A few weeks ago, I posted about an interesting paper by Richard Johnston and Emily Thorson. They found that McCain’s poll numbers tracked Palin’s favorability in an uncanny fashion:
bq. Judgment on her was incontestably important. The correspondence between dynamics in her ratings and dynamics in McCain vote intentions is astonishingly exact. Her marginal impact in vote-intention estimation models dwarfs that for any Vice-Presidential we are aware of, certainly for her predecessors in 2000 and 2004. And the range traversed by her favorability ratings is truly impressive. But why? We are unaware of any theory that opens the door to serious impact from the bottom half of the ticket.
See the post for the graphs. Palin’s resignation got these graphs some penetration in the blogosphere (Matt Yglesias, Ezra Klein), which prompted Seth Masket to offer a different interpretation. Here are his thoughts and my responses.
bq. I’m going to somewhat disagree with this [Johnston and Thorson’s] interpretation of the graphs. For one thing, it shouldn’t be a shock that a presidential candidate’s approval rating moves in tandem with that of his vice presidential candidate. If you’re going to vote for one, you’re going to vote for the other — people know that. (Indeed, it’s more surprising that Obama’s and Biden’s ratings don’t jibe more.)
I think it is more surprising. Vice-presidential candidates don’t have a consistently strong impact on the evaluations of the presidential candidates. Palin’s impact is unusual — certainly in light of 2000 and 2004, as Johnston and Thorson note — but also in light of the past 50 or so years of presidential elections, according to some other research I recently reviewed. Simply put, the media paid an extraordinary amount of attention to her, which easily could have made the public’s feelings about her more important than has historically been the case.
bq. Second, while we would expect the incumbent party’s candidate (in this case, McCain) to bear the blame for a sour economy, we wouldn’t necessarily expect voters to make that connection overnight. It was a confusing and very sudden collapse in the financial sector that caught the public’s attention in mid-September. It probably took a few weeks of campaign noise and media coverage for voters to apply the information to the political sphere.
I think Seth is basically right here, although I would say that the public was already paying a lot of attention to the economy even before the financial collapse. In an August 2008 NBC-WSJ poll, 49% said that economic issues such as job creation, gas prices, and the mortgage crisis should be the highest priority of government; an additional 14% cited health care, which also manifests economic concerns. Only 37% cited non-economic issues, such as Iraq, terrorism, and immigration.
If the financial collapse mattered, it didn’t matter by in a strict mechanical way, with each bank failure or drop in the Dow causing spikes in Obama’s poll numbers. Phil Klinkner pointed this out soon after the election. My graph above denotes some of these events, along with the announcement of the vice-presidential candidates, the onset of the conventions, and the four debates.
If the financial collapse mattered, it did so in the way that Seth suggests — by continuing to heighten the salience of the economy such that it became a more important factor in vote choice. This in turn would have pushed the candidates’ poll numbers toward the “equilibrium” predicted by the candidates’ positions — a la the accounts of Tom Holbrook as well as Andy and Gary King.
But there is still this question of the McCain plunge in October. Here is Seth:
bq. Finally, note where the McCain plunge begins — right around October 8th…What happened that week? Well, October 7th was the night of the second presidential debate, the town-hall format one that included McCain’s famous “that one” reference to Obama. That debate turned mostly on economic matters, with the candidates charting out different positions on how to rescue the economy. Sixty-three million people watched the debate – a 21% increase over the first Obama-McCain debate and the biggest viewership for a presidential debate since 1992.
bq. So here’s my interpretation: By the 2nd week of October, voters recognized the economy was tanking. The high public attention on the 2nd debate gave voters an opportunity to apply their knowledge of the economy to the political world, and they chose to blame the economy’s collapse on the incumbent party. Palin was along for the ride on this. Her star was tied to John McCain’s, and his to the interaction of party and economics.
If you look at my graph above, you can see the dip after the Oct. 8 presidential debate. (“Plunge” is perhaps too strong; it’s a shift of a only few percentage points.) So Seth is right: it is tough to say whether the dip in Palin’s evaluations documented by Johnston and Thorson is causing the McCain dip, or the debate is causing the drip (and possibly the dip for Palin as well).
However, I’m less certain that the debate mattered by focusing on the economy. For one, Obama’s numbers don’t really increase after the debate. Shouldn’t he benefit? And McCain’s numbers bounce back a little bit after the debate. Why? If the debate somehow helped voters blame the Republican Party for the bad economy, shouldn’t this suggest a final decision of sorts? If it was the debate that caused the dip, its apparently temporary effect suggests, to me at least, something tied more specifically to McCain’s performance in that debate (i.e., “that one,” etc.).
Of course, all this is speculative. We’ll be seeing more and better research soon. In the meantime, if anyone has any suggestions for the graph above, let me know.
