openpolitics.com

Yet there is strong political science evidence that football wins boost the president’s approval rating in the winning team’s media market while depressing it in the losing team’s market. The effect is short-lived, so the Bengals’ one-point win back in September won’t deliver Ohio to Clinton on Election Day, but it is true that if the Steelers and Eagles both win their November 6 games, that could meaningfully improve Clinton’s chances in a key swing state.

.. Back during the 2000 campaign, George W. Bush and Al Gore both blanketed swing states with ads touting the respective candidates’ positions on Social Security. Bush, riding the late ’90s wave of enthusiasm for stock market speculation, proposed allowing workers to invest a share of their payroll taxes in private accounts. Gore, counting on Social Security’s traditional popularity, characterized this as a risky scheme that would call Americans’ retirement security into question.

.. A folk theory account of Bush, Gore, and Social Security would say that voters who found Bush’s Social Security message persuasive gravitated toward him but those who liked Gore’s plan gravitated toward him. This is a view in which people’s policy beliefs come first and their political allegiances follow naturally.

But it turns out that this isn’t really what happened. Gabriel Lenz did a more sophisticated study of voter dynamics and found that it’s actually the opposite. Rather than voters changing their minds about the candidates in response to information about their Social Security plans, voters changed their minds about Social Security.

A Bush voter who started the campaign leery of privatizing Social Security, in other words, was much more likely to respond to the dueling ad campaigns by deciding he liked privatization than to respond by deciding that he liked Al Gore. Attachments to political parties and particular leaders are simply more profound and more deeply held than attachments to issue positions.

.. Most of us know, on a gut level, that this rationalization process happens.

Back in 2008, Republicans were inclined to emphasize the risk of electing an inexperienced commander in chief, while eight years later Democrats are bragging about having the most qualified nominee ever. Simply put, for most people, attachments to parties and candidates are more profound and more fundamental than attachments to issue positions.

.. Indeed, Bartels and Achen show that in some ways, highly attuned voters are simply better at misinforming themselves. Back in the 1990s, for example, the budget deficit was falling rapidly, and Bill Clinton liked to tout this fact. Under the circumstances, it’s perhaps not so surprising that Democrats were more likely than Republicans to correctly state that the deficit was declining.

What is surprising is that, as Bartels and Achen showed in a classic 2006 paper, it’s not the uninformed Republicans who are more likely to have gotten this wrong. Instead, the more attention a given Republican paid to politics and political news, the more likely he was to mistakenly believe the deficit was rising during the Clinton years. Paying more attention to politics, in other words, didn’t make people more informed about the underlying issue — it made them more informed about partisan talking points.

.. The fact that citizens are getting their views on issues from the politicians they support and not vice versa — and that the most informed citizens are most likely to do so — is simply devastating to the folk theory. Voters cannot be selecting leaders whose stances they agree with if it turns out that voters are learning what stances they should agree with by taking cues from the leaders they support.

.. So what happened? Folk theory would predict the existence of some Wilson administration policy initiative that negatively impacted New Jersey beach communities. The truth is that a calamity did strike — a wave of unusual shark attacks against human swimmers.

 .. Wilson was not, obviously, capable of controlling sharks’ migratory patterns or appetite for human flesh. Nor does it seem especially likely that Jersey Shore residents suddenly became confused about this fact. It’s just that the shark attacks were bad, they led to bad secondary effects, and those effects were especially salient in beach towns. People felt grumpy and panicked, so they voted against the incumbent.

• Voters appear completely blind to comparative issues. Incumbent governments all around the world were punished for the Great Recession with no consideration of whether their country did better or worse than the average country in navigating a global catastrophe.

.. Vox’s Trump Tax model, designed in partnership with a group of political scientists, suggests that Trump is polling about 5 percentage points worse than you would expect a generic Republican to poll given the overall political climate. Major election forecasts see a Trump win as unlikely, but still normally give him a 1 in 4 or 1 in 5 chance, meaning a Trump win would be the equivalent of a football team blowing an easy field goal — surprising, but hardly unheard of.

.. Most successful democracies have parliamentary governments — often backed by proportional electoral systems — leading to a politics that reenforces this tendency and avoids tipping points. In the American system, small shifts in public sentiment can lead to drastic changes — either Bush or Gore, either Clinton or Trump — whereas the Dutch or German electoral systems ensure that a small change in voting behavior leads to a small change in the composition of parliament. Any given party could put a fool or a knave forward as leader, and he might still win votes. But to exercise meaningful power he would need to negotiate with other coalition partners, which is hard to do if you’re a fool.

The American system has no such safeguard. If a fool or a knave secures the nomination of one of the major political parties, he has a pretty good chance of becoming president, at which point all bets are off.

When the office was originally designed by the framers of the Constitution, they meant for it to be an indirectly elected office whose holder would be selected by a collaborative meeting of Electoral College members, thus insulating it from popular whims.