Make Trump less terrible again?

 There have been a number of questions of the form "what kind of president X will be [has been]:  great, good, average, poor, or terrible."  I calculated a net score for Donald Trump, with great +2, good +1..... terrible -2."  

The first time it was asked was in April 2011, when there was some talk of him running for president; the second was in January 2016, when he was a contender but not yet the clear favorite.   It was asked again in March, August, and October 2016, when he was the favorite and then the Republican nominee.   Then there was one in December 2012, after he was elected but before he took office, another in June 2020, and two in early 2021 (Jan/Feb and March).  Finally, there were two during the 2024 campaign.  Basically, there seems to have been a drop as people got to know him during the 2016 campaign, but a pretty steady rise after that point.  January 6 doesn't seem to have hurt him--his score in late January/early February 2021 was a little higher than it had been in June 2020.  But then there is the exceptionally favorable assessment in December 2020--still more negative than positive, but only slightly.  What explains it?

Here is the percent saying that he will be (or was) a great president:

That's a pretty steady increase as he solidified his position among Republicans (although it's worth noting that his highest figure is still below the 23% who rated Barack Obama as great in December 2016).  

Here, the December 2016 survey stands out, with an unusually low number saying that he would be terrible.  Apart from that, it didn't vary much between 2016 and 2024.  

I think that the drop in "terrible" ratings in December 2016 reflects "diffuse support" for the political process:  people were willing to put their doubts aside and give the newly elected president a chance.  Unfortunately no parallel question was asked for Biden immediately after his election in 2020.  Hopefully it will be asked again for Trump in the next month or so.  I would guess that the effect has weakened or disappeared, partly because people know him better, and partly because general support for the process has become weaker:  that is, the share who expect him to be terrible would be about the same as during the campaign.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Public opinion on immigration: the Trump and Biden years

 Andrew Gelman recently reposted something I wrote on immigration in 2016.  That reminded me that I should update another old post on immigration, which summarized answers to a question on whether immigration should be "kept at its present level, increased, or decreased."  Opinion had shifted towards "decreased" until the mid-1990s, but steadily moved towards "increased" after that.  As of 2016, "decreased" was still more common than "increased," but it was getting close.  Here is the updated figure:

In 2020, the balance was on the side of increased for the first time (34% increased, 36% present level, 28% decreased), but that was followed by four years of shifts against immigration, so opinions are now about where they were in 2002-4.  

On some issues, opinions shift with party control of the presidency.  Sometimes there is a general "thermostatic" movement against the administration's policy, or what people perceive as its policy:  when a Democrat is in office, people shift away from support for spending on social programs; when a Republican is in office, they shift towards more support.  There's no sign of that here.  Sometimes there are shifts that differ by party:  people see conditions as worse when the other party is in power.  That is, a Republican might think that levels of immigration were OK under Trump but out of control under Biden, and shift from "present level" to "decreased."  I got the breakdowns by party for some of the recent surveys:

People of all parties have generally moved in the same direction at the same time.  There was a substantial increase in the gap between parties in 2014-19, but only a slight increase since then.  To put things in another way, during Biden's term both Democrats and Republicans moved towards saying that immigration should be decreased, and the movement was only slightly larger among Republicans.  That leads to a question of what they were reacting to.  Most people don't have much personal experience that would help them in judging levels of immigration; but to the extent that views reflect news coverage, you'd expect growing divergence based on differences in coverage between mainstream and conservative media.  

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

 

All together now?

In the 2020 presidential election, Joe Biden got 51.3% of the vote and Donald Trump got 46.8%, for a Democratic lead of 4.5%; in 2024, Kamala Harris got 48.1% and Trump got 50.1%, a Democratic "lead" of -2.  So on the average, Democrats lost ground among voters, but that doesn't mean that they lost across the board:  in certain groups, their vote might have held up better or even increased.  My last post looked at demographic groups; this post will look at states.    

The figure shows the Democratic lead (%Democratic-%Republican) in 2024 compared to 2020.*  The line represents a uniform shift against the Democrats.   The correlation between the leads in 2020 and 2024 is .994 (.993 if you omit DC).  But geographical patterns persist over time, so in order to decide if that's a large correlation, you need a standard of comparison:  is it bigger or smaller than the usual correlation between successive elections?  So I looked at presidential elections since 1972.  The 2020-24 correlation is the largest in that period; the previous record was .993, between the 2016 and 2020 leads.  In fact, the correlation between the 2016 and 2024 leads is .984, which is larger than the correlation between any previous successive pair.   That is, the geographical pattern has been very stable in the three elections where Trump has been a candidate:  Democratic made almost uniform gains in 2020 and suffered almost uniform losses in 2024.  

The degree of stability has increased over time:  1984-88 was the first successive pair to break .9,  1996-2000 was over .95, and 2008-2012 reached .982.  The 2012-16 correlation was lower, at .952, but that was still high by historical standards.  So the basic story in recent elections is one of stability.  Some observers have said that in 2024 the Democrats lost more ground in "blue states" or that their vote held up better in swing states, but I don't see evidence for either of these claims.  There is a statistically significant correlation between state population and 2020-24 change--the Democrats lost more in the bigger states--but this is largely driven by the four biggest states (California, Texas, Florida, and New York), so I'm not sure if there's really anything there.

In the course of doing this analysis, I noticed something unusual.  For thirteen of the fourteen elections considered, their highest correlation was with the immediately preceding or following election.  The exception was 1972--its correlation with the pattern in 1976 was only .42, which was lower than its correlation with any of the other elections.   Its highest correlation was with 1988 (.87) and it has a substantial correlation (.70) with the pattern in 2024.  So in a sense, 1972 seems to have anticipated future elections in terms of the geographic pattern.   It also anticipated the future in another way:  it was was the first election in which college education was associated with Democratic rather than Republican voting.  

*The District of Columbia is not shown because the Democratic lead was so large in both elections.

Group differences in voting, 2016-2024

 After the 2020 election, I had a post showing how different groups voted in 2016 and 2020, according to Edison exit polls.  This post updates that with information from the 2024 polls as reported by CNN. :

                                         % For Trump

 

                                        2016               2020                    2024

Men                             52%                     49%                  55%   
Women                        41%                     43%                 45%

White                            57%                    57%                 57%
Black                            8%                      12%                13%
Latino/a                      28%                     32%                 46%
Asian-Am.                  27%                     31%                 39%

White Men                 62%                     58%                 60%
White Women            52%                     55%                53%
Black Men                 13%                     18%              21%
Black Women              4%                       8%                   7%
Latino                         32%                     36%                55%
Latina                          25%                     28%                 38%

Age 18-29                   36%                     35%                43%
        30-44                   52%                     55%                48%
        45-65                   52%                     49%                54%    
        65+                      52%                     51%                 49%

Urban                           34%                     37%               38%
Suburban                      49%                     48%                51%
Rural                             61%                     54%               64%

White Coll.                   48%                    49%                45%   
White non-C                 66%                     64%               66%
Non-W coll                   22%                     27%               32%
Non-W non-coll            20%                     26%               34%

under $50,000               41%                     42%               50%
  $50K-49,999               49%                     43%               51%
   $100,000+                  47%                     54%               46%

LGBT                            14%                     28%               13%
Not LGBT                     47%                     48%               53%

Veterans                         60%                    52%               65%     
non-Vets                        44%                     46%               48%

W. Evangelical              80%                    76%              82%
All others                       34%                     37%              40%

Although the exit polls have large samples, the way that they are constructed means that the group estimates can still have fairly large errors, so I focus on the ones that showed a trend over the three elections.   The ones for which I see a trend are in boldface.  Some people talked about his Trump's gains among "minority" voters in 2020.  I was skeptical then, but now I have to agree that there is something going on.  With black voters, the share is still small enough that there's room for doubt, but Trump definitely made gains among Latin and Asian voters.  They may be following the general path of assimilation previously followed by white ethnic groups like Irish Catholics. 

The estimated gender gap among whites was 10% in 2016, 3% in 2020, and 7% in 2024:  that is, despite the Dobbs decision, it didn't change much.  But it did increase among Latins and maybe blacks. Trump has made solid gains among Latinos and black men, smaller gains among Latinas, and smaller and possibly no gains among black women.

Trump made gains with higher income people in 2020, and in 2024 lost ground with them while gaining with low-income people.  That is interesting if it holds up, but overall the differences are small.  Educational differences are large in all elections, and didn't change much.  

 My general assessment is that Trump made gains across the board between 2020 and 2024:  there was not much realignment.  Of course, there's always a good deal of continuity, but I think that the changes between 2016 and 2024 are less striking than the differences between 2012 and 2016.

Inflation and incumbency

 Many people say that inflation was a major cause of the Democratic loss on Tuesday.  But inflation hasn't stopped governing parties from being re-elected in the past.  The figure shows margin in the popular vote and inflation in the previous term.

Under Biden, inflation averaged 5.0% a year, and the Democrats trail in the popular vote by 3.0 (47.7% to 50.7%), as I write this (it will probably get a little closer as more votes are counted in California).  In Richard Nixon's first term, inflation averaged 5.0%, and he won in a landslide.  The correlation between average inflation and margin is just -.22.  

What if people consider the trend--is inflation higher or lower than it was in the past?  I tried average inflation in the administration minus average inflation in the previous administration, and found a stronger relationship:  a regression coefficient of -2.25 with a standard error of 1.04.  After a little experimentation I found an even stronger relationship with inflation in the past year minus average in the previous administration*:  

The correlation is -.65 and the regression coefficient is -2.8 with a standard error of 1.0.  There are two big outliers:  1964 and 1972.  Apart from that, all of the elections are close to the predicted values.  Of course, inflation isn't the only important economic condition.  I added per-capita GDP growth in the first three quarters of the election year (from Ray Fair) and a dummy variable for for an incumbent president running.  The estimates:

Constant        -1.65       (2.92)
relative inf    -1.93        (0.79)
GDP               1.35       (0.65)
Incumbent      5.07        (3.35)

The current value of relative inflation is .92.  The model suggests that if it were zero (ie, the same as inflation under Trump, which averaged about 2%), Trump would still lead, but the gap would be only about half as large.  

The estimated effect of incumbency is large and the predicted value would favor the Democrats if Joe Biden had been the candidate.  The standard error is large, meaning that there's a lot of uncertainty about the size of the incumbency advantage (or even if there is any advantage).  But even if it were smaller, I don't think it should be interpreted as meaning that Biden would have done better than Harris.  A large part of the incumbency advantage comes from the ability to go on TV and speak to the nation--sometimes to try to get support for their policies, but sometimes speaking as leader of the nation rather than leader of a party (e. g., after a natural disaster).  Some presidents have been better at that than others, but they all could do it effectively at least some of the time.  Trump was an exception--it's just not the way he operates.  Biden was also an exception:  he couldn't do it very well, and for much of his term he didn't even try (or if he did, I've forgotten).  Part of that was age, but even in his prime it was a weak point, maybe because he was from a small state where personal relations mattered more than media skills. There have also been general changes that probably reduce the advantage--the fragmentation of the media means a presidential address doesn't reach as many people, and increased partisanship means it's harder to win them over.   

*This is similar to Robert Gordon's "inflation acceleration" and "excess inflation." 

Last post before the election

 The polls suggest a very close election, but there is often some systematic polling error--in 2016 and 2020 Republican support was underestimated.  One potentially relevant factor is that there was unusually high turnout in 2020--the rate rose from 60.1% in 2016 to 66% in 2020.  Infrequent voters tend to be less educated, which today means that they tend to vote Republican.  That may have contributed to the underestimation of Republican vote in 2020.  It seems likely that turnout will be lower this time, which reduces the chance that the polls will underestimate the Republican vote and to the extent that they have tried to correct by giving more weight to less educated respondents, makes them more likely to overestimate the Republican vote.  So if I had to guess, I'd say the error is likely to be in the other direction this time--that Harris will run ahead of the polls.  

  The figure shows turnout in 2020 and 2016 by state (from this source):

Turnout increased in every state--the reference line shows a uniform increase.  There are several states that had a relatively large increase, but only one of them is a swing state--Arizona.  

A couple of bonuses: first, an update on questions about confidence in "the wisdom of the American people" in making political decisions or election choices:

Second, an outfit called EON Journals falsely lists me as the editor of one of their journals.  I asked them by e-mail to remove my name, and got no response.  I followed by sending a letter to the address they listed.  I got it back today, with a notice saying "Return to sender/Attemped--Not known/Unable to forward."  So their mailing address is fake too.  

[Some data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]