Presidential Election
This is as fast and furious a pace in the presidential election as we are likely to see until the fall. The Democratic primaries and caucuses are occurring one right after the other, and President Bush informally began his own campaign on Sunday with his high-visibility appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press.
There is little question that the election advantage has tilted toward the Democrats, at least in the short term. Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry has zoomed into front-runner status in the fight for the Democratic nomination, with a favorable image among about two-thirds of the population. At the same time, Bush’s favorability ratings are down. Kerry and Bush are tied in a head-to-head general election matchup, in contrast to the more typical scenario in February of an election year, in which an incumbent president seeking re-election leads his opponent.
A lot of this is to be expected during a high-intensity, high-profile Democratic primary contest. Pollsters have long calibrated a "convention bounce" during each party’s convention in the summer of an election year, when the candidate of the party having the convention tends to jump up in the polls.
I think we are now in a comparable period for the Democrats. The fascinating fight for the party nomination, the colorful cast of characters, the up-and-down saga of former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, and Kerry’s emergence as the front-runner have all made for great interest and drama. Everything else being equal, it’s logical that Bush would suffer and the Democrats would gain.
George Bush
There are other factors working against Bush at this point. First and foremost, there’s the extraordinary impact of the testimony of former weapons inspector David Kay, who essentially said that there were no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq at the beginning of the Iraq war. Given that the existence of WMD was Bush’s basic frequently stated justification for going to war, it can’t help but hurt him that no weapons have yet turned up.
The lack of evidence of WMD is particularly damaging when coupled with CIA Director George Tenet’s comment that the Iraqi threat was not imminent at the beginning of the war, and Secretary of State Colin Powell’s statement that he might not have supported the war if he had known that the weapons were not there. Not surprisingly, WMD and Iraq made up the dominant subject matter for the first 30 minutes of moderator Tim Russert’s questioning of Bush on Meet the Press.
At the same time, I think the recent drop in Bush’s approval ratings is not necessarily abnormal. Bush’s ratings were at 50% a couple of times last fall, after the rally effect associated with the beginning of the Iraq war had dissipated. And that’s the range to which they have now returned after the smaller rally effect associated with Bush’s surprise visit to Iraq at Thanksgiving, and the subsequent capture of Saddam Hussein. A presidential job approval rating in the low 50s is quite normal and to be expected in the winter of an election year.
Bush’s job approval ratings hit their low point of 49% in the Jan. 29-Feb. 1 CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll. The latest Gallup Poll (conducted Feb. 6-8) shows a statistically insignificant, but symbolically important, increase to 52%. As previously noted, this is a fairly "normal" job approval rating for a president in the midst of a highly charged presidential campaign.
Will there be an impact from Bush’s unusual, and highly visible, appearance Sunday on Meet the Press? There is little doubt that Bush and his advisers made the decision to appear on the program in an effort to arrest the downward trend in Bush’s job approval ratings. The bulk of the interviews for Gallup’s weekend poll were conducted on Friday and Saturday, so the Meet the Press interview per se could not have had a great deal of impact on the poll results, but the apparent halt to Bush’s ratings slide evident in the poll (at least for the moment) is no doubt encouraging to Bush’s re-election team.
Coincident with Bush’s slight uptick in job approval rating this weekend was a similar uptick in Bush’s standing against Kerry in the presidential horse-race question. Last weekend, Kerry was beating Bush among likely voters by a seven-point margin. This weekend, the two are statistically tied, with Bush getting 49% of the vote, compared with Kerry’s 48%.
John Kerry
One thing is abundantly clear from the poll data: Democrats are gathering ranks around Kerry -- the candidate they think has the best chance of beating Bush. Not only has Kerry won 8 out of 10 primaries or caucuses held so far, but he now has the backing of 52% of registered Democrats nationwide when they are asked whom they want to be their nominee.
North Carolina Sen. John Edwards is said to be the main threat to Kerry’s march toward the nomination, but Edwards isn’t any better positioned than Dean at this point. Indeed, Dean gets 14% support among registered Democrats nationwide, compared with 13% for Edwards and 10% for retired Gen. Wesley Clark. Edwards does only slightly better against Bush than either Dean or Clark. While Bush is now beating Kerry by 1 point, he beats Edwards by 4 points, Clark by 5, and Dean by 10.
One can envision scenarios in which Kerry falters and loses his lead, as the result of either a major gaffe, or larger-than-expected losses in the southern states of Tennessee and Virginia today. But at this point, the odds of Kerry not getting his party’s nomination seem to be quite low.
We usually present trial heat results with the caveat that much can change between now and the election in November, and that’s certainly true. Although Bush in many ways began the election campaign this weekend with his appearance on Meet the Press, he has yet to begin spending the huge amounts of money his campaign has collected. Kerry’s "primary bounce" may dissipate, and with Bush’s money and increased campaign efforts, it’s entirely possible that he will come back and move into a lead in the weeks and months to come.
Same-Sex Marriage
There’s been a great deal of discussion of the potential impact of the same-sex marriage issue on the presidential election. The Massachusetts Supreme Court essentially ruled that Massachusetts could not bar same-sex couples from getting legally married, and despite efforts by the Massachusetts governor and state legislature to intervene, most observers conclude that there will be a tidal wave of highly publicized same-sex marriages taking place there once the ruling takes effect in May.
It has not been lost on the Bush re-election strategists that Kerry is a senator from Massachusetts, or that he was 1 of 14 senators who voted against the Defense of Marriage Act passed in 1996 during the Clinton administration.
Some conservatives are pushing for a federal amendment to the Constitution that would define marriage as only between and a man and a woman, and many observers assume that the candidates’ positions on this type of amendment will be a major litmus test used during the campaign.
How likely is it that the constitutional amendment issue will indeed become a defining one in the months to come? Gallup data show that same-sex marriage is in general a low-priority issue for voters in the presidential campaign. It is somewhat more salient to Republicans and conservatives, voters who are almost certainly going to vote for Bush regardless, although their level of intensity of support (and hence turnout) could be somewhat dependent on Bush’s willingness to take a position on the issue. Liberal voters who are concerned that same-sex marriage should not be restricted are very likely to vote for the Democratic candidate, but there is no evidence in our data that the issue is highly significant to them as a group.
There is also some evidence in the poll suggesting that Americans are reluctant to push for the dramatic action step of amending the Constitution as a way of addressing the same-sex marriage issue. Gallup’s weekend poll shows a 12-point difference between the percentage of Americans who oppose same-sex marriage in general, and the percentage favoring a constitutional amendment that would define marriage as being only between a man and a woman (thus barring marriages between gay or lesbian couples). Fifty-nine percent say that same-sex marriage should not be legal, but only 47% favor a constitutional amendment to that effect.
Opinion on same-sex marriage is partisan. Sixty-three percent of Republicans favor such an amendment, compared with 44% of independents and 36% of Democrats.
Valentine’s Day
Ninety-eight percent of married people in this country say they are in love. And during this Valentine’s Day season, 72% of all Americans (aged 18 and older) say they are in love with someone. Being in love increases as Americans move into middle age, and then falls again as they move into old age. Only 51% of those aged 65 and older are in love, no doubt in part because individuals in this age group are more likely to be widows or widowers. Men are more likely to be in love than women are, and those with higher incomes are more likely to be in love than those with lower incomes are. Sixty-two percent of Americans say they will celebrate Valentine’s Day in some special way, meaning that at least some Americans who are in love will not be doing anything about it come Saturday.
Janet Jackson
Many observers are surprised at the enormous amount of attention given to Janet Jackson’s "wardrobe malfunction" during her half-time appearance at the Super Bowl on Feb. 1. Our weekend poll shows that only 21% of the adult population saw the event live and were offended by it. Those with children under 18 were only slightly more likely to be offended than others.
Thus, it is perhaps not surprising to find that only a third of Americans believe that CBS should be punished in some way for broadcasting the incident, although three-quarters of Americans say that the entertainment industry in general should make serious efforts to reduce the amount of sex and violence in its movies, television shows, and music.