Hey, Pollsters!

Three topics I'd love to know more about:

1. How many people know that Healthcare.gov is Obamacare? Especially the people who actually use it. Also, the associated questions: how many know that it's the Affordable Care Act, and how many know that there's more to the ACA than the exchanges? I'm assuming that the number of people who associate Healthcare.gov with Obamacare is higher than it would have been if it had worked smoothly from the start...I'd expect the number to be relatively high now, and start to shrink as time goes on. But either way, I'd love to know about it.

2. How many people know that the US is still involved in a shooting war in Afghanistan? How many know that the US is no longer involved in a shooting war in Iraq? I saw another reference today somewhere to "two wars"...I suppose that might have meant Afghanistan and the general "war on terror," or it could have been just a error while writing quickly, or that there was an implicit "over the last decade" that I didn't read properly, but really I have no idea. I'm fairly certain that some people think the US is still occupying Iraq, and that some people don't know there are still US troops (and US casualties) in Afghanistan, but whether it's a tiny fraction or something more substantial? I have no idea.

3. An old standby: What do people mean when they talk about the "deficit"? Or, to put it another way: what do people hear when pollsters ask them about the deficit?

Generally: I find myself curious about political knowledge (in the electorate, but sometimes among elites) at least as often as I am curious about political opinions. That might just be because there's plenty of available information about opinions and much less about knowledge; I can't tell.

This worked once! So: Hey, pollsters: I bet I'm not the only one curious about these things.

It's Not Ideology

Matthew Dickinson was dragged back to blogging (good to have him back! Although I'd like to read his WH staff book when it's done) to discuss polarization, and how there's not as much of it out there as some people think. I tend to be on his side of the discussion; I'd note that it's a real debate, however, and I'm glad that he's going to talk more about it in a subsequent post.

All I can add is that what's going on doesn't fit any notion of ideology that I can understand. I saw a couple of people note this on twitter, but you shouldn't miss this from yesterday's NYT look at polarization in one Georgia House district. It's a good article, but the kicker is the must-read:

Mr. Tripcony, the surveyor, said he underwent heart surgery not long ago without health insurance, “a bad blow.” He has been making payments against the cost. He had heard of the online marketplace for insurance that opened on Oct. 1 under the Affordable Care Act.

“I just don’t trust it,” said Mr. Tripcony, who has an equal distrust of President Obama. “I don’t like him, and I don’t feel comfortable with anything he’s got to do with.”

Mr. Tripcony said he had a better idea for a system to provide health care at a fair price. “I think it should be the same for everybody,” he said. “One big company, whether owned by the government or private.”

Informed that he had described the single-payer system that Mr. Obama abandoned when Republican critics called it socialized medicine, he said, “Yeah, I know, it’s crazy.”

He said he might eventually seek health insurance under the new system. “In a couple of months, when they get the Web sites working, I may do it.”

This is partisanship, not ideology, right? He's against the ACA because it's "Obamacare," which means it's Barack Obama, and that's got to be a bad thing. It's certainly not because he disapproves of government involvement in health care, right?

The thing is, and this really is a challenge both for survey research and for larger interpretations of what's going on, is that under the conditions that most elites express their partisanship in ideological, rather than partisan, language, then mass publics are going to learn to give "ideological" answers to political questions. But this is a perfect example of how this is all just on the surface. Not that Tripcony or most Republicans are really liberals underneath -- that's not at all what I'm saying. The point is that if you look at it as a matter of coherent ideas driving issue positions, you're going to be lost.  Most of us are neither liberals or conservatives, or anything else. Or, rather, we're a mishmash; some liberal ideas resonate with us, some conservative ideas resonate, but none of it particularly constrains our positions on specific questions of public policy.

And what makes it even more confusing is that the political culture generally is anti-party, and pro-ideology. So to begin with some of the most extreme partisans think of themselves as outside of the party they obviously belong to in any objective sense. On top of that, it's considered appropriate to oppose, say, Obamacare because one is conservative, but illegitimate to oppose it because one is a Republican.

Good luck figuring all that out in a  relatively brief set of survey questions.

People Think Crazy Things About Inflation

I don't recall every seeing this one; it doesn't surprise me, but, you know, this is just crazy talk:

Over the next twelve months, do you expect that the cost of living  – that is, what you pay for everyday goods and services  ─ will increase, decrease, or stay about the same?
Decrease........................................... 1
Stay the same ................................... 22
Total increase.....................................77
    Increase 1% to 3% ....................... 23
    Increase 4% to 5% ....................... 18
    Increase 6% to 10%...................... 15
    Increase 11% or more................... 15
    Increase not sure how much............  6 

So more than one in seven believe that inflation will be over 11% next year, and three in ten, total, have it at 6% or more. In real life, it's unlikely that inflation will hit 2% next year.

That's from a Hart/Public Opinion Strategies poll, which also has the somewhat helpful results that people think the budget deficit has become worse in the last year by a 8/66 (better/worse) margin, and that while Obamacare gets a 29/46 positive/negative split, "Affordable Care Act" returns a 24/37 result.

Click through for the long term trends, going back to 2007, on inflation. Just eyeballing it, my best guess is that it basically follows optimism and pessimism about the economy overall; people perceive prices going up more during hard times than good times, even though the truth is roughly the opposite. Unfortunately, all we get here is inflation expectations, not perceptions of how things have changed.

There is a famous finding that Democrats believed that inflation got worse during the Reagan years (contrary to the plain fact that it got much better). Hart/POS don't give us a partisan breakdown here.

I'd like to think that the 15% who expect Carter-level inflation next year are Tea Partiers who actually believe that Fed policies will produce runaway inflation, but it's probably more likely a combination of partisan Republicans who just select the worst possible option and people who have no idea what "11%" means.

No larger point here; just thought it was interesting that fear of inflation, or at least survey answers that look like fear of inflation, are incredibly persistent.

Catch of the Day

An easy one this time, as Steven Benen goes the Ignore Those Polls! route with regard to the debt limit.

Let this be a reminder to the political world: there's nothing quite as useless as a debt-ceiling poll. Folks have no idea what the debt ceiling is, what default is, what bond markets are, or what the full faith and credit of the United States means, so polling on the subject tells us nothing.

Since my position is that politicians should probably ignore all deficit/debt polls in general, I obviously agree that they should ignore debt limit polls.

While I'm here: I'd also say that they should mostly ignore all "who would you blame" speculative polls about a government shutdown, as well. At best, it's going to give you just a bit more than basic party ID questions, but mostly, asking people to predict how they'll react to possible future political stories is just a waste of time. People aren't very good at understanding why they have the opinions they currently have; they're usually in no position to predict their future reactions. That goes double, of course, for something which they have very little knowledge about in the first place.

The other thing about the debt limit is that unless there's an actual catastrophe, the debt limit is purely symbolic. Which means (among other things) that unless people are out there talking about it, it basically doesn't exist in political discussion. It's still understandable that it's not a vote that Members of Congress want to take (and, of course, what they really should do is just get rid of it), but it's not as if voters are going to bring it up on their own a few months after it happens.

At any rate: nice catch!

Catch of the Day

One for Matt Yglesias, who makes a good point:

[T]he striking thing about American politics today is the extent to which politicians in congress don't reach agreements even when the American people aren't sharply divided.

The example he gives is about taxes; he correctly points out that the polling on taxes has the majority of Republicans actually support a deficit-reducing deal that relies on cutting spending and raising taxes.

In fact, it's sort of remarkable that thirty-five years after Ronald Reagan shifted on taxes, and over twenty years after the Gingrich revolt against George H.W. Bush solidified anti-tax extremism as the rarely contested orthodoxy of all national Republican politicians, the GOP rank-and-file is still incredibly resistant to the message.

That said, as Yglesias says, we shouldn't make too much of this kind of abstract issue polling. In fact, I'm not sure about this (his emphasis):

If key Republican leaders—John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, etc.—wanted to shake hands on a bargain that raised taxes a fair amount and cut spending by three or four times that amount, Obama would gladly take the deal and a strong cross-party majority of Americans would applaud.

Yes and no; depends on the "etc.", doesn't it? Let's say that those leaders agreed to it, but Rush Limbaugh opposed it and called it a sell-out...and so did Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, and so did a fair number of House Republicans. What, then, would the polling among Republicans show? I wouldn't want to predict that in advance. And I'm not at all confident that the pre-specifics polling about general attitudes about taxation would have any predictive power at all to the post-specifics, post-elite lineup, results. On the other hand, if President Cruz, Speaker Ryan, and Majority Leader Paul agree to the exact same deal and get it endorsed by Rush and the rest, then the rank-and-file are going to support it (for the moment at least!) almost unanimously.

All of which is to totally agree with the main point* he's making, which is that that policy-preference constraints by voters is at best a very minimal cause of Congressional polarization.

And: Nice catch!



*On the other hand, I don't think I can go along with Yglesias's (separate) complaint about the use of Jedi Council. On two counts. One is that there's nothing at all wrong with using references from inferior movies/shows/books whatever, including inferior sequels (or prequels, whatever). As anyone who has used Pacino's "just when I thought I was out..." quote will have to admit. And the second thing is that I think it's the case that the Jedi maintained peace in the galaxy for a thousand years before the events of the prequels. That's not bad! And if so, I think it's wrong for us to think of them as a bunch of easily-duped fools; it's just that we only saw that part of it. I say I think so, however, because I tried to look it up and realized that figuring it out would require a short course in Star Wars galactic history based on books, games, and more, and I really don't want to start down that particular path.

He's a Man You Must Believe

I never know how to take self-reports about information sources...it's probably not a very good idea to take them at face value.

But for whatever it's worth, I'm a bit intrigued at one bit from today's new Kaiser poll. It turns out that of the various sources of information about the ACA, people say they trust "your doctor or nurse" the most (quite sensibly, people claim to trust "social networking sites" the least, although that they say that doesn't, again, mean it's actually true). It's not anywhere close to the most used source; only 22 percent say they've recently heard something about ACA from "Your doctor or another health care professional." But what they hear, they say they trust.

What all this makes me wonder about is whether doctors are in fact a significant source of misinformation about Obamacare.

It's pretty unlikely, in my view, that doctors are particularly well-informed about the ACA -- at least, about the kinds of questions that consumers would have. Why should they be? I suppose some they would know about some of the cost-control reforms, at least to the extent that it directly affects them. But the whole exchanges/subsidies/mandate portion of it doesn't really have much to do with doctors, at all. At least not directly.

Meanwhile, doctors strongly tend to be Republicans, and I'd guess that doctors probably fit comfortably into the Rush Limbaugh listening demographic. The odds that doctors have heard, and would believe, various Obamacare myths strikes as very high. Are they then passing those myths along to patients (and others they meet)? And are people who might dismiss something if it was email forwarded from Uncle Larry assuming that if a doctor said it, it must be true? If so: how much of the misinformation out there does it account for?

Obviously, this is totally speculative. Any step in the logic I'm setting out here could be dead wrong, including the assumption that doctors are relatively uninformed about health insurance reform. I'd sure love to see a study about it, though.

Hey, Pollsters! What's a Deficit (To You)?

Paul Krugman flagged polling showing that people (incorrectly) believe that the federal budget deficit is rising, and Kevin Drum explains it as information lag: "It takes a long time for public opinion to change on stuff like this, and that's especially true when one side is loudly trumpeting false narratives." Could be! But there's more than one possibility here:

1. People mean the actual federal budget deficit, but are misinformed (Krugman/Drum).

2. People mean the federal debt, not the budget deficit, and correctly believe that the debt is still rising (suggested by Megan McArdle today and by several of us after Eric Cantor said the deficit was going up recently; this was if I recall correctly a big Mario Cuomo talking point in the 1980s -- if only Democrats would say "debt" instead of "deficit," they would win all the elections, or something like that).

3. People mean "economic bad times," not the federal budget deficit. Recall the voter who asked George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and some kook who security had accidentally let on stage during a presidential debate about how the deficit national debt affected them personally.*

4. People mean "stuff I don't like in the budget," not the federal budget deficit. Goes with what I call the GOP war on budgeting -- for example, if that's what you mean by "deficit," then of course the ACA increases the deficit regardless of what CBO says.

I'm confident that it's roughly split between explanations 4 and 3, but I don't really have any hard evidence for it, and all of them are plausible. I've asked before, but: Hey, pollsters! Help us out here! I'm not really sure how to go about testing this one...surely not simply posing these four possibilities. But it sure would be nice to have an idea about what people actually mean when they talk about the deficit.


*Corrected. I remembered this wrong; thanks to Drezner for the catch. Don't think it changes the point, though.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Kathleen Turner, 59.

Good stuff:

1. John Side does some teaching: why we should care what happens to Obama's approval rating. (I thought I remembered writing a version of this myself a while back, but I can't find it; either way, John's is better.

2. Kevin Drum on medical inflation.

3. And very good one from Ezra Klein on Bobby Jindal.

Catch of the Day

The Catch goes to John Sides for pointing out some interesting research from last year. As John sums it up, Jeffery Mondak and Jon Hurwitz found:

For civil libertarians dismayed at many (most?) Americans’ willingness to accept an expanded “national security state,” the problem may lie not so much with the threat of terrorism, but with a general failure to defend civil liberties.

That's worth knowing; terrorism isn't a special case, but part of a more general lack of commitment to civil liberties.

That's generally a pretty big problem for the small group (and I'm in that group) who really do consider civil liberties a priority. Basically, you can get lip service support, but it's not deep at all, and for many it doesn't take much to get to where the trade-offs are worth it.

What's more, the incentives for politicians are asymmetrical in a way that biases against civil liberties. That is: the downside of an incremental loss of civil liberties isn't ever going to be very large. But the downside, or at least the perceived downside, of insisting on civil liberties at the expense of some competing value is almost always going to be lopsided in favor of the other value.

And unfortunately, I don't think it's a problem that can be solved. About the best we can hope for is either luck of the draw with politicians who just happen to care about these issues, or, more likely, the courts stepping in.

At any rate: nice catch!

Presidential Approval Probably Isn't Stuck At Midrange

Ezra Klein poses a hypothesis I've heard a few times before at the end of a nice post earlier this week:

Tucked inside Abramowitz’s take is an interesting structural prediction about American politics: As party polarization increases and the persuadable middle dwindles, scandals and gaffes will become less meaningful as they’ll only be able to convince those who want to be convinced. It’s not clear that the IRS mess, Benghazi, or the DoJ/AP issue will rise to the level of being a useful test of this thesis. But something will.

It's tempting to believe that polarization is producing presidential approval results which are little more than reflections of partisanship. Barack Obama's Gallup approval history would seem to suggest that might be happening. His best rating of 69% ranks 10th best of the 12 presidents in the Gallup era, and is really in a tie for last with Nixon (67%), Reagan (68%), and perhaps Ford (71%). Everyone else had higher highs. And yet, at least to date, Obama's lowest point of 38% approval beats everyone but Ike and Kennedy. Obama's overall average to date is 49%; since the beginning of 2012, his weekly Gallup number has ranged higher than 55% and lower than 45% only once in each direction, and overall, outside of a brief honeymoon in 2009, he's been in that range almost his entire presidency.

And yet...there's no reason to believe that polarization has advanced significantly in the last fifteen years, but George W. Bush's approval ratings were all over the place. Bush holds the highest spike in the history of Gallup, hitting a soaring 90%. And when he crashed, Bush bottomed out at 25%, lower than everyone but Truman and Nixon. Bush's first term was, overall, fourth-highest (and also fourth farthest from 50%); his second term is tied for second-lowest (and also tied for second farthest from 50%).

Conclusion? Most likely, Obama's approval ratings have stayed in a narrow range mainly because there really haven't been that many events, and those that have happened have roughly balanced out. The economy has mostly been the same from 2010 on -- recovering, but not recovering enough to get people thinking "prosperity." The same, really, with foreign affairs; with the exception of the bin Laden killing, the administration can't really offer peace, but also isn't running up the level of policy disaster that occurred during the Bush presidency...good news (out of Iraq! overall casualties in Afghanistan way down!) seem to be balanced by bad (Benghazi -- the real event, not the phony scandal; the Boston bombing; various high-profile attacks in Afghanistan).

Granted, it could be that it's harder for events now to move the needle, but the reaction to events during the Bush administration just makes me very skeptical of that.

Obama Tracks W. Approval...Still

Barack Obama's Gallup approval rating ticked up to 50% today. It's the third time he's reached that mark over the last couple months, but both times previously he fell below 50% the next day; he hasn't had consecutive days at or above 50% since late February. In fact, there's a clear break: through the reading ending February 28 he was at or above 50% all but four days beginning with the November 7-9 survey; after that, 50% has been the peak.

What's fun to look at, at least for me, is that he's still closely tracking George W. Bush's approval ratings. Of course, that wasn't the case in the first three years of Obama's presidency. In the first several months he was more popular than Bush; after September 11, he of course fell far behind Bush's record performance.

But Obama caught Bush in spring 2012 (vs. spring 2004), and ever since they've been within a few points of each other. And so the most recent Bush 2005 poll, April 4-7, has him at...50% approval. Uncanny!

At this point, however, Bush was fading. He managed to spike up again to 50% for May 2-5, but that was the last time he would reach that point. Still, he was in the highish 40s (in other words, where Obama has been for the last six weeks) all the way to mid-July. So unless Obama moves sharply one way or another, they'll still be pretty close for a while.

No real larger point here. The two of them, Bush and Obama, were the least popular presidents re-elected after a full term during the polling era, and that's still true now, five months after the election. Not for long, though; Nixon is about to dive down below both of them.

More on Talk and Action and Agenda Setting and Climate

I wrote one over at Plum Line yesterday about a Media Matters push to get people to lobby the broadcast networks to run more stories about climate. My argument was that it's unlikely that such an effort would be successful, and that if the goal was more attention to climate, the more likely way to get results would be for activists to target politicians, and especially the president. Basically, the path going activists to parties to politicians to news coverage works better than the more direct activists to news coverage path.

After some pushback, I'm thinking that it wasn't the smartest item I ever wrote. Not that I got it wrong, exactly, but just that my focus on the narrow question wasn't really very helpful. So, I'm going with a long, rambling post that considers the more general issue from several different perspectives.

First, I agree with what Michael Grunwald tweeted: "Deeds>Words!" Along with a link to his argument (well, a short form of his argument) that "while it’s absolutely fair to complain that Obama doesn’t talk about climate change anymore, except at rallies when he’s firing up his liberal base, it’s also worth noting that he’s probably done more to prevent climate change than anyone else on the planet." Leaving aside whether he's correct about Obama, I think his general point is clearly correct: policy formation and implementation is more important than getting stuff into news broadcasts. The question is whether those things are independent of each other, but I think he's right that the Obama case shows they are at least largely independent of each other. For better or worse, a lot of the press doesn't cover policy, and so they can easily just miss important things that happen, especially at the regulatory level.

Second, digby raises a fair point about the bully pulpit:

I had thought the bully pulpit is not only useless, but often counter-productive, so this is a surprise to me. Ezra Klein explained it to us all in this New Yorker piece from 2012, wherein he outlined all the political science numbers-crunching that proves public opinion is fairly irrelevant to public policy and presidential rhetoric even more so. Indeed, the thesis says that while the president coming out publicly for a particular policy may be able to harden his own troops' resolve from time to time, he also hardens the opposition against him, so government basically can only be effective through the use of backroom deals and inside the beltway politicking:
[...]
So, considering how well the obsession wit the deficit has worked to make it a top priority issue,  I totally agree that the president should talk a lot about climate change.  I do think it makes a difference and I think the very act of doing it repeatedly puts it on the agenda and gives it an urgency.  Will he change climate change deniers minds?  Doubtful.  In fact, I agree that it may very well harden their opposition to any policies designed to prevent it, although it's hard to see how they could be more hardened than they already are.  But it could help persuade Democrats and Independents that this is something to which they need to pay attention and that's a necessary first step. So start yammering Mr President! 

See, this is where it gets tricky.

On the one hand: presidents can definitely get people talking about things, mainly by "agenda-setting" -- that is, by getting the news media to talk about things.

On the other, Klein's article was exactly right: it's not clear to what effect all that agenda-setting is for. And it has the potential to backfire.

Digby argues that Barack Obama's frequent public support of deficit reduction has had the consequence of pushing Democrats to become more likely to support deficit reduction in polls. That seems likely to me, but only because (with the president joining Republicans) there's an elite consensus, or close to it, for deficit reduction. But that wouldn't be the case on climate of course.

Moreover, and this gets back to Grunwald's point: to what effect? Suppose that liberals pushed Obama to talk about climate more often, and it had the effects I predict: he would in fact respond to that pressure by talking about climate more often, and it would yield more news coverage. Suppose that digby is correct that as a consequence, climate concern among Democrats would go up in polling...suppose even that Obama could change peoples' minds, so that the overall numbers on whether the government should do more on the environment tipped back towards the Democrats' position.

OK, then what? Would legislation be more likely to get through the current Congress? Not that I can see. Would the EPA and other government agencies be more likely to adopt tough regulations? Not really, I don't think; while public opinion might matter to them, relatively small shifts probably don't.

Would relatively small shifts in polling make it more likely that climate would be a higher agenda item for Democrats in 2014, or 2016? Harder to say...maybe? And that would very much be (if you want action on climate) a valuable result. But I'm not sure that the news media/agenda setting portion of it is really a particularly efficient way of getting there. Why not just directly organize within nomination battles?

And yet...on the other, other, other hand: as far as I understand it, the data we have on public opinion and the bully pulpit are mainly about short-term effects, and especially the (non-) effects of attempting to move Congress on specific legislation by changing public opinion. I don't think we know much, if anything (and I hope someone will correct me if I'm wrong) about long-term effects, if any. I mean, we know that Ronald Reagan didn't make US voters more conservative during his presidency...but I don't think we know anything about what, if any, long-term effects he might have had either on specific issues or ideology in general -- including effects concentrated within conservatives. Or, to put it the other way: we could have something here similar to campaign effects in which strong professional electioneering tends to cancel out; if one side saw the minimal effects results and decided to not campaign at all, we're fairly certain that it would create a very large effect. If Democratic presidents preach liberal ideals it might not change any minds, but if they don't, it might fail to "educate" a generation of Democratic activists.

I should wrap this up, but one more point. The holy grail on this, for climate activists, is to get mainstream conservatives (that is, non-crazy conservatives) to accept the scientific consensus on climate; if that happens, then it probably becomes relatively easy to get legislation done. Would agenda-setting through the media make that more likely? If it's accomplished by having a Democratic president talk more about it?

And yet what if mainstream conservatives would never be open to legislation? In that case, the best hope is for climate to be at the top of the Democratic agenda the next time they win a landslide and hold Congress and the presidency. Would more stories in the national press make that more likely?

I don't have answers to those questions. The main thing I would say is that the answers, from all we know from the research, are non-obvious. We really, really, should avoid any simplistic ideas about what presidents can do with their rhetoric...but should also be modest in what we know, and what it implies about what presidents should talk about.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Lucy Lawless, 45. OK: I wasn't really much of a Xena fan, at least not as far as actually watching the show. But I very much liked her D'anna.

The good stuff:

1. James Fallows on the costs -- to the US budget -- of Iraq and Afghanistan.

2. Micah Cohen looks at turnover in the Senate.

3. Ann Friedman interviews Chris Hayes, and talks quotas.

4. And a dissenting view to my post on public opinion, from Steve M. He argues that you can create "artificial" intensity that leads to action, which I said couldn't be done by presidents, by working at it in a sustained way for years. It's fair to say that there are some people who are partisan activists who were sparked by leading politicians, as opposed to those who became involved because some issue get them out of their houses. But in practice that's a very small group. Most of the people he's talking about, the Rush Limbaugh audience, don't become activists (more, although still a relatively small group, become avid consumers, but that's not the same thing). They learn, basically, the "right" answers to give on policy questions...but even then, it's not unusual to find that those answers are just a thin layer; that's why, for example, pollsters get surprisingly high rates of Republicans supporting some Democratic positions (minimum wage, background checks). Of course, the same happens on the other side, too.

The Real Reason Public Opinion Doesn't Work

Jonathan Chait gets it half-right:

At his remarks today touting support for background checks on guns, President Obama said, "Nothing is more powerful than millions of voices calling for change." Actually, since background checks command 90 percent in the polls but lack support from Republicans in Congress, pretty clearly millions of voices calling for change are less powerful than holding a House majority. They're also less powerful than a Senate majority. Or even 41 Senators, who can stop anything they want. A well-funded lobby probably beats millions of voices calling for change, too.

Basically, everything is more powerful than millions of voices calling for change.

See, the problem here is equating "90 percent in the polls" with "calling for change." Sure, 90 percent of citizens, or registered voters, or whoever it is will answer in the affirmative if they're asked by a pollster about this policy. But that's not at all the same as "calling for change." It's more like...well, it is receiving a call. Not calling.

Those people who have been pushing for marriage equality? They were calling for change. And marching for it, demanding it, donating money to get it, running for office to achieve it and supporting candidates who would vote for it, filing lawsuits to make it legal. In many cases, they based their entire political identity around it.

Action works. "Public opinion" is barely real; most of the time, on most issues, change the wording of the question and you'll get entirely different answers. At best, "public opinion" as such is passive. And in politics, passive doesn't get results.

Action works. Oh, not all the time: sometimes action on one side is met by action on the other side, and on some things there's just going to be a winner and a loser. Sometimes, too, action by some is not enough, or it takes too much time, especially in a political system that is even more biased towards the status quo than most.

What's more, it's perfectly understandable why most of us, on most issues, barely have opinions, let alone take action. Action is hard! Action can be painful. Action is risky. Action is unpredictable. We all have plenty of other things to do, after all. For the most part, we only take action when we can't do other things -- when something is so wrong that we just have to do something about it. It's almost impossible to manufacture that artificially...that's why presidential attempts to go over the heads of Congress to the people rarely work. Not because Congress will ignore their constituents. But because a president, no matter how eloquent or popular, isn't going to stir people to action on something just because they happen to agree with him. Meaningful action is too big a commitment for the tiny signal of a presidential exhortation to get it to happen. It usually take something with a much more direct effect on our day to day lives. But if it does happen, look out.

So, yeah, Chait is right about the strategy of going over the heads of Congress, and that's the key point to make about all of this from the perspective of what a president should spend time on. But from the point of view of citizens: yes, action can make a difference. And it may not even take millions.

What is Waste? Answered.

I linked to it from Plum Line yesterday, but I want to make sure everyone sees a great survey from Emily Swanson and Mark Blumenthal about what "waste" means to those who want to get rid of wasteful government spending.

This all came out of a post I wrote a whole ago in which I wondered about exactly that; it seems Swanson and Blumenthal decided to find out the answer. Cool! It's well worth reading the whole thing -- the data are fascinating -- but I'll quote the key paragraph:

When it comes to fingering specific programs for government waste versus pointing more generally to inefficiency or foolish spending, the survey results find little variation by party. But a more detailed look at which programs were named by Democrats and by Republicans suggests that for many, waste is indeed defined as "money spent on some government program I don't like."

That's about half of it. Interestingly enough, to me at any rate, the rest is split between two kinds of "real" waste -- that is, stuff the government supposedly spends without getting anything at all to show for it. Of that, about half is basically about politicians and bureaucrats living high on the hog. The other half is Swanson and Blumenthal classify as "Inefficiency/Fraud/Foolishness," but I'd note that a large chunk of that, such as unnecessary/ridiculous research, could easily be classified under programs, as well -- although to be fair, it's certainly possible that some of the objections to programs could be because of perceived inefficiency or fraud. Not criticizing the study or the analysis; it's just that it's hard to know exactly what people are thinking.

Fascinating stuff. And the emphasis on money wasted on salaries and "perks" of politicians certainly explains the latest round of lies from Michele Bachmann; there appears to be a receptive audience ready to believe that politicians are exploiting their positions for personal gain.

Anyway, it's great stuff. Now if anyone would like to find out what people mean when they say "deficit"...

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Mark Gardner, 51.

Right to the good stuff:

1. Patricia Wald: confirm some judges!

2. More on spending, presidents, and public opinion from John Sides.

3. Sarah Kliff interviews Jay Rockefeller: health care.

4. And Scalia is overrated as a legal thinker, says Scott Lemieux. 

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Terence Bayler, 83. Who? He's the guy who said, "A Samaritan? This is supposed to be a Jewish section" and "Well, obviously it's not meant to be taken literally; it refers to any manufacturers of dairy products." Also played The Bloody Baron in Potter, and was in an excellent episode of Upstairs, Downstairs, among other things.

1. Mark Blumenthal surveys what we know about the bully pulpit -- absolute must-read.

2. Gershom Gorenberg, sounding almost optimistic, on the Israeli elections.

3. The only way to deal with Republicans these days sometimes seems to be developing "why don't they just" lines. Kevin Drum has a solid one.

4. The latest from John Sides and Lynn Vavreck's The Gamble.

5. And a funny from Dan Amira (vaguely security theater related, so it's sort of politics, I suppose). Here's a question for what may be a slow news day: how do you rank Rob Reiner's first five movies? I'm pretty sure I'd put Harry Met Sally last...I could see a case for Tap, Sure Thing, or Princess Bride as the top one, and Stand By Me is awful good, too.

Yet More Monday Cranky Blogging

Gallup has a new piece out by Andrew Dugan about a supposed "second term curse," and noting that every second-term president in the Gallup era except for Reagan and Clinton had lower approval ratings averages in their second term than their first term.

Watch out!

A lot of this may only be regression to the mean. That is, if presidential approval is a coin flip set to an average around 55% over the long haul, then what you're going to find is that presidents with a first-term average north of that are going to fall back -- and those who fell short of it will rally. And guess what? The two (of seven in Gallup's summary) who improved were the two who, up to now, had the lowest first-term rankings. Reagan and Clinton tied at 50% average Gallup approval in their first terms; they held the record for re-election, until Barack Obama at 49% just edged past it.

One question is what would have happened to Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, and George H.W. Bush if they had been re-elected. It's possible they were just bad at the job (surely Carter was) and would have been very unpopular no matter what -- but it's also possible that they would have produced at least one addition to the "plus" side of things.

But Gallup ignores them by only looking at two-term presidents. And guess what? Most two-term presidents were pretty popular in their first terms -- that's how they got re-elected!

That's not to say that there's nothing to the possibility that second terms can be rough on presidents. But if what you're doing is looking at the numbers, you need to be careful about what they're really telling us.

Which is mostly to avoid a terrible recession or a war which appears pointless and hopeless. Oh, other things matter too; Clinton does better than Reagan, for example, mainly because of those other things. But the big hits, the stuff that chases first term presidents out of office or makes second term presidents unpopular, are mostly terrible economies or awful wars. But outside of Watergate, that's what's going to really cripple a president, sending his approval ratings south of 40% for an extended period.

The question is whether there's something inherent in second terms that leads to trouble, and that's a big and complicated question. But we're not going to get at it with this kind of analysis.

Ignore Those Polls!

Well, actually, sort of the opposite -- two great polling questions today furnished an excellent reminder of why all policy surveys should be taken with a monstrously large grain of salt.

First, one poll has 47% believing that going over the "fiscal cliff" will increase the deficit -- while in fact, the combination of tax increases and spending cuts will radically decrease the deficit.

Second, as Sarah Kliff reports, PPP invented and polled about an entirely fictional "Panetta-Burns" plan, and found that about a quarter of respondents were willing to state an opinion about it.

The point isn't that voters are stupid, which I don't believe, or even that they're just not very informed, which I do believe. The point is that most of us don't bother to develop real opinions about lots and lots of things, but yet are nevertheless willing to answer pollsters' questions.

Look, I'll give an example from something removed from politics. As regular readers know, not only am I a pretty serious baseball fan, but I write about it here all the time (and more; long ago, I published a few things in Baseball Prospectus, so yeah, I put in time and energy on this stuff). Indeed: every year I write a post about the Hall of Fame ballot, and I take those posts pretty seriously, doing enough research that I'm satisfied with the results. I've also read, thought, and argued quite a bit, about the Hall of Fame itself, and about virtually every player who comes up for a vote. And yet: since I'm still a couple of weeks away from my HOF post, I would really have to refresh my memory to see what I had decided about some of the close cases. And if I received a PPP poll asking me about the HOF ballot this year, I'm sure I would try to answer, but I also think there's a pretty good chance that I'd get one or more of the answers "wrong" -- in the sense that I'd give a different opinion than what I had written last year and will write again this year.

If that's true of me and the HOF ballot, just think how true it would be of the average voter and some issue she rarely thinks about. Of course you're going to get some goofy answers. Of course things such as question wording and other survey treatments can have a huge effect on the results.

Again: it's easy to make fun of the respondents, but that's the wrong reaction to this sort of thing. If all those people who got the fiscal cliff wrong suddenly were appointed to Congress and had to vote in committee on it tomorrow, they would bother to learn about it -- just as we all wait until we need it to learn all sorts of things in our lives.

So, you know, enjoy this stuff (and, yeah, I really wish someone asked more specifically if the tax increases and spending cuts in the fiscal cliff would increase or decrease the deficit). But just remember not to take public policy polling all that seriously. Yes, there are real opinions that we can get at with careful research, but it's very, very, easy to get junk even if you're trying to ask good questions. And not everyone is doing that.

Ignore Those Polls! (Or At Least Be Wary)

Remember, most people do not have strong opinions about most policy options. Therefore, the way they answer survey questions about issue positions can be massively affected by current news events, opinion leadership, question wording, and pretty much everything else. The effect probably grows larger the less people know -- and think -- about the issue. Something that's a long-standing policy question, or something that is part of ordinary life, might produce relatively stable views; those issues which are rarely in the news, or highly abstract, are likely to produce less stable answers. That is, answers which are even more highly dependent on recent information flows and on question wording.

Example: both Conor Friedersdorf and Dan Larison had posts up before the debate last night emphasizing the reluctance of the American people to get any "more involved" in "Middle East leadership changes." That's from a recent Pew poll. But in early September, just before the attacks in Benghazi, Pew found strong pluralities approving of the intervention there (44/33) and of Barack Obama's overall handling of Libya (49/32). 

In other words, current opposition to the abstract notion of US "involvement" in "leadership changes" turns out to utterly fail to predict reactions to something that sure appears to fit that characterization. At least, when things were going well -- or, I should say, at least when no apparent bad news was visible.

For candidates, I think this suggests that for low-salience issues such as these, there's probably a way to phrase things so that they don't sound objectionable to most voters. That is, if you want to, say, intervene in Syria in a particular way, there's probably a way to describe the underlying principle that would support such a move that can produce polling majorities. Unfortunately, there's also a way to describe it that will produce polling majorities against the policy.

For presidents, the most obvious point is that what matters on low salience items such as these isn't so much how something polls going in, but whether the policy actually works or not. Or at least avoids damage that would show up on the front pages of newspapers, especially damage clearly linked to the policy. Of course, that's probably true for all policies; presidents who believe, for example, that policies which poll badly will yield strong economic growth should almost certainly pursue those "unpopular" policies. At least as long as there's enough time for payoffs before Election Day.

All of which is to say that if Friedersdorf and Larison believe that, say, an intervention in Syria would be bad policy, then that's the best electoral basis for opposing it. Not what people told Pew about some abstract question about intervention.