THE CASE:
“Early polls don’t always foretell the fate of a first-term president. Does anything?”1
JANUARY 27, 20247:23 AM ET
Presidential approval numbers, like swimmers, cause alarm if they stay underwater too long.
President Biden’s approval numbers in the Gallup Poll have been “underwater” – meaning they have been below 50% — since August of 2021, his seventh month in office.
His Gallup has fallen as low as 37% at several points in the past 18 months
, including his readings for October and November 2023. Biden’s approval was 40% in the latest NPR/PBS News Hour/Marist poll in December. The average of national polls calculated by 538.com had Biden below 40% for most of January.
That’s not just underwater, it’s deep underwater.
Since modern polling began, the first-term presidents who were unable to reach 50% approval at any point within a year of their next Election Day have not won a new term.
Examples of those who were denied reelection include one-term Presidents Gerald Ford (1976), Jimmy Carter (1980), George H.W. Bush (1992) and Donald Trump (2020).
By that same token, incumbents who had better than 50% approval with a year to go to reelection have usually won – and often won easily. Think of Dwight Eisenhower in 1956, Richard Nixon in 1972, Ronald Reagan in 1984, Bill Clinton in 1996 and George W. Bush in 2004.
So 50% in the polls has become more than just another reference point. Yet there’s not really any predictive magic in that number or in polls in general.
Since World War II, four presidents have managed to win reelection after dipping below 50% approval in the Gallup at least once with a year or less to go to their moment of reelection truth: Harry Truman, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
Conversely, some incumbents who had at least briefly been above 50% in their final year were soundly beaten in November — including Carter and the first President Bush.
It is also worth noting that two incumbents who only barely broke above the 50% line when reelection was a year away still managed to emerge as landslide reelection winners. In the most salient examples, Republican Presidents Nixon and Reagan, who looked vulnerable to a pack of noteworthy Democratic challengers in the primaries of 1972 and 1984, each went on to sweep 49 states in winning another term.
Where else to look?
Election years tend to be dynamic, with incumbent presidents dominating the news – for good or ill. And fate has a way of taking a hand, as world events and domestic economic trends often weigh heavily in the November outcome.
The classic case of defying the odds and the oddsmakers was the shock reelection of Harry Truman in 1948. His approval number was still above 50% with a year to go, but it tumbled all the way to 36% in April of 1948.
If presidential approval numbers
are not perfect predictors of an incumbent’s reelection, is there something else that is? Observers have long sought the True North by which to set their compass and their expectations.
Pollsters have often used some version of the question: “Are things in this country generally going in the right direction or have we gotten off on the wrong track?” While the negative answer is always more popular, the width of the gap between “right direction” and “wrong track” has been a rough guide to the fate of the incumbent president for at least the past 40 years.
Popular election prognosticator Charlie Cook published a chart
in July 2020 citing data from the Roper Center at the University of Connecticut and the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll showing a strong correlation between the width of that gap and the presidential outcome. It showed the “wrong track” answer was chosen by an average of 70% and “right direction” by just 23% in the five most recent presidential election years when the president (or his party) lost. The gap had averaged 46 points in those years (1980, 1992, 2000, 2008 and 2016).
When the numbers for “wrong track” and “right direction” were closer to even, the results were quite different. The two responses were just 7 points apart (49% to 42% on average) in the five election years when the incumbent (or his party) actually won (1984, 1988, 1996, 2004 and 2012).
But it is worth noting that while this polling question did predict the outcome in the Electoral College, it twice failed to predict the winner of the popular vote. “Wrong direction” was the leading answer by 18 points in 2000 and by 31 points in 2016, years in when nominees of the incumbent party (Democrats Al Gore and Hillary Clinton) both won the popular vote.
More recently, in 2022, this same question and a similar one about voters’ general sense of satisfaction (a question asked by the Gallup Organization) have consistently found 70% or more saying “wrong direction” or “dissatisfied.” That seemed a sure sign of a “red wave” of Republican victories in that year fall’s midterm elections — a wave that failed to materialize.
In 2016, William Jordan, U.S. elections editor for the YouGov polling organization, published an analysis
questioning the value of the right direction/wrong track question as an election predictor. His point was that “wrong track” responders tended to blame different factors (and parties) for what was wrong. Moreover, such responders did not agree on what the “right direction” would be.
Confidence in economics?
Yet another way of gauging the national attitude toward an incumbent president is to shift the focus of measurement from the voter to the consumer. While it is the largest economy in the world, the U.S. economy is still consumer-driven and dependent on the relative willingness of ordinary citizens to buy goods and services.
That willingness is rooted in necessity, of course, but also driven by ability to pay and faith in the future. No surprise, then, that rising consumer confidence coincides with rising confidence in government and especially in the nation’s chief executive.
The University of Michigan has been compiling statistics and calculating an index of confidence on the part of American consumers since the mid-1970s, a time when that level of confidence was at the center of national politics. Ford, who took office when Nixon resigned in 1974 under threat of impeachment, struggled to manage a weak hand on several economic fronts. Energy costs were surging, employment growth was stagnant and inflation was approaching double digits.
So consumer confidence, which had climbed when Nixon was president, slid to 75.6 on the 100-point University of Michigan scale in the final quarter of 1975. That number improved somewhat in 1976, the year Ford was seeking a election to a term in his own right. But it was too late and too little to save him.
Carter, the man who replaced him, was also beset by energy shortages and inflation and the consumer confidence index fell to 63.3 one year before he was to face the voters – and Reagan, his opponent.
Initially, Reagan struggled with the same mix of economic problems his predecessors had. But as his reelection year approached, high interest rates and recession had finally corralled inflation. The pain of these policies had begun to ease, Reagan’s tax cuts were popular and business was picking up. The Michigan index hit 91.1 when Reagan was one year away from reelection.
The boom years lasted long enough to boost Reagan’s vice president and successor, George H.W. Bush, in 1988. But they did not last for Bush himself. The consumer confidence number was just 69.1 by November 1991, when voters were first learning the name of Bill Clinton, who 12 months later would make the first Bush a one-termer.
These examples suggest the consumer confidence number is at least as potent a predictor as the approval polling. But here again, the intrusion of other factors and the dynamics of the election year itself can change the picture dramatically.
The second President Bush had a Reagan-like consumer confidence metric of 93.7 in November 2003, yet barely won a year later with the narrowest reelection margin of any president since 1916). Trump, too, was sailing along with a dizzying 96.8 consumer confidence index one year before losing to Biden by 7 million in the popular vote. The difference was COVID and all that followed.
Biden can look to the consumer confidence index for two notes of encouragement. One is that his weak index of 61.3 in November 2023 has improved since, jumping to 69.7 in December as gas prices moderated and other economic indicators improved. The other is that Obama, the last Democratic president to win reelection, did so one year after his consumer confidence index had been just 63.7. It went up most months in 2012, including a well-timed bump up over 80 in the month before the election.
Other guideposts in economics: jobless numbers
Another option is to correlate presidential prospect with certain economic measures that can be presumed to be weighing on voters’ minds.
Perhaps most prominent among these is the unemployment rate compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It measures the percentage of able-bodied workers currently without a job but seeking employment. The so-called “jobless number” appears on the first Friday of each new month, often to great fanfare as to its political as well as economic significance.
Elevated jobless numbers are a bad omen at the start of a president’s reelection year. But several incumbents have managed to overcome them. Going back half a century, first-term presidents seeking reelection have had unemployment rates that averaged 6.3 percent one year out from Election Day.
But incumbents whose number was higher than that average have been reelected no less often than those whose number was lower. A year out from their reelection test, both Obama and Reagan had unemployment figures above 8%, twice as high as the postwar average of 3.5%
One reason both Reagan and Obama survived was that both were seen as hauling the economy back up out of serious recessions. Reagan saw unemployment go above 10% for the first time since the Great Depression. Obama came to office just as the U.S. economy was sliding into what would be called the Great Recession. But both could point to growth (Obama at 4.6% and Reagan at a rip-roaring 8.6%).
Both Reagan and Obama could tout lower inflation. Reagan inherited double-digit inflation from Carter, but he also kept the inflation-fighter Paul Volcker in place as Federal Reserve Board Chairman.
Even the sky-high mortgage rates of the 1970s and early 1980s were beginning to decline as Reagan was wrapping up his first term. They would soon fall to single digits and continue downward to the sub-4% territory they reached in the Obama and Trump years, before government spending to counter the effects of the COVID-driven downturn reignited inflation. That inflation shot up in Biden’s first years in office, but a Volcker-like clamp-down by the Fed once again proved effective. Biden was able to begin his reelection campaign with inflation numbers comparable to Reagan and Obama’s at the same point in their presidencies.
The “misery index”Rate hikes by the Federal Reserve Board slammed the brakes on inflation in 2023 and raised fears of a recession. While a downturn has yet to develop, the possibility of one conjures memories of the low-growth/high-inflation “stagflation” of the 1970s that proved fatal to the presidencies of Ford and Carter.
Running against Ford in 1976 Carter highlighted something he called the “misery index,” a simple combination of the jobless and inflation rates. When Ford was one year away from Election Day the combined “index” was 15.7% and a heavy burden indeed. Four years later, entering his own reelection year, Carter would be looking at a misery index of 18.5% Biden at similar low point was 6.8% and Trump was a full point lower still.
With a November 2023 jobless number of 3.7%, Biden was approaching the postwar average — usually a marker of good things ahead. But is he is getting little credit for it, in part because of the inflation that flared and persisted during his term. For many Americans it was their first real dose of what inflation can do.
“These are challenging times for forecasting,” according to Stanford Economics Professor Neale Mahoney, who notes the improving health of the actual U.S. economy has not been reflected in public opinion.
“The rise of social media as a prominent information source — with its tendency to amplify bad news — may be fraying the link between economic fundamentals and consumer sentiment,” Neal has written
. “The partisan factors we document may intensify as the November election approaches.”
_______________________________________________________
1 Elving, Ron. “Early Polls Don’t Always Foretell the Fate of a First-Term President. Does Anything?” NPR, NPR, 27 Jan. 2024, www.npr.org/2024/01/27/1225563900/polls-predictor-election-inflation-jobless-misery-index-approval-rating.
PAPER PROMPTS:
Please Note: There are many interesting ethical issues embedded in this case, but for the purposes of this assignment please stay focused on the issues of epistemology – specifically on using induction as a reliable means of gaining knowledge.
- How do you think Locke would respond to the reliability of presidential elections predictions based on voter polling and/or the use of the various indices in the above article? Is it logically reasonable to infer the future winner of the elections based on historical patterns and current polling results? In defending your response, include a brief explanation of Locke’s theory of epistemology with special emphasis on induction and causation. (Hint: you do not need to go as far back in the theory as his concept of the “tabula rasa.”) Be sure to explain what induction is and why Locke supports it as a reasonably reliable means of gaining knowledge. (25 Points)
- How do you think Hume would respond to the reliability of these presidential elections predictions based on voter polling and/or the use of the various indices in the above article? Can certain historical patterns and current polling results be used to predict the probability of who is likely to win the next presidential election? In defending your response, include a brief explanation of Hume’s skepticism and why he rejected the principle of induction and the principle of universal causation. (25 Points)
- With which of these two philosophers do you find yourself most inclined to agree? Briefly defend your answer comparing relative strengths and weaknesses of each theory. (10 Points)
DETAILED INSTRUCTIONS AND RUBRICS FOR PAPERS
INSTRUCTIONS:
Articulating complex ideas and applying them to practical contemporary problems are essential skills in Philosophy. In this course, you will post three short Case Studies (See the discussion on the third paper option in your Syllabus). These papers are a required part of the course. You can find the specific subject paper topics in each of the modules on the assignments page.
Begin by reading the assigned pages in our text for the philosophers for this case and the above article from NPR. Once you have done some further research into the case, you should then answer the three questions provided above in the paper assignment prompt. The completed assignment should be approximately 1000 words, not counting your end-notes or footnotes. Please follow the assigned format as exemplified at the end of this document. Each answer should be separated, numbered and of proportionate length to the number of points possible. This study is worth a total of 60 points. Please take note of the different point value for each question and draft your responses accordingly.
Use correct spelling, punctuation, and grammar. The papers must be completed by the due dates specified on the assignment itself and also specified in the Course Calendar and on the syllabus. You may develop your response by typing directly into the Canvas rich content editor window or you may upload your paper from a Word Doc or Google Doc on your computer. You may use either end-notes or footnotes. I found that writing the assignment in Word, then uploading it when complete was the easiest way to do end-note citations. When you have finished entering your answer click on the “Submit” button. Once submitted you cannot go back and change your response.
The Canvas Doc Team (Links to an external site.) offers detailed instructions for submitting papers online.
General Suggestions for Writing Case Study Papers
I. Focus & Relevance
Be sure that you understand the assignment and have understood each question. Your responses should be focused on the questions I’ve asked & not the questions you wish I had asked! It is important to weed out all irrelevant considerations or concerns that an economist or historian or political scientist might have but are not strictly speaking, ethical concerns. Look at the completed sample case study for some ideas.
II. Format
This assignment has a very specific format that is probably not similar to papers you may have written before. No overall introductory or summary paragraph should be included. This paper has three sections corresponding to the three questions in the prompt and each section is graded separately (see the rubrics below). Each response to those questions should be numbered and separated with headings following the format of the assignment. Please do not re-type the entire prompt. Example:
- First Philosopher’s Name
- Second Philosopher’s Name
- Conclusion (your position on the case).
III. Tone/Voice
Ever since George Carlin pointed out that “using your own words” would result in a private and hence meaningless expression, I’ve had to give up on the phrase. However a certain degree of originality is still important. Your task is to explain a concept as if you were the Teaching Assistant for this class. If you simply repeat the text or my lecture, you haven’t helped your imaginary student. You need to clarify the argument/concept in a way that demonstrates that you really understand it and can express the same ideas in a way that is different than has already been explained by the text or by me.
IV. Adequate and Balanced Defense of Your Argument
In question one and two, you are asked to make an argument using the philosophers we’re studying. You should be clear in your thesis in the first sentence of the first paragraph of each section (and your own thesis should be in the first sentence of section #3). It is important to ensure that your application is consistent with the philosopher’s theory and that you support that application with a well-thought-out defense. Your analysis should reflect a degree of familiarity with not only the philosophical theory but also the key facts of the issue gleaned from a number of reputable sources. You should include counter-considerations that are relevant to that theory and could impact the philosopher’s conclusions.
V. Quotes & Footnote & End-Note Citations
All direct quotes, references, data, and close paraphrases should be cited properly using standard MLA format. All citations should be presented as end-notes, or footnotes, not works cited and definitely not as a bibliography with no actual citations. Hypertext links in the body of your paper for the endnotes do not need to be provided – this is something that has been autoformatted by Word when the sample document provided below was pasted onto this Canvas page.
Quoting is a way of supporting your interpretation of an argument or theory and is critical to a scholarly endeavor. Relevance to your response and to the question asked is critical. Quotes can be edited to shorten them but be careful not to take the quote out of context, thus altering the intent of the author. The length and number of quotes must be appropriate to the length of the assignment; short papers require shorter and perhaps fewer quotes.
Most of the quotes on the philosophers should be from primary sources – i.e. should come from the original author’s works, and not from the secondary commentary of the author of our text nor from my lectures, nor my power points. If the quote was found in our text, they need only be cited with the page number of our text where it was found (see sample completed assignment). However, quotes from all other sources must be fully and completely cited.
You should not use quotes that I’ve already used in my power-point slides! No quotes should come from sources such wiki-quotes, intelli-quotes, brainy-quotes, Mill-quotes, etc. as these are insufficiently scholarly and often include misquotes. All close paraphrases and every piece of data/factual reference should also be cited though not necessarily encapsulated in quotation marks.
An additional really valuable use of footnotes and end-notes is moving the actual data, or a discussion or definition which would be a distraction in the body of the text to the end of the paper. This way the reader is provided with the relevant information but the flow of the argument presented is not interrupted.
I believe that footnotes and end-notes are easier to make in Word, then upload the document to Canvas, though citations can be done manually using the rich content editor in Canvas. Footnotes are also very easy in Google docs but endnotes can be frustrating using this program. You can do endnotes in Google Docs but you will need to download and install a free end-note generator to convert footnotes into endnotes. Google Docs does not convert the Arabic numbers (1, 2, 3, 4) into lower-case Roman numerals (i, ii, iii, iv) but please don’t worry about this as Arabic numbers will be fine for this assignment. (Hypertext links connecting the endnote numbers in your text to the endnote citations are not required. In the sample the hypertext links in the endnote numbers were added automatically when a word doc was pasted into the Canvas page.)
An additional really valuable use of footnotes and end-notes is moving the actual data, or a discussion or definition which would be a distraction in the body of the text to the end of the paper. This way the reader is provided with the relevant information but the flow of the argument presented is not interrupted.
VI. Length
Part of the criteria for success is effective use of the space allowed. If you write just 600 words for a 1000 word assignment, you have not satisfied this criterion. However, this is not an invitation to use the additional space for stream-of-consciousness or irrelevant information not pertinent to the assigned issue. If you are having difficulties with the length, it is usually because you have not recognized or developed sufficiently the various issues involved. Conversely, if your draft is too long, you need to whittle it down to just the relevant essentials, perhaps editing out the anecdotes or redundancies; more is not always better! I am very willing to help if you submit drafts sufficiently before the due date.
In each section, the length of your responses should be proportionate the the maximum points possible for that prompt. This means that sections 1 and 2 should be roughly 2.5 times longer than section 3.
VII. Research
Please note that one aspect of your grade noted in the Rubrics for this assignment is that “Responses reflect thoughtful and detailed consideration of not only background material provided but also a further familiarity with the events, facts, and history surrounding the Case provided.” This means that in order to present a good argument in support of your conclusion, it must not only be logically coherent but also an informed argument, backed with some research into the case.
There is so much information easily available on this topic. You might start with a couple of good articles that provide excellent background information:
- From ABC News – Morris, G. Elliott. “What Are the Best Pollsters in America?” ABC News, ABC News Network, 25 Jan. 2024, abcnews.go.com/538/best-pollsters-america/story?id=105563951 .
- and, another good one from MIT Sloan School of Management (Lots of equations that lost me but the overall discussion and list of references at the end should be particularly useful) – Barnett, Arnold, et al. “The Polls and the US Presidential Election in 2020 ….and 2024,” Statistics and Public Policy (American Statistical Association) , MIT Sloan School of Management, 2024, mitsloan.mit.edu/sites/default/files/inline-files/The%20Polls%20and%20the%20US%20Presidential%20Election%20in%202020%20%E2%80%A6.and%202024%20(A.%20Barnett).pdf.
VIII. Use of AI-Generated Content & Plagiarism
Plagiarism and the use of AI-generated content are prohibited on all writing assignments in this course. For a further discussion of this policy, please refer to the pages entitled, “Academic Integrity,” and “Course Policy on Use of AI Generated Content” in the Orientation Module.