●How to Understand Obama’s Chances in 2012 The American Mag_自考专本|专升本|高升专|高升本|在职研究生-学历教育网

The popular vote for the House and the president have converged. Here’s what it means for Obama’s chances in 2012.

Since the middle 1990s, the popular vote for the House of Representatives has become a good proxy for the standing of the nation’s two major parties. This was not the case for many years, in large part because Democratic House candidates in the South stood for different issues than their party’s national nominees and tended to run far ahead of Democratic presidential candidates. But during Bill Clinton’s presidency and afterward, Democratic presidential candidates became more successful nationally than they had been in most of the 1970s and 1980s, even as Republicans started running much better than they had in House districts in the South.

In 1992, for the first time since Reconstruction, the Republican percentage of the House vote in the South, defined as the 11 Confederate states plus West Virginia, Kentucky, and Oklahoma, was (slightly) higher than in the North; in 1994, Republicans carried the House popular vote in the South, as they have ever since, in years when they carried the House popular vote in the North only twice (in 1994 and 2002).

So it is fair to say that the popular vote for the House and the president have converged. This is apparent in the following table, showing the Democratic percentage for president and for House members in presidential election years going back to the first election after World War II.

Table 1

The contrast is striking: from 1996 through 2008 there is only a 1% difference between the Democratic percentages for president and the House; between 1952 and 1992, with the single exception of 1964, when Lyndon Johnson ran ahead of Democratic congressional candidates, Democratic House candidates’ percentage ranged from 5% to 14% higher than Democrats’ percentages for president.

The question then suggests itself: to what extent can we consider the popular vote for the House in off-year elections as a prediction of the presidential vote in the next election? The answer appears to be: pretty good. Here are the Republican and Democratic percentages for the House popular vote and for the presidential popular vote, starting with 1994.

Table 2

In the three most recent cases, the off-year percentages for the House are almost exactly the same as the presidential year percentages for president. However, Republicans signally failed to replicate their 1994 House percentage in the 1996 presidential contest. They would have been closer if 6% of the 8% cast for independent candidate Ross Perot is counted for Republican nominee Bob Dole—who polls suggested was the second choice of the overwhelming percentage of Perot voters—but that would still have left Clinton ahead 51%-47%.

Absent a considerable redefinition by the incumbent president, he or his party’s nominee is likely to run just about as well (or poorly) in the next presidential election as his party’s House candidates did in the most recent off-year elections.

Obviously, the three most recent examples portend an unhappy 2012 for President Obama and the Democrats, while the 1994-1996 example is a precedent for an incumbent Democratic president overcoming a “thumping” (George W. Bush’s term) in the off-year and winning reelection by a nontrivial margin. What I think these numbers suggest is that, absent a considerable redefinition by the incumbent president, he or his party’s nominee is likely to run just about as well (or poorly) in the next presidential election as his party’s House candidates did in the most recent off-year elections. The off-year vote represents a settled opinion on how the president and his party have performed in nearly two years in office, and unless the president takes a significantly different course toward governing, as Bill Clinton arguably did in 1995-1996, then that settled verdict remains more or less in place. Or so the numbers suggest.

Another way to compare off-year elections and the next presidential elections is to look at them in terms of electoral votes. The procedure is to assign to each party all the electoral votes in each state in which they carry the vote for the House (with the District of Columbia’s three electoral votes always assigned to the Democrats). To some extent this is fictional, since both parties strive hard to win popular vote pluralities for president in any state which is seriously contested, while few if any practical politicians care very much about whether their party carries the popular vote in their state for House of Representatives; they care instead about how many House seats it wins. The putative electoral vote totals are significantly affected by which party wins the House popular vote in large states where the parties are nearly evenly divided: a few votes may tip the putative electoral vote balance quite a lot. Nonetheless, if the House popular vote is a reasonable proxy for opinion on the parties, this may be worth looking at retrospectively. Omitting the 1994 and 1996 cycles, where it is plain that the off-year result was not predictive of the outcome of the next presidential contest, we get the following results, showing the putative electoral votes in House races and the actual electoral votes in presidential races (with faithless electors assigned to the party voters assumed they would vote for).

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