The new Pew report on trust in government is out, and, as we would expect amidst an economic downturn, trust is low. One question is what this means for the 2010 election. Pew notes “record anti-incumbent sentiment.” This leads Chris Cilizza to write:
bq. ..unrest…is at the foundation of what is shaping up to be a strongly anti-incumbent political year…Those soaring levels of dissatisfaction have to worry incumbents of both parties — although the electoral pain will almost certainly be felt more by Democrats since, well, they have a lot more incumbents in the House and Senate.
This suggests a testable hypothesis: more congressional incumbents lose elections when trust in government declines. Conveniently, Pew put some data on-line. It has the number of House incumbents who lost their elections (1958-2008) as well as a database of trust questions (from which I take the American National Election Study data, which I charted previously, combined with one CBS/NYT poll from October 2006, a year when the ANES did not field its standard election survey). Here is the graph:
Hmm, so much for the anti-incumbent effects of trust. Thanks to a few outliers, the relationship between trust and incumbent losses is actually _positive_, although it is not statistically significant. Thus, I call this a null relationship.
To be fair, both Pew and Cilizza make a second, more qualified claim: this distrust of government is really worse for _Democratic_ incumbents. Here is the key Pew tabulation:
Here is Cilizza:
bq. More potentially problematic for Democrats is that the Pew poll also shows that the discontent toward the federal government runs far stronger among Republicans and independents and appears to be directly correlated with voter intensity.
But Cilizza’s choice of the word “correlated” is important. We really don’t know, based on this tabulation, whether it’s distrust of the government that driving anticipated voting behavior or something else that is correlated with distrust — namely, dissatisfaction with the economy. The distinction is important. If the economy is the key, the Democrats may not have to fix the government to mitigate their losses in 2010, simply preside over an improving economy. To that end, I note some new Gallup data, which show increasing satisfaction with the direction of the country among both Democrats and independents. Levels of satisfaction are still low in absolute terms, but if these trends continue, the Democratic majorities might yet survive 2010.
