I was exchanging messages today with Charles Franklin, who was a key person behind pollster.com and is responsible for both the Marquette Poll and the Survey Monkey Poll
We got talking about Clinton’s approval ratings. Clinton is really the only other President whose approval ratings tanked in the first 6 months. Does anyone remember why these numbers changes so fast in May?
Here is the file with approval ratings for every President since Carter. Warning – right now it is raw:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/zsd7w31iyv7ukz6/gdp.xlsx?dl=0
I’m guessing the Waco siege.
Followed closely by “Travelgate.”
Very good memory.
My first vote for president. I remember those 8 years like it was yesterday.
My first Presidential campaign. Like your first lover, you never forget it even though you look back and see they weren’t really that great. It felt so good to be fighting back. And that special closeness with your comrades.
I could point to one big thing — and it’s completely in accordance with with the timeline. However, there were other other matters that contributed fuel.
January 1993 – setting up the healthcare task force. People hadn’t realized that Clinton had no plan when he ran for office. Appointing Hillary as the chair didn’t sit well with Republicans and many Democrats.
Questionable appointees. Didn’t please the left and “nannygate” handed the right a legal/ethical issue.
March 29, 1993 CS Monitor– Nunn to Open Hearings On Military’s Gay Ban
Clinton’s posture on this felt like a betrayal to many gays and equality supporters on the left and the right viewed Clinton as being behind Nunn’s openness.
May 1993 – Not so much initiators as much as reinforcers –
TravelGate. LATimes
(Later revelations were more damning but those weren’t known or even suspected at that early stage.)
May 30, 1992 David Gergen appointed WH aide. This was a public acknowledgment that the Clinton WH was a disorganized mess and that only Republicans know how to run a WH.
The biggie was February 28 – April 19, 1993 – Waco Siege. It really was horrendous.
From Clinton’s autobiography: the budget barely passed on May 31. Lani Guinier was withdrawn in the first few days of June. His budget passed the Senate 50-49. Clinton mentions Koresh and the Travel Office in April.
No one single event,just a sense that the White House was making a lot of mistakes. And in fact they did.
Clinton spends a page and a half on his haircut.
The haircut was on May 13. Relatively minor but it did contribute to the narrative that had been building. (A page and a half on it? A four sentence paragraph would have sufficed to own it as a dumb move, but the Clintons tend not to own their sheet.)
Here’s the Senate roll call on the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993. It was actually 50/50 and Gore was the tiebreaker. Only one obviously curious no vote, Frank Lautenberg. Two provisions didn’t help Democrats:
Transportation fuels taxes were raised by 4.3 cents per gallon.
The portion of Social Security benefits subject to income taxes was raised from 50% to 85%.
Might have been better to go for a smaller fuel tax increase with a provision for increases based on inflation. Gas prices did spike in August 1994. Next apike began in 2000.
Wasn’t that Obama? Doesn’t really matter, it was a Democrat pissing on FDR’s grave.
Good news: Trump has dropped to a 40% approval rating.
Bad News: Democratic Party has hit a recent new low at 38.5% approval.
OTOH, the Republican Party is at 37%.
Difference is that the GOP favorable trend line is up and the unfavorable is down; whereas the Democratic Party favorable line is falling, but the unfavorable is flat. So, the DP net unfavorable is less than the GOP net unfavorable. Not unlike the net unfavorables for Clinton and Trump. Somehow “we suck less” isn’t working as well as expected.
He had campaigned on a jobs program, but the jobs program he eventually produced was loaded with extras (including some DOD programs) and a small fraction of what he campaigned for and even that was killed by Dole. Also, two of the first things he proposed were gays in the military and the BTU tax. The first was replaced by DADT while the second was DOA; neither was particularly popular.
He talks about the replacement of the BTU tax in his autobiography as well.
That’s what I recall. “He campaigned on the economy then expends his political capital on gays in the military?” And now he is reviled for compromising on it!
Can’t compare numbers in time due to extreme polarization after the year 2000 – the SCOTUS intervention to appoint the next president.
One must also realize, it took time for Bill Clinton to grow into his presidency as his popular vote represented a record low figure – 45 million or 43%.
Part of the point is that low numbers are not permanent. One might argue, and I would agree, that the ceiling is lower and the floor higher as well (the latter certainly was true with Obama).
But Obama’s numbers relative stability themselves may have been a product of the relative stability of his last 5 years in office – which saw reasonable stability in the economy and an absence of events like 9/11, the Gulf War or the Russian invasion of Afghanistan.
Crunching numbers is never an easy task, I prefer above graphs for global analysis …
An indication for post Obama years could be interpreted from extreme low level in popularity from opposing party from 2009 until 2016. Call it
partisanship, or better racial prejudice and build-up of white anger. Result: vengeance in electing Trump for white-supremacist America in 2016.
There is another way to think of this and of Obama and Trump. It comes from a someone connected with Shaheen’s office:
The explanation for Trump is that he was a hand grenade thrown at an establishment that did truly grasp the stagnation of rural and middle America. But it was suggested to me that so was Obama. Obama had little experience himself. He represented something very different thematically, but most importantly he was never viewed as part of the establishment. In this telling the fact he was African American as a strength – it highlighted that he was not part of elite.
It is worth noting in counties in Iowa and Wisconsin something interesting in rural counties. In both states Obama broke a relatively long trend. This was a reflection of the same instinct behind Trump – and instinct that no longer trusted elites. Conversely in the suburbs Trump broke long standing patterns with Labor and lower income voters.
Both in fact are much more common than realized. The same voters who created Trump – and remember here we are talking about 6-9 percent of the electorate – created Obama.
Why is this important? Like the years after Watergate, the establishment is in crisis. One can argue that from 1988 to 2008 there was a restoration of the establishment. In 2005 this restoration collapsed. You can see this in the right track/wrong direction numbers, which have never recovered since 2005.
But unlike the period after Watergate and Vietnam, the establishment has not re-established their credibility. This was the fundamental mistake Clinton made: she was a restoration candidate in a time when the establishment was still in crisis. So Obama is popular because he is not part of the establishment but she is. In fact a key part of her message was she was the steady hand – an elite.
Viewed this way the risk to Trump comes from being seen as a conventional politician. People view the system as broken; THEY WANT the hand grenade to explode.
This also explains that when strangers professed Trump and one countered with Bernie, you mostly got “Oh, he’s good too!”, meaning “He’s an outsider too”. If you got “He’s a Socialist!” or “He’s a Communist!”, you know you were talking to a Republican not a true independent.
Yes! They want revolution not evolution. They are tired of waiting for Hope and Change that never comes.
The grievance is based on something real:
A blueprint for revolution and the epicenter is here in the USA. Dare I say here in the formerly industrial Midwest? Instead people have once again, as in 1980, turned to the snake oil salesmen representing the 1%, because they, at least, acknowledge the problem! However, the (R) cure for economic anemia is more bleeding. That and bowing down to a bigoted bloodthirsty hypothetical hyperbeing first conceived in the bloody Mideast 5000 years ago.
It’s as if during the French revolution the people rioted in the streets shouting, “YES! We want MORE aristocrats and churchmen!”. Of course, back then, the Left didn’t say, “You want a few more personal privileges but first surrender all you have to the Lords.”
Yes, a small plurality but he won the EC. Bigly.
So by today’s logic, he wasn’t really President because he didn’t get 50% of the popular vote so the CIA should have taken him out and installed Gore as President. Or maybe Tom Foley.