Over the last few months, the public's attention has shifted dramatically from a single-minded focus on combating terrorism to concerns about the ailing economy. That's a big and politically significant change: A bad economy almost always hurts the incumbent president's party in congressional elections.
While this shift in our collective concern should mean a big advantage for the Democrats as the 2002 elections approach, you would never guess that fromcurrent press coverage. It seems instead that with President Bush's popularity sohigh, the press can't quite believe that politics is moving onto pro-Democraticterrain. So reporters look around for polling data that will allow them todownplay the significance of the shift toward Democratic issues.
Take the front-page article by Alison Mitchell in The New York Times from the first Friday in January. In the article, which reported on Senate majority leader Tom Daschle's speech attacking Republican economic policies, Mitchell declined to mention the shift in issue salience and in fact implied that Republicans might even have gained the political upper hand on economic issues. "Democrats," Mitchell wrote, "have lost the edge that they gained in the Clinton years as the party most trusted to start the economy moving."
Trouble is, the party that voters trust most to be effective stewards of theeconomy tends to be heavily influenced by long-term partisan judgments; it is apoor and at best lagging indicator of voter reaction to economic change. Forexample, on the question of which party voters trust more on the economy, sevenpoll readings from 2001 suggest a relative parity: Sometimes voters said theypreferred the Democrats; sometimes, the Republicans. Neither party appears tohave gained or lost a big advantage on the economy thus far in the Bushpresidency. Moreover, NBC/Wall Street Journal poll data on this same questionfrom Clinton's second term average out to be about even as well. Contrary toMitchell's assertion in the Times, the Democrats of the Clinton years overallweren't really working with a big advantage to lose.
But that story doesn't jibe with how the press is viewing current politics. Sorather than the real story about the sharp shift in public concerns, we insteadget poll factoids--which are at best deceptive, and at worst inaccurate--thatpurport to illustrate the accepted story line: The Republicans, buoyed by thepresident, are in ascendance; the Democrats are in decline.
The truth is the reverse, as a look at the surveydata reveals. Alate September poll by Ipsos-Reid, for instance, showed that respondents trustedthe Democrats more than the Republicans by 15 points on jobs andunemployment--issues that are increasingly urgent as public attention turns fromOsama to the recession. Poll data from Louis Harris show a rapid rise in theportion of the population who feel directly affected by the recession. And whileless than a fifth of the population say they feel directly affected now, thisnumber will grow as the recession persists, with predictably adverse affects forthe incumbent presidential party.
Growing worry about the economy is not the only bad news for theRepublicans. Education and health care, both traditionally Democratic issues, areof increasing public concern. According to Democracy Corps surveys, thepercentage of people concerned about education increased by 7 points, and thepercentage of people concerned about health care increased by 9 points, betweenNovember and December of last year. Health-care problems, of course, are acutelysensitive to the state of the economy: The number of people concerned with thisissue will increase as more of them are affected by gaps in coverage. And healthcare is one of those issues, like Social Security and the environment, on whichthe public heavily favors Democrats over Republicans--by an average 18 percentmargin in 2001.
All of this bodes ill for the Republicans. When combined with a domesticagenda (on tax cuts, the environment, health care, and Social Security) thatranges from not very popular to just plain unpopular, this doesn't leave the GOPmuch besides Bush's status as war president to run on in 2002. And if electionresults from throughout the twentieth century are any guide, a war presidentprovides little help to his party at all [see Ruy Teixeira, "DiffidentDemocrats," TAP, November 5, 2001].
Maybe the conventional wisdom is right. Maybe the apparent shift in thepolitical terrain will do much less for the Democrats than history wouldsuggest. Maybe, because of the war and other factors, such as redistricting, thepower of incumbency, and deep campaign pockets, the Republicans are actually ingood shape. But there's little in the polling data that would lead to thatconclusion. Polling has its limitations, of course, but one thing it is usefulfor is testing the accuracy of the conventional wisdom. Now if only the presswould use it that way.
