Charlie Cook is Kinda Wrong

I like Charlie Cook. He's a very smart guy knows as much about congressional elections as just about anybody. But he's just kinda sorta wrong in his read of what the debates did to the race. Here's part of his analysis:

A strong performance in that first debate would have probably closed the sale for Obama. Instead, his lackluster showing shifted a bunch of voters who had seemed to be drifting gradually in his direction back into neutral, with some reversing course and moving into Romney’s column. ... But this is a horse race, a very close one that can still go either way, and that was not the case before the first debate. The debates—and I would say all three of them—hit a reset button for Romney and put him back into this contest.

The notion that Obama could have "closed the sale" with a strong performance in the first debate is pure nonsense. Similiarly, the notion that "this is a horse race, a very close one that can still go either way, and that was not the case before the first debate" is also nonsense.

Step back and think about the logic of this. The idea Cook is selling is that Obama had a nice lead before the first debate (this is true but it was already starting to recede) and that he could have just held that lead and coasted if he had "a strong performance." This is just fantasy.

The race was already starting to tighten before the first debate. Contrary to what Cook and others think, Obama did not have a disastrous debate performance. If he did, that would be reflected in the polls with his job approval sinking. It isn't. In fact, his job approval has gone steadily up in October. What happened in the first debate is that Romney looked credible after several months of being bashed by Bain Capital ads, discussion of Romney's tax returns, the conventions, and Romney's 47% comments. In the wake of all that, by the end of September, a certain number of voters (a small number but enough to make a difference) who do not care for President Obama were unsure they could support Governor Romney. When these voters saw Romney in the first debate, where he seemed, in a word, presidential, they simply went where they were likely to go in the first place. Polling says they were moving in that direction already. The first debate accelerated that. But it was underway. Some of you may remember that this is exactly the logic I outlined way back in early March when I asked whether Romney would be a credible alternative.

Importantly, there was no possibility that a "strong performance" by the President in that first debate was going to "close the sale." That's just utterly silly.

And let me add just one point to this. You might ask, why does it matter if Charlie Cook has it wrong? What's at stake in this? For starters, Andrew Sullivan, who spent more than a week on the ledge with some insane ideas about what happened in the debate is going to open that window up again and will start threatening to jump. This is sad because I enjoy reading Sullivan's blog and now I'll have to avoid it for another week or so. Second, and more importantly, this nonsensical meme has now infected some of the smarter, more reasonable minds in the journalist class, like Charlie Cook. Whether Obama wins or loses (though it will be worse if he loses), we'll hear this nonsense about how the President looked down too much during the first debate and that's why Romney caught up. It just isn't true.

Monitoring the Debate Bounce II

I mentioned yesterday that one reason Democrats shouldn't get too panicked about the post-debate polling is that Romney's gains seem to be just that ... gains for Romney rather than a drop in support for Obama.

This morning, Gallup released their tracker which now includes close to 50% of their sample as post-debate interviews and the topline was unchanged from yesterday (Obama leads 49-46). Similarly, Rasmussen released their tracker which now includes 100% post-debate interviews and their numbers were unchanged from yesterday as well (Romney leads 49-47).

If we use these new numbers to extrapolate out the size of the bounce the same way I did yesterday, we find that Romney got a 4-point bounce in Rasmussen's tracker and is headed for a modest 2-point bounce from Gallup. Average the two and you get a 3-point bounce overall.

But, as I mentioned above, the gains seem to be gains for Romney rather than a drop in support for Obama. Obama's job approval rating in Rasmussen's tracker was 49% before the debate and it is 50% today. The President's job approval has ticked down in Gallup's tracker since the debate but it is still 48%.

Overall, today's numbers (so far) seem to suggest a leveling-off of Romney's post-debate surge. Whether it is just because it has reached its half-life or because the jobs report news is starting to mute it, I think it is starting to look more like it is in line with the 1-2 point bounce I initially predicted.

UPDATE: The Reuters/Ipsos tracker is also unchanged from yesterday (Obama leads 47-45) and that tracker is now almost entirely made up of interviews from after the debate. So, the post-debate Romney bounce seems to be cresting at about 3%.

Will Romney Be a Credible Alternative?

Presidential campaigns in which there is an incumbent running for re-election are really about whether people want the incumbent to stay in office for 4 more years. There are generally two pre-conditions that must be satisfied in order for an incumbent president to lose: First, the incumbent needs to be unpopular. The most obvious measure of this is the president's job approval rating. When President Bush was re-elected in 2004, 51% of voters that day approved of the job he was doing (according to exit polls) and he received 51% of the vote. But job approval over 50% is not the only pre-condition. Even if the president is unpopular, the challenger must be a credible alternative. Generally, the party out of power does a good job of choosing someone who is a credible alternative. That, after all, is what the primary process is about. John Kerry satisfied that condition in 2004 but Bush was just popular enough to win a second term. Bob Dole was certainly a credible alterative in 1996 but President Clinton was quite popular. Bill Clinton was a credible alternative in 1992 and 41 was quite unpopular so Clinton won. A fair argument can be made that the last two major party nominees to not quite be credible alternatives facing incumbent presidents were McGovern (1972) and Goldwater (1964). Both lost in blowouts and both were facing presidents with strong approval ratings.

Let's take a quick look at where we are on these two measures. First, job approval:



Obama's job approval has improved steadily since the summer of 2011 and the improvement has arguably been driven by two things - improving consumer confidence and the ramping up of the Republican primaries which have made Obama look pretty darn presidential. Forgetting about the positive trajectory, it seems as if Obama is at a point right now where he would be likely to be re-elected if job approval were the only thing that mattered. But he's not a tremendous distance from a place where the second question, the credibility of the alternative, would matter. So let's take a look at the favorability ratings for one Willard Mitt Romney:



This is not good. Romney's unfavorables have shot up in the last few months. To give that the most negative spin, we might say that just as the American public has gotten to know Romney better and just as the American public has had to start digesting the idea of Romney as a potential nominee and a potential president, they have found more and more to dislike about him.

UPDATE: First Read posts favorability numbers for some recent party nominees. Romney compares rather badly. Most notably, John Kerry (also trying to beat a somewhat vulnerably incumbent) was at 42/30. To be fair though, Kerry already had the nomination effectively locked down for a few weeks by this point. I expect Romney's numbers to improve at least a little once the party rallies around him. But he still won't be where Kerry's numbers were and Kerry ... ya know ... lost.

A more sympathetic read of Romney's numbers might be that this has been a bruising primary and, when it is over, Romney's numbers will start to improve. That's probably true to some extent. But one thing about unfavorable numbers is that it is particularly hard to move the unfavorable numbers down. Voters who don't have a strong impression can certainly be brought over. Voters who do have a strong impression are hard to move. And negative impressions are harder to change than positive impressions.

The 2012 election is going to be about Obama ... as long as Mitt Romney is a credible alternative. If he's not, then Obama has a bit more room for error with the economy, Iran, gas prices, whatever. In 1980, Jimmy Carter lost because voters did not approve of the job he was doing but that was not enough. It was Reagan's credible performances in the debates and in the campaign generally that allowed voters to vote for him in the general election. It is a long way to go until November. But Romney has not yet passed that threshold and he seems to be moving in the wrong direction right now.