Yes, Obama's Approval Ratings Are Declining. What Did You Expect?

This is the first paragraph of a commentary by Doug Schoen and Scott Rasmussen in today's Wall Street Journal:

It is simply wrong for commentators to continue to focus on President Barack Obama's high levels of popularity, and to conclude that these are indicative of high levels of public confidence in the work of his administration. Indeed, a detailed look at recent survey data shows that the opposite is most likely true. The American people are coming to express increasingly significant doubts about his initiatives, and most likely support a different agenda and different policies from those that the Obama administration has advanced.

Scott is an extremely fair-minded guy and someone whom we have partnered with in the past. I don't know Doug Schoen, other than that he's Mark Penn's business partner. In any event, I think their lede is just wrong. Barack Obama's Gallup approval ratings, as of this afternoon, are 62 percent approve and 27 percent disapprove. Those are pretty good scores. The average of all Gallup approval ratings taken for all Presidents, going all the way back to 1937, is 54.9 percent approve and 35.2 percent disapprove; Obama is about 8 points ahead of those numbers on either side. He is notably more popular than an American president usually is, and it would therefore stand to reason that he has proportionately more power than average to advance his agenda. It is not wrong for commentators to notate this fact.

Now, what is true is that Obama's ratings have been declining some ... actually his approval ratings haven't been declining that much, but his disapproval scores have been increasing:



I segregate out Rasmussen's approval numbers from the other polls because they've been very different from the rest, generally showing disapproval scores about 10 points higher than the other agencies and approval scores a couple of points lower. Unlike with horse race polling, where all the pollsters are ultimately subject to a pop quiz in the form of an election, there is no obvious way to validate whether an approval poll is right or wrong. That makes it particularly important to pay attention to house effects. Rasmussen's approval ratings for Obama have been different from the other agencies, and/but, they've been consistently and predictably different. In any event, both the Rasmussen and non-Rasmussen data series ultimately show the same pattern: Obama's disapproval ratings have increased over time.

As we pointed out a couple of days ago, moreover, Obama's approval ratings are now fairly average for someone 50 days or so into his Presidency; this is the chart we produced at this time:



A well-rounded commentary on Barack Obama popularity would take note of this context. It would also disclaim, however, that Obama's first 50 days have been anything other than typical. A typical president, 50 days or so into his term, is choosing the drapes for the Lincoln Bedroom and picking out a puppy dog -- generally unobjectionable sorts of activities. Obama has chosen to put forward nearly the entirely of his agenda. One can make the case that Obama has attempted to push his agenda further in 50 days than most Presidents do in a year. Let's take that proposition somewhat literally: what do a President's approval ratings typically look like a year or so into his term?



In his first year in office, a President's approval ratings typically decline by about 3 points from the time of his inauguration, while his disapproval ratings typically climb by about 12 points. That is fairly close to the magnitude of change that Barack Obama's numbers have experienced. True, he's lost that ground in 50 days rather than 365. But here, I suppose, is the point:

This is all completely predictable. Barack Obama didn't get elected with 60 or 65 percent of the vote -- he got elected with about 53 percent of the vote. As the warm and fuzzy feelings surrounding his inauguration wane and are replaced by an actual attempt to put forward a actual political agenda, it is not surprising that his approval ratings gravitate toward that anchor established during the election.

Most Americans support most parts of Obama's agenda -- particularly the ideas of moving toward more universal health care, applying both carrots and sticks in the effort to reduce carbon emissions, making the tax code more progressive, permitting stem cell research, withdrawing troops from Iraq, and stimulating the economy. But not all Americans do, and as Obama attempts to actuate that agenda, it's not surprising that some of them are beginning to make those feelings known.

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Stewart Destroys CNBC, Cramer, Disses “Doucheborough”

On the day in October 2004 that Jon Stewart made up his mind to end CNN’s Crossfire, viewers didn’t have advance warning. By contrast, last night’s epic takedown of CNBC and Mad Money host Jim Cramer that built over an eight-day period, including the advance hype of a Thursday morning front-page, above-the-fold story on America’s most widely-circulated newspaper, USA Today.

It did not disappoint. In addition to an extensive confrontation that included footage of Cramer admitting to the ease of manipulating markets, Stewart indicted CNBC’s “sins of commission” in fueling hype that led to the economic crisis.

I understand you want to make finance entertaining, but it’s not a (bleeping) game. And when I watch that, I get, I can’t tell you how angry that makes me. Because what it says to me is: you all know. You all know what’s going on. You know, you can draw a straight line from those shenanigans to the stuff that was being pulled at Bear, and AIG, and all this derivative market stuff that is this weird Wall Street side bet.

If you haven’t seen the must-see interview in the past seven hours overnight since it aired, here are the full, lengthier-than-televised outtakes, in three parts (note, un-beeped, explicit language):

Part One:

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Jim Cramer Interview Outtake Pt. 1

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Jim Cramer

Part Two:

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Jim Cramer Interview Outtake Pt. 2

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Jim Cramer

Part Three:

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Jim Cramer Interview Outtake Pt. 3

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Jim Cramer

In an unaired segment around the six-minute mark of the third outtake clip, Stewart also passed his awarded mantle of douchebaggery from ex-CNNer Robert Novak (“Douchebag of Liberty”) to MSNBCer Joe Scarborough (“Doucheborough”).

Stewart told Cramer that he could go back to Scarborough’s Morning Joe with a message about Stewart’s role in the debate:

You now have become the face of this, and that is incredibly unfortunate. Because you’re not the face of it, you shouldn’t be the face of it. You were the person that was, uh, I-don’t-know-what enough to stand up and go, "Hey, that wasn’t fair!" Which it’s not, because this show isn’t fair, and you can tell ‘Doucheborough’ it isn’t supposed to be fair.

In Morning Joe's first two segments this morning, including one where Scarborough railed against "a sickness on Wall Street," the Stewart-Cramer interview wasn't mentioned.

Wise.

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White House to Passive-Aggressive Hill Republicans: Put Up or Shut Up

Well, not in those words.

Still, Barack Obama’s comments to regional newspapers last night and the premise of a question and follow-up today at the White House gets to the heart of the current national political situation.

Here’s the quick play-by-play. Robert Gibbs was asked about yesterday’s interview in which the President said congressional Republicans needed to do more than just say no, they needed to present alternatives on the budget and economic recovery in general. The question was, congressional Republicans gave Obama a list in January that Obama said didn’t have "anything crazy" on it, so how come those ideas didn’t make it into the stimulus?

Gibbs replied that some Republican ideas were incorporated. He then pivoted to the budget discussion, noting the sturm und drang over the deficit and debt was fundamentally dishonest:

We have members of Congress rightly concerned about the growth of deficits and debt…. If they're concerned about the deficit, the best way to exercise that concern, if you're critical of what the administration has proposed, would be to come up with… an honest budgeting document that pays for both wars, that pays -- takes into account natural disasters, or future money for economic and financial stability -- and does so in a way that demonstrates clearly for the American people that you're putting this country back on a path towards fiscal responsibility and fiscal sustainability.

(emphasis added)

The follow-up question was, if some Republican ideas were incorporated, how can the President say the Republican Party is a party of no ideas?

Gibbs replied, “you've heard certainly recently a lot more criticism than you've heard suggestions.”

Let's unpack the back and forth. Obama didn’t say “the Republican Party is a party of no ideas.” Something like that would have made major headlines. Here’s what Obama said, as quoted by the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

Opposition is always easy. Saying no to something is easy. Saying yes to something and figuring out how to solve problems and governing, that's hard…. I'm not impressed by just being able to say no…. I think what will be interesting is the degree to which my Republican colleagues start putting forward an affirmative agenda that's not based on ideology but on the very real struggles and pain that people are feeling right now around the country and how do we get this economy back on its feet.

So, yes, Obama clearly called out Republicans for taking the easy road. It’s a little different than saying Republicans are the party of no ideas. Obama could be taken to mean that he thinks Republicans have ideas, but aren't sharing them.

Of course, the reason Gibbs didn’t push back on the inaccurate conflation and accepted the premise – that Obama had labeled the Republicans thusly – is likely that the White House isn’t all that concerned with the semantics and feels on comfortable ground with the American public as to this question.

And frankly, they’re correct to feel that way. A Newsweek poll, released last week, showed that even Republican voters don’t particularly think their party has ideas. On the question, “Is it your impression that Republicans who have opposed Barack Obama’s economic proposals have a plan of their own for turning the economy around, or not?” Republican respondents reported 45% yes, 42% no, 13% don’t know. Only 22% of Dems and 29% of independents thought Republicans had their own plan. Moreover, by a 52-42 margin, the same Republican respondents thought Obama had “made a reasonable effort to work with and listen to Congressional Republicans.”

Still, the same reporter who set up the seeming gotcha – getting Gibbs to say that Republican ideas were incorporated in the stimulus and following up with the premise that therefore Republicans by definition can’t be a party of no ideas – had reported contemporaneously what was on the one-page sheet of ideas Eric Cantor handed Obama in January:

“Tax deductions for some small businesses, making unemployment benefits tax free and a provision that would let businesses losing money carry the losses over to pay fewer taxes in a different fiscal year.”

That’s the party of ideas? That’s the gotcha? Obama calls out Republicans for just saying no on the budget and economic recovery debate, but he’s hypocritical for criticizing their lack of contribution because he received a summary sheet seven weeks ago that included the proposal of a few small business tax deductions?

The same summary-sheet-delivering Cantor said, only three days ago to the Washington Post: “What transpired . . . and will give us a shot in the arm going forward is that we are standing up on principle and just saying no."

What’s going on here is that the White House sees the polls like everyone else, and isn’t particularly worried whether it’s an open question whether Republicans are seen as the party of no. Republicans themselves are about evenly split on this and nobody else is conflicted. That Republicans are the party of no is in the nation’s bloodstream already (you can always tell by the late night monologues), its leaders are explicitly embracing that strategy, and the emboldened White House is seizing on the opportunity for reinforcement.

Herman Melville wrote a short story called “Bartleby, the Scrivener” in 1853. The signature element of that story is that Bartleby is hired to do office work, and fairly quickly begins answering all requests by his employer with the simple, all-time passive-aggressive manifesto: “I would prefer not to.” No matter what is asked, “I would prefer not to.” No reasoning is offered, and the story is told through the eyes of the bewildered employer.

Bartleby refuses to perform any duties and refuses to leave. Eventually, the employer moves his entire business, and Bartleby stays in the old office. The new tenants can’t get Bartleby to leave, eventually he is hauled to prison for refusing to vacate, and ultimately Bartleby dies from preferring not to eat.

The current passive-aggressive stance of the Republican Party isn’t likely as pure as Bartleby’s. Readers only get a few clues but no explanation from Bartleby himself as to why he behaves as he does, while the GOP seems to calculate a long-term strategic upside to refusing to participate with Obama. Regardless of different motivations for passive-aggression, that behavior seems likely to generate about the same result for the Republican brand as Bartleby’s did for himself for as long as it is pursued.

To paraphrase a modern literary giant who contended with his own group of nihilists, “This (passive) aggression will not stand, man.”

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Americans Losing Their Faith in Faith ... And Everything Else

The longstanding project called the General Social Survey, which has polled Americans about their feelings on a variety of political and social issues for more than 35 years, just recently came out with their preliminary 2008 data (which, I should warn you, is a little bit cumbersome to access).

One of my favorite sets of questions on the GSS is one that asks Americans about their degree of confidence in various social institutions; here is what those numbers looked like in 2008 as compared with eight years earlier before George W. Bush won the Presidency, as well as in 1976 when this question was first posed:



The only major institution to have gained a statistically significant about of trust since 2000 is the military, which is now the most trusted major institution in the country . The gain came as a result, presumably, of 9/11, with the number of Americans expressing a great deal of confidence in the military shooting up from 41 percent in 2000 to 57 percent in 2002. The figure peaked at 59 percent in 2004 and has fallen slightly since, but the rating was slightly higher in 2008 than it had been in 2006 before the Iraq conflict had begun to wind down.

Trust in major corporations plummeted following the Enron scandal and is off slightly further since. In fact, the 16 percent of Americans who said they have a great deal of confidence in such institutions is the lowest figure on record. Banks and financial institutions were holding up a bit better ... until last year, when the trust score dropped to 19 percent from 30 percent two years earlier. This is not an all-time low -- confidence in the banks had been slightly lower during the S&L crisis of the early 90s -- although we'll see where we end up once the financial crisis ends.

Confidence in organized religion also fell significantly under Bush's watch, although most of the decline came between 2000 and 2002, when the rating dropped from 29 percent to 19 percent. I'm not sure whether that was the result of the Catholic priest scandals, some odd kind of ricochet from 9/11, or something else, but the scores have yet to really recover.

Medicine is less trusted than it once was -- the 39 percent score it achieved in 2008 was an all-time low -- and to a lesser extent so is science. Nobody, whatever their political persuasions, has much trust in the press, although the decline came long ago in the 1980s, perhaps as conservatives learned the utility of bashing the institution. And some instutitons are perennially unpopular -- particularly the Congress, which has never polled higher in this survey than 17 percent (in 1984).

We are not a very trusting bunch, it would seem.

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The Best Argument You'll Read for Bank "Nationalization"

I don't usually do a lot of "naked" linking -- that is, just citing someone else's material with little commentary of my own -- but this article by John P. Hussman, manager of the $3.5 billion Hussman Strategic Growth fund (and one of the very few people to have recognized the extent to which the market was both overvalued and overlevered) is really worth a read in full:

The misguided policy response from Washington has focused almost exclusively on squandering public money and burdening our children with indebtedness in order to defend the bondholders of mismanaged financial institutions (blame Paulson and Geithner -- I've got a lot of respect for our President, but he's been sold a load of garbage by banking insiders). Meanwhile, I suspect that the little tapes in Bernanke's head playing "we let the banks fail in the Great Depression" and "we let Lehman fail and look what happened" are so loud that he is making no distinction about the form of those failures. Simply letting an institution unravel is quite different from taking receivership, protecting the customers, keeping the institution intact, replacing management, properly taking the losses out of stockholder and bondholder capital, and issuing it back into private ownership at a later date. This is what it would mean for these banks to "fail." Nobody is advocating an uncontrolled unraveling of major financial institutions or permanent nationalization as if we've suddenly become Venezuela.

Make no mistake. Buying up "troubled assets" will not materially ease this crisis, nor will it even improve the capital position of financial institutions (see You Can't Rescue the Financial System if You Can't Read a Balance Sheet). [...] We are simply protecting the bondholders of mismanaged financial institutions, even though that bondholder capital is more than sufficient to cover the losses without harm to customers. Institutions that cannot survive without continual provision of public funds should be taken into receivership, their assets should be restructured to better ensure repayment, their stockholders should be wiped out, bondholders should take a major haircut, customer assets should (and will) be fully protected, and these institutions should be re-issued to the markets when the economy stabilizes.

The course of defending the bondholders of insolvent institutions is not sustainable. Do the math. The collateral behind private market debt is being marked down by easily 20-30%. That debt represents about 3.5 times GDP. That implies collateral losses on the order of 70-100% of GDP, which itself is $14 trillion. Unless Congress is actually willing to commit that amount of public funds to defend the bondholders of mismanaged financials so they can avoid any loss, this crisis simply cannot be addressed through bailouts. Bondholders have to take losses. Debt has to be restructured. There is no other option -- but the markets are going to suffer interminably until our leaders figure that out.

Hussman also has some thoughts on both short- and long-run market valuations over at his site.

The general theme I'm trying to get at with these various posts on the markets is that Wall Street doesn't necessarily know what's good for it. Someone like Hussman didn't get to manage a multi-billion dollar fund by following the crowd; he did so by being smarter than your average bull, and getting them to take the stupid side of a lot of stupid trades.

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Are Republicans Healthier Than Democrats?

In the International Journal of Epidemiology, S. V. Subramanian and Jessica Perkins write that, after controlling for age, sex, race, marital status, religious service attendance, highest educational degree, and total family income, Republicans were 25% less likely than Democrats to report being in poor health. They find a key component of this to be smoking: after controlling for that above list of variables, Republicans were 15% less likely to be smokers.

The analysis is based on data from 1972-2006, and I think a lot more needs to be done before I'd know what to make of it. Subramanian and Perkins write:

The observation that republicans enjoy better health status may reflect the core republican value of individual responsibility, which could translate into increased adherence to health-promoting behaviours. . . . It may also be that republicans exhibit greater religiosity (beyond attendance) compared with democrats, which may lead to health promoting social conditions such as enhanced social ties and networks. Alternatively, it is possible that our measures of SES (income and education) are inadequate in terms of controlling for one’s SES. The effects of identifying with the republican party, however, did not alter substantially in unadjusted and adjusted models.

And they conclude:

Whether one’s political ideology is an independent risk factor, or a marker of something else, clearly requires further research. It does not seem implausible, however, that conservative values at the individual level may be health promoting.

It's also been suggested that the causation might go the other way ("A Democrat is a Republican who got sick," to update that old saying), but, although I can see that happening in an aggregate level--people moving toward the Democrats partly because of dissatisfaction over issues such as health care--it's hard for me to believe this would be explaining the pattern at an individual level.

I think a lot more could, and should, be done here, for example using the full four-point scale for self-reported health and having a better understanding of the transition from raw comparisons to the regression model. But, whatever ultimately comes of these findings, I'm supportive of the general idea of looking at correlations from these databases. There are lots of possible dead ends and wild goose chases (and this might be one of them) but it's certainly a step up from the bald speculation we often see, and it can sometimes lead somewhere interesting.

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A Nation Neither United Nor Divided

The Center For American Progress has a terrific new survey out on political ideology. The material in the survey is right up our alley, and is probably deserving of several posts, but I want to start with a relatively quick, 30,000-foot question: ideologically speaking, is there more that unites us as Americans or divides us?

The CAP survey posed 40 political and ideological statements to a group of 1,400 American adults, and asked them whether or not they agreed with them. You can answer the questions for yourself here; they cover a wide range of topics in the areas of economic and domestic policy, foreign affairs, societal and "values" issues, and the proper role of government. Although benchmark surveys of political ideology are nothing new, this is one of the most comprehensive and best-constructed efforts that I've seen.

But let's not worry too much about precisely what those questions were for now -- we'll look at that in a subsequent post. Let's simply take the answers to all 40 questions and plot them on a graph. On the vertical axis, we'll plot the percentage of self-described conservatives that agreed with a particular statement, and on the horizontal axis, the percentage of self-described progressives and liberals who did the same. (The CAP survey included separate categories for "progressive" and "liberal", which is another thing we'll look at sometime soon, but I've combined their answers for the time being). This is what we get when we do that:



If you're having trouble picking up on a pattern in that data, that's because there isn't one. The correlation between the fraction of conservatives and the fraction of liberals agreeing to a given question is essentially zero.

Is this surprising? Perhaps. If conservatives and liberals had fundamental disagreements on most major political questions, you'd expect to see a statistically significant inverse correlation in their responses. But you don't see that. Conversely, if they agreed on most of these fundamental questions, with the differences being only around the periphery, you'd expect to see a statistically significant positive correlation in their responses. But you don't really see that either.

Rather, it seems there's about as much that unites us as divides us. And although it's possible that this result is just an artifact of the particular questions that CAP posed, for some reason it feels like the "right" answer. Americans like appeals to bipartisanship and post-ideological politics -- but they also like good, old-fashioned partisan red meat. We're a complicated country, and we have complicated politics.

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The Life and Times of EFCA, Part I

Yesterday was an eventful day in the life of the Employee Free Choice Act.

Nebraska's Ben Nelson came out against the bill, one of a half-dozen Democrats rumored to have done so. Harry Reid, undaunted, insisted that he had 60 votes for cloture -- at which point he'd only need 51 votes for the bill itself. And amidst all the madness, a Citibank analyst named Debroah Weinswig, who just last month had scored Wal-Mart stock as a "9.5" on a scale of 1 to 10, downgraded her assessment for the retail giant over fears that EFCA would pass, in spite of the political hurdles that any keen and honest observer of the bill might have perceived.

To witness: last year at this time, EFCA had 47 Democratic co-sponsors out of 51 members in the Senate: the holdouts were Blanche Lincoln and Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, and Ken Salazar of Colorado. This year, however, EFCA currently has only 40 co-sponsors, in spite of the fact that there are now 58 Democrats in the Senate.

Failing to renew their sponsorship are Max Baucus and Jon Tester of Montana, Evan Bayh of Indiana, Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, Kent Conrad and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, Dianne Feinstein of California, Herb Kohl of Wisconsin, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, and Jim Webb of Virginia. Freshmen Senators Michael Bennet, Kay Hagan and Mark Udall and Mark Warner have also declined to sponsor the bill. Why does EFCA suddenly seem to have such a tough row to hoe?

One point of view is that its apparent support last year was ephemeral: Democrats knew that the bill was unlikely to get cloture, and that if it did somehow pass, it would become the subject of a Presidential veto. Therefore, they weren't really committing themselves to much of anything. Common sense would dictate that when the stakes are low, it isn't wise for a Democrat to thumb one's nose at labor, which continues to play an instrumental and perhaps somewhat underrated role in getting Democrats elected. But now the stakes are high: EFCA really could pass, the business lobby knows it, and certain Senate Democrats are finding their support for labor to be something other than unequivocal.

The bill also suffers from poor timing: public support for unions tends to drop during recessions (although public support for corporations does too). Meanwhile, the White House is distracted, and will most likely be disinclined to spend significant time on the bill, much less its political capital. Labor, moreover, has had trouble beating back the "secret ballot" talking point, whereas conservatives came armed for the fight, and were making an active effort to undermine support for the bill since at least the failed auto bailout vote in December. Labor knows this (indeed, it never expected the battle over EFCA to be easy), and has been pushing back hard since roughly the time of the inauguration, but it let the secret ballot narrative get off to a running start and may now find it hard to catch up.

In spite of these obstacles, EFCA may still have some life in it. Firstly, the scenario that Reid envisions -- a number of Senators vote for cloture on EFCA while voting against the underlying bill -- is not entirely outside the realm of possibility. This is a vice of lobbying pressure between labor interests and business interests that a lot of conservative and moderate Democrats (and one or two moderate Republicans) don't see a way out of: voting yes on cloture and no on the bill itself would be one way to split the baby. The other option, of course, is an amended bill that preserves the secret ballot while leaving the other protections for labor in place. Labor isn't ready to go there yet -- it's not ready to give up on card check. But the Republicans have made so much of the secret ballot that if that provision were removed, they might find themselves somewhat disarmed.

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The Missing $1,000,000 Tax Bracket

Matt Yglesias has this creepy habit of writing about things the very moment that I'm thinking about them. Today I was looking at this handy chart prepared by the National Taxpayers' Union on the top marginal tax rates at different points in time. If you're at all familiar with debate over tax policy, this will be pretty familiar territory to you: the top marginal tax rate is now higher than it was under Reagan, but lower than it was under Clinton, and much lower than it's been at various other points in history. (The average top marginal tax rate since the income tax was established is 60 percent).



What the discussion over the top marginal tax rate ignores, however (and what Ygelsias picks up upon) is that this rate has been assessed at very different thresholds of income. In 1940, for example, the top marginal tax rate was 81.1 percent -- but this rate only kicked in once you made $5,000,000 or more in income, which is equivalent to about $75,000,000 in today's dollars.

But today, the threshold where the top tax bracket kicks in isn't $75 million, or $5 million, or even $1 million ... it's a mere $357,700. The progressivity of the tax code stops there.


NOTE: Inflation-Adjusted Dollars

Needless to say, these are much more dramatic differences -- more than a thousandfold at various points in our history -- than we've observed in the progress of top tax rate. They're so large, in fact, that we need to plot them on a logarithmic scale to get a better handle on things:


NOTE: Inflation-Adjusted Dollars

The median top income tax threshold since 1913 -- adjusted for today's dollars -- is a little over $1.3 million, almost four times higher than it is now. This is one thing that advocates of more progressive taxation (of which I am one) need to keep in mind: although the top tax rates have been much higher throughout much of the country's history, they also kicked in at much higher thresholds of income than the ones we see today.

The question, of course, is why there isn't a millionaires tax bracket now ... or even a multi-millionaires tax bracket. I haven't run the numbers, but I'm guessing that if you established a new tax bracket at, say, 40.5 percent, that started at incomes of $1,000,000 or more, this would bring in as much revenue to the government as restoring the $250K tax bracket (which is really $360K now given indexing to inflation) to 39.6 percent, as it was under Clinton.

And I think Yglesias is also right that the politics of this might play out even better for Obama (although, to be clear, a recent NBC/WSJ journal says that most Americans favor a repeal of the Bush tax cuts). I don't really feel a tremendous amount of sympathy for those in the $250,000 to $999,999 income bracket. (It's tough to raise a family of five in Manhattan on $250K per year? Then don't live in Manhattan). But I suspect a fairly large fraction of Americans have either a friend, family member, or immediate supervisor who makes that sort of money, and might still consider them to be within the broad definition of "middle class". Or they have some reasonable hope of someday making that amount themselves: I've heard it said before that people tend to define "rich" as someone making four times as much as themselves, and there are certainly quite a few American households who make at least $62,500 per year (one quarter of $250K).

Not very many people, however, are good acquaintances with a million-dollar income earner, and in a great many industries it is impossible to even imagine making that sort of money no matter how far one advances. Using the 4x rule that I described above, about 70 percent of the country would consider $250K to be "rich", but 98 percent would describe a million dollar income that way. And when you ask people whether they think the "rich" should be paying more taxes, the response is overwhelmingly that they should be ... about 66 percent of Americans think that "upper-income people" pay too little in taxes, versus just 9 percent who say they pay too much.

To be clear, this is not necessarily intended as an argument against raising taxes at the $250,000 level, or some other sub-million dollar threshold of income. I'm merely stipulating that if that if the conversation stops at that point, we aren't really using all the tools at our disposal to craft socially and economically optimal tax policy.

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How's He Doing?

We're now almost 50 days into Barack Obama's first term, and I thought it might be instructive to compare his Gallup approval rating to that of other Presidents roughly 50 days into their respective terms:

Obama's standing with the public -- 62 percent approve of his performance and 22 percent disapprove, according to Gallup, is objectively quite good. But presidential approval scores are usually quite good at this early point in their terms. Since World War II, the average of all presidential approval ratings through about 50 days in their terms is 61 percent approve and 23 percent disapprove. Moreover, if we limit the analysis to those presidents in their first elected terms -- we include Truman in '49 and Johnson in '65 in this category -- the average has in fact been slightly stronger than that.

Then again, Obama has a couple of pretty good excuses if his approval ratings aren't quite in Kennedy territory.

For one, the public has tended to become more partisan over the course of the past half-century, and so it has been harder to sustain stratospheric approval ratings. Since Reagan, the average president (not counting Obama) has had a score of 57 percent approve, 30 percent disapprove through this point in his term -- slightly weaker than Obama's. If we exclude the second terms of Reagan, Clinton and Bush, the scores are 58 percent approve, 24 percent disapprove.



And secondly, no president since Truman, and no newly-elected president since Roosevelt (whose first term, alas, came before Gallup had begun taking approval ratings), has had to take over under such difficult circumstances. It's not just your imagination if it seems like Obama has been in office for 500 days rather than 50 -- he hasn't had the advantage of a running start. So while we should be realistic about the fact that Obama isn't quite carrying an LBJ-type mandate at the moment, his approval ratings are almost exactly where Ronald Reagan's were at this point in 1981, which is probably the most comparable circumstance -- a "change" election amidst cloudy economic circumstances (although Reagan was technically in between recessions at this point).

This is not to say that everything has been foolproof. Far from it. The administration, I'm guessing, if it had to do it over again, would not have taken two weeks off and tried to let Nancy Pelosi sell the stimulus. It would not have overpromised on what Tim Geithner was going to be able to deliver, and it would have looked up Zoë Baird's name on Wikipedia and recognized that there are certain bugaboos when it comes to cabinet nominations that it isn't worth fighting uphill against.

But for me -- and yes, I know, I drunk the kool-aid a long time ago -- there's still nobody that I'd rather have in office right now. A large fraction of the country evidently feels the same way.

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Steele’s Fate Likely Hinges on NY-20

As controversy swirls around Michael Steele’s drama-laden debut as Republican National Committee Chairman, speculation about whether he’ll remain in the post has blossomed among Democrats and Republicans alike. Steele won the chairmanship in January after a six-ballot marathon that saw the previous Chairman, Mike Duncan, drop out after the third ballot and saw Steele best southerner Katon Dawson 91-77 on the final vote.

According to multiple former high-level RNC staffers familiar with the dynamics involved, Steele is unlikely to survive in the post if favored Republican Jim Tedisco loses his open-seat race to Democrat Scott Murphy. The special election, scheduled for March 31, is to fill a vacancy left when Kirsten Gillibrand took Hillary Clinton’s Senate seat.

If Tedisco loses, the ex-staffers said, “Steele is done.”

Completely, definitively?

“Absolutely.”

By contrast, they said, the recent financial allegations against Steele are unlikely to bring about a resignation unless there’s a serious smoking gun that catches Steele in specific awareness or direction of any shady doings. It’s a mens rea standard.

As for NY-20, Republican registration in the district outnumbers Democratic registration, and Jim Tedisco is a longtime New York State legislator who is extremely well known compared to the younger Murphy. Polling has shown Tedisco comfortably ahead.

However, several factors could lead to an upset here and a Democratic win. First, recent polling has shown Murphy edging closer, and Tedisco under 50%. Second, it appears that, although Republicans will again challenge the validity of signatures, third-party libertarian candidate Eric Sundwall may be poised to get on the ballot, which would likely siphon off some Tedisco votes. Third, Democrats are spending seriously on the race, while Steele’s efforts have been largely cosmetic. Steele campaigned on the idea that as chairman, he would lead the party back to winning races in territory they’ve been ceding. Still, his personal efforts behind fundraising on this race have been terrible, and Republicans watching the internal dynamics know it. If Tedisco wins, Steele won't get any credit behind the scenes. Fourth, Tedisco is struggling with his message on the stimulus package, which is apparently tied to his softening poll numbers.

For those that haven’t followed the story closely, Steele is under attack on many fronts at once, so let’s recap.

The highest profile blunder, fairly unanimously agreed, was his confrontation-and-capitulation to Rush Limbaugh, fueling the Limbaugh Strategy and by most (though by no means unanimous) accounts giving a gift to Barack Obama and Democrats in general.

Steele has had a spate of strange, provocative, on-record statements most reminiscent of the gift-a-thon that marked the Rod Blagojevich scandal. While it should be clear that Steele’s comments are not tethered to a specific ethical controversy like the former Illinois Governor’s were, in terms of their outlandishness and headline-grabbing, it’s a decent parallel. It seems that only a few days go by between Steele talking about wanting to hip-hop-ize the Republican Party, offering Indian-American Bobby Jindal some "slum love," or comparing his party to a bunch of alcoholics who need a 12-step program. Attention-grabbing? "Off the hook?" Yes. But also displeasing from a Republican perspective.

Additionally, Steele has threatened withholding re-election support for Republican moderates like Specter, Snowe and Collins if they vote with Democrats in support of Obama’s agenda, and also managed to seem waffling on this topic in his public statements at the same time. He may see his job as “to tick people off,” and it’s working with a significant number of Republicans.

Perhaps most significantly in the long run, Steele has had several bad stories emerge regarding his 2006 Maryland Senate campaign financial operations. In early February, this Washington Post investigative report disclosed that the finance director of Steele's failed 2006 Senate bid has told federal prosecutors that the campaign had funneled cash to a company run by Steele's sister. Steele strongly denied wrongdoing.

Last week, a WBAL report emerged from reporter Jayne Miller that during their 2006 statewide Maryland campaigns, Steele and Robert Ehrlich funneled $417,000 to a commodities trading firm, Allied Berton, LLC, for "political consulting." Allied Berton, being a commodities trading firm, does not offer political consulting. But apparently they can organize six busloads of homeless black men from Philadelphia to come down and hand out sample ballots labeling Steele and Ehrlich as Democrats. Speculation is mounting that Republicans who have it in for Steele are leaking these stories and potentially might have more.

Yet another major problem is organizational. Steele has no senior staff positions filled at the RNC. On the day FiveThirtyEight spoke to these former RNC staffers, Cyrus Krohn resigned his RNC post as eCampaign Director. Yet, this was one of the few staff positions with anyone in place. With many D.C. Republicans these days still scrambling for work, that Krohn quit in such an environment without another job waiting was significant, the sources said, because it illustrated the profound, rudderless dysfunction going on right now at RNC headquarters.

Finally, Steele, who won the chairmanship after a campaign for the post that provided no clear frontrunners, still has enemies within the Republican Party. Ada Fisher, an RNC member who herself was at the center of shady financial shenanigans during a 2006 run for office, blasted Steele at the end of last week and called on him to resign, is a Dawson backer. Dawson clearly knows that Steele may be vulnerable, and unlike, say, someone like Duncan who has moved on, Dawson may envision a route to winning the chairmanship after all.

However, realizing that there are a number of moving parts in the equation with Steele’s mouth being one of them, the current calculus seems to be that short of two things – (1) a serious smoking gun in the financial scandal, beyond what we’ve seen to date; or (2) a Tedisco loss in NY-20 at the end of this month – Steele would hang on in the post despite his troubles.

The first reason for that is Steele’s personality seems unlikely to lead him to resignation (comma Baby). If Steele won’t resign, the process would then be that RNC members would have to call for a special meeting to depose him. However, another vote would be required to vote Steele out, and then once that happens someone else would have to be elected.

That’s the second main reason Steele might hang on – as of now there’s no clearly supported alternative candidate. You don’t make a move until you know you’ve got the outcome secured, and while proxies for Dawson like Ada Fisher are out after Steele, that’s a long way away from Dawson having an endgame. (Dawson, by the way, has claimed publicly he supports Steele: "He has the promise to be a tremendous chairman.") Keep in mind that if something dramatic were to happen and Steele was ousted, the next race would occur in the spotlight and hindsight of the Limbaugh spectacle. The scrutiny on “who’s really running the Republican Party” and umpteen Limbaugh litmus-test questions would throw a chaotic element into the mix that would make an uncertain situation even less predictable. Someone like Newt Gingrich could probably handle it, but nobody who’s running in 2012 is going to try for the such a post, and Newt is giving indications he’s preparing for a run.

While folks like NRO's Jim Geraghty openly muse about "buyer's remorse," others Republicans seem willing to give Steele more time. Last night, conservative Patrick Ruffini acknowledged that Steele had erred in the Limbaugh firestorm, but reiterated his basic support: “I still want him to be a successful RNC Chairman. Steele was elected Chairman as a fresh face and a reformer, a basic orientation the Republican Party will need to embrace in 2010. He remains one of the most compelling public faces of the party.”

Writing for Politico, Roger Simon categorizes two types of Republicans reacting to Steele: "What the hell is this guy babbling about?" and "I know what the hell this guy is babbling about, and I don’t like it."

What is still likely is, though they are clearly not happy with some of Steele’s shenanigans and organization-building unpreparedness, there are enough Republicans at this point who would rather see Steele succeed than fail.

But God help him if Murphy beats Tedisco in NY-20.

*_*

Quick, off-topic update. Nate didn't mention this, but FiveThirtyEight turns one year old today. What a year.

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Do Americans Want to Nationalize the Banks?

A Newsweek poll released over the weekend suggests that Americans may be more amendable than previously believed to the idea of a government takeover of major banks. The specific question posed by the survey asked was as follows:

Temporary nationalization is another way for the federal
government to deal with large banks in danger of failing.

This is where the government takes over a failing bank,
cleans its balance sheets, and then quickly sells it off.
In general, which do YOU think is the better way to deal
with failing banks... (READ)

29 Government financial aid WITHOUT any government
control of the bank, OR
56 Nationalization, where the government takes
temporary control?
11 Neither/Other (VOL.)
4 (DO NOT READ) Don’t know

As you can see, when the question is presented in this way, a majority of Americans prefer temporary nationalization to additional government bailouts. But let's be clear about what the poll does and does not say.

First of all, the poll did not ask its respondents how comfortable they are with bank nationalization in the abstract. Instead, it asked how they feel about nationalization vis-à-vis bailouts. This is an important distinction. You might ask Americans whether they'd prefer to get a colonscopy or a root canal; if a majority said they'd prefer a colonscopy, that does not mean there'd be a line the next morning at the proctologist's office.

Secondly, the poll's wording is somewhat sympathetic toward the idea of nationalization; "cleans its balance sheets, and then quickly sells it off" sounds almost ... easy ... much easier than nationalization would be in practice.

Nevertheless, given that the poll did use the n-word (alternate phrasing such as 'takeover' polls much better), and that the n-word was preferred to bailouts by almost 2:1, I think this can be taken as a significant finding.

The key question, perhaps, is whether there is some sort of solution other than either nationalization or bailouts (or perhaps some combination thereof). Are these really the only two choices that we have?

I don't want to render a categorical answer to that question, but the answer is probably 'yes'. Although there are different flavors of nationalization, and different flavors of bailout, essentially all realistic solutions to the bailout crisis could be classified under one of those two headings. As Yves Smith compellingly explains, for instance, the 'good bank' / 'bad bank' solution probably requires nationalization first (and if it doesn't require nationalization, it will probably require a ton of capital, above and beyond what is still available through TARP funds, which gets us back into the 'bailout' column).

How about just letting the banks fail, as Senator Richard Shelby, the Ranking Republican Member on the Senate banking committee suggested that we do? Bzzt. Banks don't just disappear in this country when they become insolvent. Instead, the government steps in, protects the depositors up to the $250,000 FDIC limit, sells off what assets it can, and then gives the proceeds from those asset sales away in a particular order ... depositors who were over the $250K limit get the rest of their money back first, then creditors do, then debtholders, then, finally, stockholders (see example here). The government, by the way, doesn't wait for a bank to actually fail before doing this; it steps in almost literally in the dark of night (usually over a weekend) once such a failure appears inevitable or substantially likely. So 'letting the banks fail' is tantamount to nationalization anyway ... albeit perhaps a more chaotic version of it.

Where I break from the liberal crowd, however, is in thinking that the Administration is avoiding nationalization because of a lack of political willpower, or some kind of phobia about being accused of socialism. On the contrary, as the Newsweek poll suggests (and as I think has also been evident for some time as a matter of common sense), nationalization is probably the path of least resistance insofar as the politics of everything goes. So why isn't the Administration simply nationalizing Citi and BoA now?

Most likely because they're buying time. They're buying time to do any number of things:

a) 'Stress test' the banks to see just how bad the problems are and just which ones are candidates for nationalization;
b) Determine whether any alternatives to nationalization are still viable for the sick banks, perhaps involving existing TARP funds and "only" another hundred billion or two in taxpayer monies;
c) Figuring out how to nationalize the banks, if and when such a step is deemed to be necessary, and,
d) Getting Treasury fully staffed up, which it isn't yet.

Perhaps the Administration is holding out hope that there will be some sort of spontaneous recovery in the financial condition of the banks -- and perhaps that hope is completely naive -- but I don't think this is what is driving the policy decision. The four reasons that I provided above are sufficient to explain the obfucsaction and the delays. And remember, the Administration can't really talk about nationalization until and unless it is ready to nationalize, since merely talking about nationalization would tend to make that outcome inevitable. If (when?) a decision is made to nationalize Citi or BoA, we shouldn't expect a lot of advance warning.

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Dow 36,000 Guy Accuses Obama of Sabotaging Economy

Nope, not an Onion headline. Kevin Hassett, co-author of Dow 36,000 -- which proffered exactly the sort of advice that you might reasonably infer from its title -- has now penned a column accusing Barack Obama of deliberately attempting to sabotage the economy.

It is no wonder that markets are imploding around us. Obama is giving us the War on Business.

Imagine that some hypothetical enemy state spent years preparing a “Manchurian Candidate” to destroy the U.S. economy once elected. What policies might that leader pursue?

He might discourage private capital from entering the financial sector by instructing his Treasury secretary to repeatedly promise a brilliant rescue plan, but never actually have one. Private firms, spooked by the thought of what government might do, would shy away from transactions altogether. If the secretary were smooth and played rope-a-dope long enough, the whole financial sector would be gone before voters could demand action.

To review, Dow 36,000 came out in October, 1999, within months of the tippy-top peak of the tech bubble ... this is when stocks were as overvalued as at literally any time in American history, including the Roaring 20's -- and Hassett was telling you to double -- nay, triple-down on them! It would be hard to identify an individual who better embodied the phrase "irrational exuberance" -- well, maybe the Pets.com sock puppet -- or who destroyed more wealth with charlatanic financial advice.

And this guy thinks it's all some big conspiracy against him. Literally.

Wall Street needs to get its house in order. A big reason for the financial crisis is because of market failures -- the country had to endure the weight of two consecutive bubbles, first in tech stocks and then in housing. Another big reason is because the Fed kept interest rates much lower than they ought to have been. There were a number of reasons for that, but the fact that the NASDAQ would pitch a fit anytime that Greenspan or Bernanke wouldn't meet their expectations on perpetually low interest rates was probably one of them.

There appears to be no acknowledgment of any of this, no attempt whatsoever to come to grips with reality. Instead, all we get is denial and anger.

Nobody is going on CBNC and saying: "You know what, our bad. We had a lot of good and honest disagreements with the Bush administration's policy. We have a lot of good and honest disagreements with the Obama administration's policy. There are a lot of things we couldn't have anticipated. We were trying the best we could. But we also gave you a lot of bad advice. And that advice cost you a lot of money. And for that, we're sorry."

Why can't anyone on Wall Street man up and do that?

The worst news is that we appear to be in only the second of five stages of grieving -- and you can pretty much project the path the markets will take until the healing process completes itself.

1. Denial (Nov 2007 - Sept. 2008) : Markets surprisingly resilient in face of recessionary pressures.
2. Anger (Sept. 2008 - present): Wall Street throws tantrum; markets crash.
3. Bargaining (Summer 2009?): Bear market rally.
4. Depression (Fall-Winter 2009?): Dow gives back most of gains from rally (and then some, perhaps); sits near 15-year lows as volatility and volumes decrease.
5. Acceptance (2010?): Market finally capitulates; Dow rebounds to an historically sustainable valuation of perhaps 9,000 points.

Then again, if Hassett thinks that things are going to get even worse, there's probably no better time to get your money in than right now.

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Who Sits Where?

I admire Sam Stein. The other day, we were in a Robert Gibbs briefing, and he sat down before it started in a seat that happened to be Politico’s. Having once been politely booted from the same seat by Jonathan Martin, I stood nearby curious to see how long Sam would make it. Sure enough, a few minutes into the briefing, Carol Lee came and kicked him out, asserting her right, as a member of that organization, to sit in the assigned seat. Politico’s seat in February was in the sixth row, far left, but it has now moved up to the fourth row, three seats behind CBS' Chip Reid (see charts below).

Undaunted, Sam got up, noticed the second seat in the last row was empty, and re-seated himself. About five minutes later, Todd Gillman of the Dallas Morning News claimed it. Sam had to stand with the rest of us; Huffington Post, like FiveThirtyEight, doesn’t have a plaque-stamped seat.

There are 49 assigned seats in the James S. Brady briefing room, and thus far there are typically another 30-60 people packed standing in the U-shaped ring around the seating perimeter during briefings. For a visual, check out the Daily Show clip from this past Thursday night appended to the bottom of this post.

How are these seats assigned? The White House Correspondents Association determines who sits, not the White House Press Office. “Everything out there,” a White House staff person told me when I first arrived, referring to the demarcation between White House Press Staff offices and the working press areas, “we have nothing to do with.”

The WHCA's Executive Board meets regularly. The board knows the media landscape is changing, and it has the thankless task of having to accommodate increasingly frequent demand for reallocation of seat assignments. At a recent meeting, seats were juggled and the chart changed.

According to a media source, "In the past, the game of musical chairs in the briefing room was a combination of petty media politics and sucking up to the administration." As for the changes made after the recent board meeting, "This latest alignment does justice to the state of the mainstream media in the White House press corps."

Here's February's seating chart:



Here's March:



It's worth pointing out that the WHCA doesn't decide who can be in the briefing room. Losing a seat is not the same as losing access.

Still, one reason who sits where matters is that Gibbs only occasionally farms out questions as deep as the fourth row, rarely beyond that, and only occasionally goes to the standing wings near the front (David Corn is an effective questioner from his usual spot standing next to the WSJ, but few others catch Gibbs' eye). Nearly everyone in the first two rows get one question and a follow-up every day, which is at least the first 20 questions in what are typically 45-minute briefings. If you want an on-camera question and thus the best chance to put Gibbs on the spot with an answer that might become hard news, seating location matters. For his part, Gibbs has pledged to distribute questions better, but it will not ever change that those near the front have a huge edge on the field.

The three main factors in the shifting turf battle are (1) attrition as news organizations contract or disappear; (2) reporters working for organizations who have seats not coming regularly enough to protect their seats; and (3) the emergence of new media.

Attrition is not only inevitable, it's something the organizations plan fights over well in advance. For example, Fox News and Bloomberg will ultimately battle for a front row seat when one of those is vacated. Wire services AP and Reuters have the front row, Bloomberg is second row. NBC, CBS, ABC and CNN have the front row, Fox News is second row.

The financial dire straits of many shareholder-owned news media, including the vaunted New York Times (did NYT have trouble meeting payroll the other day?), will undoubtedly play a role in White House seating. For example, the Tribune bankruptcy has led to its seats consolidating into the L.A. Times seat in the third row. McClatchy is a possibly vulnerable seat down the road.

People not showing up to protect their turf speaks for itself. Not everyone shows up for every briefing, and those hungering to move closer to the podium take note of who's not showing up. Stop showing up, or show up infrequently, and your seat may become vulnerable.

As for the emergence of new media, the board knows it's inevitable, although certainly assigned seats or workspaces haven't happened yet. Politico is the closest to this model, but even it has a staff of roughly 50 people and a print edition. One reason is that the only organizations to whom the WHCA will even consider assigning seats (or, for that matter, the cramped workspaces crammed adjoining the briefing room) are WHCA members. Whether new media members will join the WHCA is an open question. Certainly, if you want the right to purchase a table at the WHCA annual dinner apparently a.k.a. "Prom" ($1,800 for a table of 10 seats), you have to be a member.

In certain ways the musical chairs fight seems small. It's inside baseball, but people seem to want to know about how things work inside the White House press corps, and this is one of those things. You're unlikely to hear about this from Jeff Zeleny or "that guy from Flight of the Conchords" (Chuck Todd) for defensible reasons.

If for no other reason, Sam needs a handy guide to know whose seat he's nabbing.

***

(Some chart notes on abbreviations:)
AFP = Agence-France Press (a major worldwide news agency akin to AP and Reuters)
NPR = National Public Radio
AURN = American Urban Radio Networks (the only African-American owned radio network)
VOA = Voice of America
CCH = Commerce Clearing House (another international-based publishing organization, owned by Wolters Kluwer)
UPI = United Press International
CSM = Christian Science Monitor
BNA = Bureau of National Affairs

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Millionaires for McCain, Billionaires for Obama . . . or Maybe Not

My recent maps showed the estimated vote for McCain and Obama among high and low-income people within each state. But these are based on national survey data which, by necessity, can't tell us much about actual rich people.

Apropos of this, I thought it might help to repost these thoughts from November, when somebody asked me what I thought of this article by Wall Street Journal writer Robert Frank, "The Rich Support McCain, the Super-Rich Support Obama." Frank wrote:

According to a new survey by Prince & Associates, voters worth $1 million to $10 million are favoring Sen. John McCain, while voters worth $30 million or more are favoring Sen. Barack Obama. The survey of 493 families showed: More than three quarters of those worth $1 million to $10 million plan to vote for Sen. McCain. Only 15% plan to vote for Sen. Obama (the rest are undecided). Of those worth more than $30 million, two-thirds support Sen. Obama, while one third support Sen. McCain.

Do I believe this? Not really.
My problem here is that I don't know where the survey is coming from. How did Prince & Associates sample people making $30 million or more? Without knowing at least something about the sampling, it's hard to say anything at all about these claims.

For example, a graph accompanying the article linked above gives estimates of about 0.1 million households with over $25 million and 9 million households [typo fixed] with over $1 million. This ratio is about 1%; thus, in a simple random sample of 493 people worth over $1 million, you'd expect to see about a whopping 5 people in the survey worth over $30 million. Or maybe there were 6 such people in the sample; that would explain why the percentages of the super-rich cited in the linked article are 16% (1 in 6) and 67% (4 in 6).

The survey might have more than 6 super-rich people in it; I don't know since no details are given. (I searched on the web for the survey but all I could find were links to the Robert Frank article discussed here.)

How do you take a sample of super-rich people? Prince & Associates is a Connecticut-based consulting company that describes itself as "the foremost empirical research firm in the realm of private wealth. . . Using purposive sampling methodologies, Prince & Associates, Inc. has created statistically valid single-study and panel samples providing detailed insights into the hard-to-reach and exceptionally private universe of the affluent."

I respect that this sort of sampling is difficult but it's hard for me to evaluate it when no description is provided of the sample. I'll email Russ Alan Prince to see if he can enlighten me on this, but really I'd think it would be the responsibility of a Wall Street Journal reporter to ask some questions here. (I guess it's possible that Frank did ask some questions but for proprietary reasons did not want to describe the sampling methodology, but if so I would've appreciated just a sentence or two on it, to give me a little more confidence in the results.)

Other data

The substantive reason I'm skeptical about these findings (as well as a similar report by Daniel Gross in 2004) is the following passage from page 144 of our Red State, Blue State book:

Probably the best evidence [about the political views of the richest Americans] comes from studies of political contributions. Political scientist Thomas Ferguson has tracked political donations of top corporate executives and the Forbes 400 richest Americans (or their equivalents, in earlier periods). The data presented in his 1995 book, Golden Rule, indicate that America's superrich have generally learned Republican, but with some notable exceptions that have changed over time. Certain industries have persistently higher rates of contributions to the Democrats. In the New Deal, these included industries with a strong interest in free trade. Since the Reagan years, finance, and high technology firms have been much friendlier to Democratic presidential candidates than most of the rest of American business.

For 2004, Ferguson consolidated the lists of top executives and richest families into a lot of 674 firms and investors. Out of this list, 53% contributed to George W. Bush's reelection campaign and 16% donated to Kerry, with Bush doing better among the oil and pharmaceutical industries and Kerry getting more from investment banks and hedge funds.

Given that this 53%-16% gap in contributions in 2004, I'm skeptical of the claim that, in 2004, "the haute millionaires, those worth more than $10 million, favored Kerry 59-41." Which leaves me skeptical of the 2008 survey as well. Perhaps Prince & Associates is oversampling hedge-funders in Connecticut?

I emailed Frank and Prince but neither responded. As I've noted above, this stuff is tricky and I'm certainly willing to believe that there is some way by which Ferguson's and Prince's results can be reconciled. My guess is that Prince's sample is unrepresentative (i.e., not good enough for a fivethirtyeight.com post but good enough for a Wall Street Journal column) but I'm open to other explanations.

P.S. Tom Ferguson pointed me to this tally from April of primary election contributions by the super-rich.

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