources as chimeras. Chimeric laboratory animal models of human disease have become an increasingly important tool for basic biomedical research, even apart from the possibilities of creating them using human embryonic stem cells. …

The Time-for-Change Model and the 2004 Presidential Election: A Post-Mortem and a Look Ahead

Based on George Bush's net approval rating of −1% in the final Gallup Poll in June, a 3.7% growth rate for real GDP during the first two quarters of 2004, and the fact that the Republican Party had controlled the White House for only one term, the time-for-change model predicted that Mr. Bush would win reelection with 53.7% of the major party vote. This forecast was made in late July, before the Republican National Convention and more than three months before Election Day.

Anatomy of a Rally Effect: George W. Bush and the War on Terrorism

The “rally-round-the-flag effect” sparked by the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington and by President George W. Bush's prompt launching of the War on Terrorism cries out for the kind of timely analysis that political scientists sometimes can provide. A rally effect is the sudden and substantial increase in public approval of the president that occurs in response to certain kinds of dramatic international events involving the United States. The September 11 rally effect is distinctive for at least three reasons. First, of all the recorded rally effects, it is the largest. Bush's approval rating soared in the Gallup Poll from 51% on September 10 to 86% on September 15.The president's approval rating is the percentage of survey respondents who answer “approve” to the question: “Do you approve or disapprove of the job [name] is doing as president?” This 35-point increase nearly doubles the previous record, the 18-point boost triggered by his father's launch of Operation Desert Storm in January 1991. Second, the further increase in Bush's approval rating to 90% on September 22 represents the highest rating ever recorded for a president (Morin 2001). Third, the September 11 rally effect has lasted longer than any in the history of polling. As of November 10, 2002, Bush's approval rating was 68%—22 points below its peak but still much higher than his rating 13 months earlier.

NIH to start stem cell funding

The US National Institutes of Health is preparing to award the first federally funded grants for research into human embryonic stem cells following President George W. Bush's limited approval for projects using existing stem cell lines. The NIH expects the first grants from a US$ 100m budget to be awarded early next year, but several uncertainties still surround Bush's decision. Some researchers have questioned the quality and quantity of the ∼60 cell lines that are currently available, and are wary of any patent or licensing restrictions commercial suppliers might place on their use. These and wider issues are discussed in The Scientist (3 September). MJD

Priming and Media Impact on the Evaluations of the President's Performance

The period between August 1990 and early November 1992 was characterized by two “issue regimes,” the Gulf War and an economic recession. Analysis of aggregate media content and opinion poll data shows that President George Bush's job approval ratings were closely tied to the changes in the salience of these two issues. Guided by priming theory, hypotheses were formulated and tested concerning media effects on voters' evaluations of President Bush. Results show that the pattern of forming Bush's approval ratings is related to two different issue regimes. The total dominance of the public arena by one issue during an issue regime sets the foundation of Bush's overall approval ratings. However, direct media priming effects are found limited. Implications of these results are discussed.

When intentions go awry: The bush administration's foreign policy rhetoric

During George Bush's presidency the Cold War drew to a close and his administration triumphed in the Gulf War. Some viewed these events as a harbinger of a new world order. Basking in the success of the Gulf War, Bush's approval ratings soared, and prominent Democrats reconsidered challenging him in 1992. Foreign policy themes might have seemed a natural emphasis in campaign rhetoric. Yet, on the eve of the election, Bush abandoned efforts to rally the public with such appeals. This article identifies primary metaphorical themes employed by Bush to define foreign policy reality. Bush's rhetoric was fundamentally ordered by the orientational metaphor of war. Other themes reinforced central premises of the war metaphor and reflected enduring premises of American exceptional ism. However, critical constraints blunted Bush's rhetorical intentions, and perhaps nullified constraints presidents traditionally have harnessed to define rhetorical situations to fit a preferred world view. A disjuncture between rheto...

George Bush and the Costs of High Popularity: A General Model with a Current Application

People worry about the public-relations presidency: an institutional pattern of action giving high priority to public support, especially as shown by the opinion polls. These worries have been accentuated by actions in the White House and news media. “I don't live by the polls,” Bush told reporters early in 1990, parrying the implication that he did live by them. Daily polls that benefitted the White House were taken during the six months before the Gulf War by the Wirthlin Group (Ronald Reagan's second-term pollster) on behalf of “Citizens for a Free Kuwait.” These included very sophisticated tracking and feedback devices. Bush, in fact, became the first president to mention his own popularity polls in a State of the Union address in January 1992. Yet, Bush could as well have accused reporters of living by the polls. Each change in his public approval ratings was accompanied by featured news stories. At the close of the war, even before the planes had returned to their bases, commentators began speculating on how soon the president's popularity would fall.Several things stand out from Bush's approval ratings in his first three years in office. His polls were strikingly high in absolute terms and relative to the polls of his predecessors at the same points in their administrations. Another notable feature was that they were more erratic. Where Reagan's polls changed by more than five percentage points only twice in the same period, Bush's changed by this amount 13 times, leading modern presidents in this kind of fluctuation. Bush's approval ratings climbed with the invasion of Panama in January 1990, fell the next month, and then fell further.

George Bush and the Costs of High Popularity: A General Model with a Current Application

People worry about the public-relations presidency: an institutional pattern of action giving high priority to public support, especially as shown by the opinion polls. These worries have been accentuated by actions in the White House and news media. “I don't live by the polls,” Bush told reporters early in 1990, parrying the implication that he did live by them. Daily polls that benefitted the White House were taken during the six months before the Gulf War by the Wirthlin Group (Ronald Reagan's second-term pollster) on behalf of “Citizens for a Free Kuwait.” These included very sophisticated tracking and feedback devices. Bush, in fact, became the first president to mention his own popularity polls in a State of the Union address in January 1992. Yet, Bush could as well have accused reporters of living by the polls. Each change in his public approval ratings was accompanied by featured news stories. At the close of the war, even before the planes had returned to their bases, commentators began speculating on how soon the president's popularity would fall.Several things stand out from Bush's approval ratings in his first three years in office. His polls were strikingly high in absolute terms and relative to the polls of his predecessors at the same points in their administrations. Another notable feature was that they were more erratic. Where Reagan's polls changed by more than five percentage points only twice in the same period, Bush's changed by this amount 13 times, leading modern presidents in this kind of fluctuation. Bush's approval ratings climbed with the invasion of Panama in January 1990, fell the next month, and then fell further.