Too soon to tell?

 Donald Trump currently has a narrow lead in the polls (about 1% in the 538 average), so all you can say now is that it could go either way.  But what if one of the candidates opened opened up a substantial lead--how much would that tell us about what is likely to happen in November?  I looked up surveys from late May/early June in presidential elections from 1948-2020 and compared the margin in the survey to the actual popular vote margin in November.*

The regression is y=.44x, where y is the election margin and x is the May survey margin.**  

There was a large residual in 1948, which was a notorious failure of the polls, followed by pretty good predictions in 1952-1968.  Then there were large errors in 1972, 1980, 1984, 1988, and 1992--in the first four of those, the Republicans did substantially better in November than the May surveys suggested, and in 1992 the Democrats did substantially better.  Since then, the predictions have been pretty good, except for 2008, when there was an obvious reason for a late shift towards the Democrats.  A graph of the absolute value of the residuals:

The sample is small, so you could plausibly claim the apparent pattern is just a matter of chance.  However, I think that there probably was a real change.  In the earlier years, there was fairly strong party identification based on ethnicity, region, religion, and family tradition.  Although candidate qualities and current conditions made a difference, the main thing that happened during the campaign is that some of the people who had been thinking of voting against their normal party would drift back "home."   Then there was a stretch when party identification was weaker, so that events during the campaign could make more difference.  That was followed by a period in which party identification became stronger again, but now based more on ideology.  

Note:  Through the 1960s, only one organization (Gallup) regularly did election polling.  The number has grown since then, and in recent years you can calculate an average based on large numbers of polls.  In order to make things comparable, I just selected one survey for each election, based partly on the date (whatever was closest to May 24, when I compiled the data) and partly on my judgement about the general reputation of different organizations.  

*Of course, the candidate who leads in the popular vote may not win the Electoral College, but that's a different issue.  

**If you include an intercept, the estimate is -1.7 with a standard error of about 1.7; the estimated coefficient for x is still .44.  A non-zero intercept could mean either a consistent bias in the polls or a tendency for the vote to shift in favor of a particular party during the campaign, neither of which seemed likely in principle.

The future ain't what it used to be

 Back in 2011, I wrote about the question "As you look to the future, do you think life for people generally will get better, or will it get worse."  It's been asked once since then (in 2018), so here is an update.  

         Better  Worse  Same   DK         Net

Feb  1952    45   33     12   10           +12
July 1962    55   23     12   10           +32
Jan  1979    46   46      3    6             0
Sept 1989*   57   28     12    4           +29
Jan  2009    61   31      3    5           +30
Aug  2018    53   40      2    5           +13

At the time, my main point was simply that opinion had been a lot more pessimistic in the 1970s than it was in the most recent survey.  This point continues to be relevant, but the difference between 2009 and 2018 is also interesting.  In recent years, Republican assessments of things seem to have been more affected by the party of the president than Democrats:  Republicans become substantially more positive in Republican administrations and more pessimistic in Democratic administrations, while Democrats are less variable.  Consequently, other things equal, average opinion is more positive under Republican administrations (an example).  This has been suggested as a reason that opinions about the economy today are more negative than you would expect from the basic economic conditions.  This question could be an exception--opinion was less optimistic under Trump than under Obama.  However, the 2009 survey was taken at the very beginning of the Obama administration, when there seemed to be a general feeling of goodwill.**  It's unfortunate that it wasn't asked again during the Obama administration.

Breaking it down by party identification, and adding 1979 for comparison, here is the percent saying that life will get better:

            Rep       Dem      Ind

1979         50%       44%     49%
2009         53%       70%     59%
2018         61%       48%     51%

In 1979, party differences were small (and Democrats were least optimistic); by 2009, they were substantial, and they didn't grow between 2009 and 2018.  

*This question asked about people in the United States over the next ten years.  The same survey also asked about people in "developing nations" and "other industrialized nations" over the next ten years:  answers were slightly more optimistic (60%-20% and 64%-16%).

**It was actually taken a few days before Obama's inauguration.  

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Wrong track, right time

 Back in 1971, an Opinion Research Corporation survey asked "Do you feel that things in this country are generally going in the right direction today, or do you feel that things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track?"  The question has been asked many times since then, by a number of survey organizations.  I wrote about it in February 2017, and then forgot about it.  But I recently rediscovered the question and in this post I'll will update the figures and look at several periods in more detail.

As I observed in my previous post, people were not especially discontented at the time of Trump's election--only 31% said we were going in the right direction and 62% said we were on the wrong track, but those figures are close to the sample averages of 34% and 58%.  Moreover, there was no downward trend (actually a small positive correlation with time in 1971-2016), which goes against the popular idea that Trump's election was a response to a long period of growing  popular frustration.  The question hasn't been asked as frequently in the Trump and Obama administrations as it was at times in the past, but it seems that opinion generally became more positive, despite political turmoil and the Covid pandemic, up to the last time it was asked (January 2022).  

Opinions hit a low in December 2008, but since that time the most striking thing is that they've varied in a pretty narrow range--the figure shows the first and third quartiles, and 33 out of the 40 observations since March 2009 have been in between those.  I checked a few of the surveys, and opinions seem to have become more closely related to partisanship than they were in the past--supporters of the president's party are more likely to say we are on the right track--which may help to explain the decline in variation.  

More generally, opinions are clearly related to economic conditions, but can't be fully explained by them.  Opinions also seem to be related to presidential approval--see the highs during the first Gulf War and early in Obama's presidency--but have held up under two unpopular presidents.  I'll look at the relationships in a future post, and see if there is any pattern in the residuals.  

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Who can you trust?

 A couple of years ago, I wrote about a question asked in 1974 and 1976 and revived in 2001--"how much trust and confidence do you have in the American people as a whole when it comes to making judgments under our democratic system about the issues facing our country--a great deal, a fair amount, not very much, or none at all?" I recently discovered that this was part of a series of questions about "trust and confidence" in various things related to politics.  I'll consider some of them today.  First, the updated figure for the American people:

There is a decline, which seems to have been especially sharp between about 2010 and 2015, but has continued since then.  (The one relatively high figure in recent years was in a survey taken just days after Joe Biden's inauguration).  

Next, one on trust and confidence in "men and women in political life in this country who either hold or are running for political office."

It's a similar downward trend, but there is more year-to-year variation.  It was unusually high in 2008--maybe that was because of Obama.  It also rose during the Trump administration, which seems surprising, but might have been because of Democrats uniting in opposition to Trump.  But overall, they track each other closely--the correlation is 0.84.  

Next, one on trust and confidence in "the government of the state where you live when it comes to handling state problems."

There is a downward trend, but it's weaker than with the two previous questions.  There are some unusual cases--very high in 1998, then low in 2003 and 2009-11.  The 2009-11 figures are probably because of the recession, which squeezed state government finances.  Economic circumstances may also have contributed to the high in 1998, but I can't think of any reason for the 2003 low

Finally, trust and confidence in "local governments in the area where you live when it comes to handling local problems."  

There's no discernible trend, and not much year-to-year variation (by my rough calculation, not much more than you'd expect from sampling error alone).  The figures for 2021 and 2023 are the lowest since the 1970s, so maybe a downward trend is starting to emerge, but 2022 was at a normal level.  

People are often more favorable towards things that are close to them (for example, the local schools vs. schools in general), but the differences here involve the trends.  You might expect confidence in "the American people" to be highest, and that was true in the earlier surveys, but is no longer true today.  My interpretation is that the declines for the first two questions are a reaction to conflict and polarization in national politics--ironically, confidence in state and local governments has held up because people pay less attention to them.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]