Today's Pioneer Press carried this graph about midterm elections, comparing presidential approval ratings with the number of House seats lost or gained:
From this graph, I learned that Richard Nixon had a 47 percent approval rating in October 1974, three months after he had resigned. What's up with that, McClatchy-Tribune and any remaining Pioneer Press copy editors? Did you mean to write the name Gerald Ford? (Nixon's last approval rating before he resigned in July was in the mid-20s.)
More importantly, I learned that voters have treated Democrats much more harshly than Republicans:
- Kennedy had a 74% approval rating and still lost four seats.
- Obama -- whose approval rating is 8 points higher than G.W. Bush's in 2006 -- lost twice as many seats.
- Reagan's approval rating in 1982 (a time of deep recession and the year I graduated from college to look for a job, alas) was only 43 percent, yet he only lost 26 seats.
(Obviously, there's a large range in the approval ratings and number of seats, so the averages may give a skewed impression, but the medians are probably even less revealing with such a small number of data points: the Democrats' median is 50.5 for approval and -31 for seats, while the Republicans' is 57 for approval and -12 for seats.)
Despite the Nixon error, it's a fascinating chart. If voters truly intend to show dissatisfaction with unpopular presidents by unseating their party members, you'd think they'd be a little more consistent. Instead, there appears to be an unacknowledged double standard.
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