It's all over now?, part 2

 I wasn't going to have another post on this topic, but then I read an article in the New York Times that drew parallels between Biden's position today and Obama's and George W. Bush's positions when they were running for re-election.  It suggested that discouraging early polls had led Obama and Bush to "retool" and "recast" their campaigns.  But the figures in my last post shows that both led in the polls at the corresponding point in the campaign, and that their performance in the election was very close to what would have been predicted from the polls a year before.  Of course, this doesn't mean that the campaign efforts didn't matter--holding onto a narrow lead is an accomplishment, but it's a different accomplishment from "turning around a struggling campaign."

The story contrasted GW Bush and Obama to "George H.W. Bush in 1992, [who] failed to heed polls showing voters distressed about the economy and ready for a change after 12 years of Republicans in the White House."  I hadn't included that race in my post because there were no surveys about Bush vs. Clinton in November 1991.  But there were surveys in October and December, and then more starting in January 1992.   In the October 1991 survey, Bush had a big lead:  58% said they would vote for Bush and 22% for Clinton.  Bush's lead in the surveys through early April 1992:

His lead diminished pretty steadily, with maybe an upturn in late March, but he was consistently ahead:  out of 25 surveys, 24 had Bush in the lead, and one had them tied.  So the early polls weren't showing warning signs.  

I had forgotten that Bush was far ahead for so much of the campaign, and not just against Clinton--he led by similar margins in matchups with other potential Democratic candidates.  I remembered that he had been very popular after the end of the Gulf War, but thought that faded pretty quickly and that the presidential race was competitive from the beginning.  It looks like the New York Times writers made the same mistake.  

The growth of partisan polarization means that a swing of this size couldn't happen today.  But the 1992 election may be relevant in  another way.  Going by basic economic statistics, things weren't great, but weren't that bad either, but popular perceptions of the economy were very negative.    As far as I know, there's no generally accepted explanation for the gap.  Either the Bush campaign didn't make enough effort to turn the perceptions around, or their efforts weren't successful.  Either way, the experience may have some lessons for today.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]