Green Habit wrote:Funny thing is though, among recent presidents, the two with the lowest unfavorability ratings both ended up as one termers.
Worth noting when the polls were taken:
George HW Bush - January 1991, tail end of the first Gulf War (his highest approval rating was right after the war ended, in Feb 1991--89%)
Carter - Uh, I have no idea. His lowest approval and highest disapproval were both in June 1979 (28%/56%), so I wonder if it has something to do with where the election cycle was at that point and how candidates tended to announce later than they do today.
That’s a shorter version of a response I was waiting to write up until after my workout: it only seems “funny” if you treat a poll as an attempt at an isolated, comprehensive capturing of the big picture, instead of one component of a holistic reflection of a moment.
Each of the presidents who reported a high number of “will vote against” respondents and then won was at an uncharacteristic low point in their popularity, at the time of the poll.
- Obama had just acquiesced to birtherism and released his birth certificate. A federal judge in Florida had declared parts of the ACA unconstitutional, and gasoline had passed $3 a gallon. April/May were part of a nadir for him polling wise, and within a few months he returned to his normal above-water numbers.
- Clinton’s polling in March 1995 was abysmal compared to his usual. Whitewater and Paula Jones has just helped usher in a massive Republican House and Senate takeover. Words like “lame duck” were being thrown around on CNN.
Consider: neither of these men had ever been nor would ever again in their tenure be close to as unpopular as they were at the moment that poll was taken. Donald Trump, who is currently at his very consistent average for polling, is 16 points below the point their nadir landed them at.
Again, the candidate’s opposition was smaller, less entrenched, and yet still part of a deviance from their popularity norm. Regression to the norm was a force in their favor. Which is why I include this poll alongside the fact that Trump’s polling continues to be almost exactly where it’s always been. The permanence of his low opinion polling is catastrophic to his ability to overcome what is already the biggest support deficit of any reelection campaign in our lifetimes.
Yeah, I think this is one of the ways in which the strategy of making your entire governing and messaging strategy about "owning the libs" is starting to backfire. Maybe they talk differently about this in private, but Trump, his aides and his supporters all seem to think that the group of people that are just not going to vote for him at all are this tiny group of far-left/SJW/whatever term is being used this week. It goes beyond their unwillingness to try and reach moderates; they just don't seem to want to acknowledge that about half the country is done with him. And when your whole messaging strategy is based on the idea that your detractors are a small group of liberal crybabies then half the country, you're going to run into huge problems.
None of this means he can't win; maybe he'll somehow convince a few of the people he's lost, or (more likely) the structural advantages he had in the 2016 election will repeat themselves. But it seems like a fairly significant issue for him.
It means there’s a shit ton of $25k a year jobs for new grads, and a desperate need for architects, lawyers, and doctors who are prepared to settle for $65,000 a year and a dollar tree for a grocery store.
What kind of stock can we put in this when a large portion of Gen X voters have the same basic mentality as Boomers, at this point?
VinylGuy wrote:its really tiresome to see these ¨good guys¨ talking about any political stuff in tv while also being kinda funny and hip and cool....its just...please enough of this shit.
This seems like it could be misleading. "Boomer and prior generations" include a lot of people who have died during the time span of that chart--there aren't a whole lot of silent generation or greatest generation voters compared to 30 years ago. And like Mickey pointed out, Gen X includes people in their mid-fifties. It feels like this graphic is conflating lifecycle and generational effects.
"I want to see the whole picture--as nearly as I can. I don't want to put on the blinders of 'good and bad,' and limit my vision."-- In Dubious Battle
Pew is really being irresponsible by already declaring when the Millennial Generation will end, let alone giving it the extremely boring and unoriginal name Generation Z. Way too early to know that for sure.
Are they? 1996 seems a little early to me but I've certainly read people theorize about the end of the Millennial generation coming in the late 90s/early 00s.
VinylGuy wrote:its really tiresome to see these ¨good guys¨ talking about any political stuff in tv while also being kinda funny and hip and cool....its just...please enough of this shit.
Mickey wrote:Are they? 1996 seems a little early to me but I've certainly read people theorize about the end of the Millennial generation coming in the late 90s/early 00s.
Neil Howe wrote:Why was 2005 chosen as this generation’s first birth year?
The 2005 date remains tentative. You can’t be sure where history will someday draw a cohort dividing line until a generation fully comes of age. But for now, 2005 is my best guess. History teaches that new generations first appear about one full phase of life, or about 18 to 24 years, after the first appearance of the last generation. Generational boundaries are also typically drawn 2 to 4 years before abrupt changes in the national mood. Millennials first appeared in 1982. That points to 2000 to 2006 as the opening window for the next generation. The reason I chose 2005 exactly—and again, this remains tentative—is that kids born in that year and after will recall nothing before Barack Obama’s presidency, the financial meltdown of 2008, and the seemingly endless Great Recession that followed.
As a Gen X person myself, I'm a little annoyed that we weren't large enough to have "our time." But maybe it's for the best. And I don't associate Gen X so much with boomers. Seems to be a lot of distance between Boomers & Millennials, so if anything I feel like Gen X is the actual transitional generation and Millennials will now become dominant. There never seemed to be as much a "Gen X type" as with other generations, though maybe I can't see that from the inside.
