Are Presidential Approval Ratings Still a Good Indicator of Midterm Success?

June 29, 2022

This morning I sat through a two-hour presentation by the Cook Political Report on how bad things look for the Democrats this fall. While there is polling data in some districts and states that supports this, the biggest factor driving expectations is something that I think is merely political convention wisdom: the president’s approval ratings. It is true that historically the president’s approval ratings has been associated with his party’s success in the midterm elections. However, the conventional wisdom always misses when things change. The folks at CPR acknowledged some ways in which the political environment is different now, but they didn’t tie it into Biden’s approval ratings. And a new poll from Quinnipiac (A-) might show that low presidential approval ratings are not the drag they used to be.

Today’s poll has Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock (D) beating Herschel Walker (R) by ten points (54-44). CPR has the Georgia Senate race as a toss-up based on the previous polling. They sounded like they thought Biden’s approval ratings would likely sink Warnock. This poll finds Biden’s approval at 33%, which gives him a -27 rating. So we know that something else is going on here. The respondents in this sample are not giving Biden high marks; in fact, his approval rating is where we expect it to be in Georgia right now.

Other Senate seats that CPR thinks will be toss-ups right now do not look like it in the polling. In Pennsylvania, Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman (D) is beating TV grifter Mehmet Oz (R) by four to nine percent in the latest polling (Trump’s pollster has him up by six points) and Oz’s approval/favorability numbers are terrible. SurveyUSA (A) has former Chief Justice Cheri Beasley (D) beating Rep. Ted Budd (R) by four points in North Carolina (although there are a good number of undecideds in that race). Quinnipiac’s Georgia poll is just one survey and it could be an outlier. We’ve seen really good pollsters have big misses before.

Let’s be clear: the polling is not good for Democrats, especially when considering historic midterm patterns. But it’s not always bad. Let’s also be clear about another thing: the media is helping to drive those numbers down.

Midterm elections are not usually good ones for the party controlling the White House (particularly in a president’s first term). Like so much of the political conventional wisdom we hear from pundits, there are important historical exceptions and there may be changes to the political reality that pundits are not appreciating. While we only have about 50-75 years of reliable scientific polling (depending on how you define that), we have 232 years of electoral results to consider. In understanding how the phenomena of midterm results works, we do not need to consider any polling data. However, as we will see, bad polling data for the party controlling the presidency in a midterm year suggests bad news for that party.

If we consider only just the last 100 years in American politics, six presidents saw their party gain seats in one house of Congress in a midterm election, including 2002 and 2018. Two presidents – FDR (1934) and George W. Bush (2002) – saw gains in both houses. To be sure, these are exceptions. In all other cases – there have been 25 midterm elections in the past 100 years – the party controlling the presidency lost seats in both house of Congress.

From 1932 until 1994, Democrats controlled both houses of Congress except 1946-48 and 1952-54 and Republicans controlled the Senate from 1980 until 1986. Republicans losing seats to Democrats often made little difference to the balance of power – and the reverse was also true. The rotating balance of power in Congress is a recent phenomenon. Does that matter? It might, especially in a polarized electorate in which approval ratings might bear less of relationship with voting patterns.

The stakes are higher when a few dozen seats can mean not just a change in parties, but a complete change in governing philosophy. This may especially be the case this year with recent Supreme Court decisions to overrule Roe v Wade and throw out New York City’s gun control law, as well as the revelations of how Trump worked with Congressional Republicans to overthrow the Republic on January 6, 2021. The stakes are very high this year and in 2024. Organizing and GOTV may mean more than ever in today’s midterms. A successful GOTV operation is thought to gain one or two percent more voters. In a close electoral environment like ours, this is important movement.

The media is a driver of polling data right now. Why? Because rather than reporting news, more and more media outlets are framing it for voters. There are two different types of major media sources in the US right now: the “mainstream media” (MSM) and the right-wing propaganda ecosystem (RWPE). The former – which includes liberal and conservative news sources – is guilty of creating attention-grabbing, sometimes clickbait, headlines to pull in customers. So, controversy is created or exaggerated for that purpose. We have discussed this previously in critiquing the way media frames polling stories. The latter – which includes media outlets like Fox News, Newsmax, and OANN – simply lies, often outrageously so, in its effort to pull in customers. So, how does this impact the polling?

The mainstream media has an interest in taking on the party in power. The right-wing propaganda ecosystem has an interest in taking on the Democratic Party. With Trump in the White House, the messages coming from the media seemed like a split in realty. The RWPE almost never said a critical word about any Republican, unless one criticized Trump. The MSM had a treasure trove of attention-grabbing headlines due to the constant corruption and casual cruelty of the Trump Administration. With Biden in the White House, one might think the realities would flip but the dynamic would stay the same.  However, believing that betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what each media type is doing.

The MSM is not doing whatever it can to support Biden and the Democrats. The MSM is not even a coherent ideological bloc. It contains conservative media like The Economist and The Wall Street Journal as well as liberal media like The New York Times and The Washington Post. The MSM needs eyeballs for its advertisers and subscriber bases, but these media adhere to journalistic standards in their reporting. None of these news sources are going to give Biden or Trump a break in order to help them politically. Maybe on their editorial pages, but not in their reporting. The RWPE understands what con artists understand: scare people and tell them what they want to hear, and they will throw money at you. And that is how the RWPE operates. So, with Biden in the White House they want to destroy him as much as they wanted to cheer on Trump.

This says something about the audiences as well. In general, consumers of the MSM are more sophisticated than consumers of the RWPE. This can very clearly be seen in the coverage over the 2020 election Big Lie that RWPE media continue to advance about without it losing them many – if any – customers. MSM consumers want real information, even if they interpret it in varied political ways.

We can expect that the ~40% of voters who still support Trump would get their news mostly from the RWPE. Biden is not going to get an approval rating of more than 60% as long as these voters continue to consume the RWPE diet. But, getting to 60% is a tough road for Biden because unlike the Republican base, Democratic voters and Independents and Republican consumers of MSM will express disapproval when they think it’s merited. Now an even trickier part: Disapproval of Biden does not equal conservative opposition to him. I know many progressives who would certainly express muted approval if not outright disapproval for Biden right now. Not one of these folks would consider voting for the 2024 Republican nominee against Biden. The real concern is whether they might stay home at election time.

Politics is not physics, and not just because it is impossible to replicate the conditions of any election in any subsequent election, but because politics is about human relationships and choices not laws of science. At the moment, the polling looks bad for Democrats. This being a midterm election with a Democratic president, the historical evidence looks bad for Democrats. The combination of the two looks really bad for Democrats. But still: in the end, those persons who get out and vote this November will decide and it’s not too late to convince them to buck the trends.

Make no mistake, the polling does not look good for Democrats this fall and neither do the fundamentals, whether political (redistricting; presidential approval rating) or economic (inflation). But, the thing pundits may be missing about our polarized electoral landscape is that presidential approval ratings might no longer represent how people will vote – at least for Democrats. Biden is getting hammered in the polls, but some of the loudest people complaining about him are liberals and progressives who are frustrated about what sometimes seems like an inability of the party to deliver on its promises to voters. These folks are not going to vote for Republicans. They might stay home, but that’s another problem.