It Is Too the Economy!
by Nate Silver
FiveThirtyEight.com
Sean Trende at Real Clear Politics has a nice post up critiquing the notion that the perilous state that the Democrats and President Obama now find themselves in has entirely to do with the economy; instead, he thinks unpopular domestic initiatives like health care and cap-and-trade deserve a significant share of the blame.
You should go read Sean's article in full if you haven't yet; I'm entirely agreed with him that it's a bit too simple-minded to say "Economy, stupid!" and leave it at that. The relationships between the electorate and its Presidents are more complicated than that; so for that matter are the relationships between economic variables and measures like Presidential approval in the statistical record. But I think Trende is being somewhat too literal-minded in his counter-critique.
Sean cites the unpopularity of health care and cap-and-trade as being major contributing factors to the difficulties Obama is facing. We probably ought to remove cap-and-trade from the discussion: polls show that (i) nobody knows what it is; (ii) to the extent they think they know what it is, they actually kind of like it. And it was only passed through one chamber of Congress, and this happened more than a year ago. Perhaps at the margins there will be one or two congressional districts in the Midwest where a Democrat voting yea will lose his seat as a result, but if you think cap-and-trade ranks higher than about the 25th biggest problem that Democrats have, you're spending too much time watching The McLaughlin Group.
Health care, on the other hand, clearly deserves a major place in any narrative about the political climate. Technically speaking, it's merely somewhat unpopular, rather than wildly so -- but the passions it invokes are asymmetric in ways that cut against the Democrats.
(More here.)
FiveThirtyEight.com
Sean Trende at Real Clear Politics has a nice post up critiquing the notion that the perilous state that the Democrats and President Obama now find themselves in has entirely to do with the economy; instead, he thinks unpopular domestic initiatives like health care and cap-and-trade deserve a significant share of the blame.
You should go read Sean's article in full if you haven't yet; I'm entirely agreed with him that it's a bit too simple-minded to say "Economy, stupid!" and leave it at that. The relationships between the electorate and its Presidents are more complicated than that; so for that matter are the relationships between economic variables and measures like Presidential approval in the statistical record. But I think Trende is being somewhat too literal-minded in his counter-critique.
Sean cites the unpopularity of health care and cap-and-trade as being major contributing factors to the difficulties Obama is facing. We probably ought to remove cap-and-trade from the discussion: polls show that (i) nobody knows what it is; (ii) to the extent they think they know what it is, they actually kind of like it. And it was only passed through one chamber of Congress, and this happened more than a year ago. Perhaps at the margins there will be one or two congressional districts in the Midwest where a Democrat voting yea will lose his seat as a result, but if you think cap-and-trade ranks higher than about the 25th biggest problem that Democrats have, you're spending too much time watching The McLaughlin Group.
Health care, on the other hand, clearly deserves a major place in any narrative about the political climate. Technically speaking, it's merely somewhat unpopular, rather than wildly so -- but the passions it invokes are asymmetric in ways that cut against the Democrats.
(More here.)
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