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7/28/2019 Where is the Rally Approval and Trust of the President Cabinet Congress and Government Since September 11

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Ar ticle: Where's the Rally? Approval and Trust o f the President,Cabinet, Congress, and Government Since September 11

Author : Br ian J. Gaines

Issue: Sep. 2002Journal: PS: Political Science & Politics

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PSOnline www.apsanet.org 53

Wheres the Rally? Approval and

Trust of the President, Cabinet,

Congress, and Government Since

September 11*

There has been much debate over whether theUnited States has changed in any lasting andfundamental manners since September 11, 2001.Immediately following the carnage, editorialistsand pundits proclaimed a national loss of inno-cence, the end of American exceptionalism, thenew globalization of terror, and other cata-clysmic shifts. One year later, it is still tooearly to be certain which claims will stand thetest of time, and which will eventually come toseem overblown or simply off the mark. Ourconcern in this symposium is limited to civicengagement in the aftermath of the assaults,

and this note will be narrower still in focus.Here, I attempt an early, mid-rally assessmentof public approval of, and trust in, governmentand political figures. Around precisely whichinstitutions or figures have Americans beenrallying? Is there any reason to believe that

the current presiden-tial approval rally isdifferent in kind, notmerely degree, fromprevious crisis-induced surges insupport for thepresident? HaveAmericans beenequally generous intheir appraisals of

other public figures, or, indeed, shown newtrust in government in the abstract? All ofthese questions seem likely to attract a greatdeal of careful attention in the near future,and the following analyses are more in thespirit of uncovering suggestive clues thanoffering proof for novel, broad theories.

Presidential Approval

President Bushs approval ratings catapultedto unprecedented heights after the September

attacks, and approval of his job performancehas since remained very high, for a very longstretch of time. Figure 1 shows Gallupspresidential approval times series for GeorgeW. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George H.W. Bushover the first 16 months of their terms.1

Clearly, the swell in support for George W.Bush since September 11 has been exceptionalin magnitude and duration, at least against thebaseline of recent history. Whereas prior toSeptember, the president was enjoying arather routine honeymoon, every post-attack

Gallup poll has detected higher approval ofhis job performance than Clinton or GeorgeH.W. Bush ever received over the samephases of their terms, with the single excep-tion of an 80% approval mark for the elderBush in a January 1990 poll. In fact, thecurrent rally is remarkable even when setagainst the whole history of presidentialapproval. A surge of 3040 points is excep-tional, as is the very slight decay of supportover the ensuing eight months. The seizing ofthe American embassy in Iran, the onset ofthe Gulf War, and the Cuban Missile Crisis

all produced smaller, more gradual, and/orless durable surges in approval for JimmyCarter, George H.W. Bush, and John KennedyOther well-known rallies, such as that pro-duced for Gerald Ford by the Mayaguez inci-dent, pale in comparison (e.g. Brody 1991,Table 3.1 and Figure 3.2).2 When GallupsSeptember 21 and 22 poll found 90% approvafor Bush, they declared it a new record high.One should not take point estimates too seri-ously, and other presidents have recorded ap-proval in the vicinity of 80%, butexcept forGeorge H.W. Bushthose presidents servedbefore the one-two punch of Vietnam andWatergate deflated normal presidential approvalevels (Brody 1991, 4041).

The Gallup polls may, moreover, exaggeratthe extent of post-peak slippage in PresidentBushs approval. Compare Figure 1, whichseems to show about a 15-point slide fromthe maximum having occurred by early May,to Figure 2, which includes data from multi-ple polling firms, and thus has more than foutimes as many observations.3 Figure 2 sug-gests that George W. Bush has experiencedtwo fairly simple, but slightly different ap-proval dynamics, one before and one after thattacks. The solid lines are lowess regressionestimates, which provide a simple and flexibl

model of trend for a univariate time series ofirregularly spaced observations. In his firsteight months, Bush enjoyed an essentiallyconstant 55% approval level (with randomfluctuations), but saw his disapproval risesteadily, as the residual categorythose whodecline to answer either approve ordisapprovegradually vanished. This is,more or less, the normal pattern (Brody 199136). Then the terrorists struck, and, instantly,about 30% of the public shifted fromdisapproving to approving of Bushs job

by

Brian J. Gaines,

University of Illinois at

Urbana-C hampaign


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performance. In the ensuing months, Bush has experienced akind of second honeymoon, as approval has dipped onlyslightlyby around 10 pointswhile disapproval has risen byapproximately the same amount.

In short, President Bush has enjoyedand as of early May2002 is still enjoyinghistorically high levels of approval fromthe American people, taken as a whole. Brody (1991, 48) pro-poses that one not lose sight of the distinction between a pure

rally and improvements in approval levels that stemfrom policy successes. In that light, one could tryto separate rewards for the rapid victory over theTaliban from the rally, qua rally. Then again, theimmediacy of Bushs approval surge leaves nodoubt that many Americans swung to approval ofthe president before he had had a chance to reactin any substantive way to Septembers terroristincidents. That polls taken as early as September13 showed 78% to 86% approval may also shedsome light on the initial source of the pro-Bush

opinion swing. One of the main themes of Brodysbook (as captured by its subtitle) is that publicevaluations of the president are mediated by mediaaccounts, which, in turn, reflect elite opinion.Hence, the dominant understanding of rallies is thatthey follow from a (temporary) suspension of elitecriticism of the president and a concomitant absenceof media cues justifying disapproval of presidentialperformance.

The September 11 terrorist attacks were proba-bly the most salient news event in decades forAmericans, and few learned about the story dayslate, after coverage had developed a distinctive,uniform tone. Most Americans did learn about theattacks from the media, to be sure, but the publicreaction was probably too immediate to be under-stood as originating in changed elite discourse, asreflected in the media with a small lag. Priorscontribution to this symposium suggests thatknowledge about the war on terrorism has dis-played a unique logic, with people somehowovercoming many of the usual obstacles to obtain-ing political information. My conjecture here issimpler, but related, insofar as I too suspect thatthe present case is in some ways anomalous. Itseems possible that the movement from disap-proval to approval of George W. Bush precededelite support, as conveyed by the media. Brodytakes variations in public responses to seemingly

similar international crises as ruling out any sim-ple explanation of the rally phenomenon as areflexive patriotic response (62). The presentrally may eventually have conformed to Brodysmodel, but, prima facie, it seems initially to havebeen a strikingly good example of an instanta-neous, reflexive patriotic response, which is cer-tainly how it was portrayed in news items aboutthe late-September run on flags at Wal Martsacross the nation.

A breakdown of the approval time series by parti-san identification would reveal, of course, that suchdecay in approval as has occurred has been dispro-portionately concentrated among Democrats. In thosepolls shown in Figure 2 that do report separate

results by partisan identification, the Republican,Independent, and Democratic average support levelsin 2002 have been 96%, 76%, and 66%, respec-tively. While that 30-point gap is impressive, note

that 66% is close to the peak approval for the whole nationalsample from both of Clintons two series shown in Figure 1.My impressionistic sense is that Democratic leaders have exper-imented with pulling almost all punches in discussion of foreignaffairs, while tentatively poking at Bush on domestic matters.Following Zaller (1999), then, we might expect only the mostattentive Democratic partisans to be shifting back to their morenatural position of disapproval of the presidents performance.

532 PS September 2002

Figure 1Gallup Presidential Approval Data, First 16Months

Figure 2Approval and Disapproval of George W. Bushthrough April 2002


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But a parting of ways between Democrats andRepublicans in the mass public could occur withor without elite and media intervention, and with-out comprehensive data on media tone over thelast eight months, I cannot really separate rival ac-counts for the overall durability of Bushs supportlevels.

One final comparison that illustrates the impres-sive duration of this rally is the time series onmedia coverage of September 11s aftermath. TheTyndall Report has compiled data on total network

newscast coverage of eight distinct stories directlyrelated to the terrorist attacks and Americas re-sponse. That time series shows a quite drastic,though not smooth, falloff in total coverage, so thatby early 2002, the news had clearly shifted to othertopics (). Yet, while themedia moved on, the public stuck with approval ofthe president, perhaps out of a sense that his poli-cies were succeeding or that the nation remained inperil. In any case, over the last eight months, presi-dential approval has been abnormally high and yetlargely immune to normal deterioration patterns.The Tyndall data suggest that this inertia might behard to explain as originating in media, reinforcingthe impression that the nation is in the midst of anunusually populist rally.

Other Political Figures

Further clues about how to understand Americanpublic opinion since September 11 come from theapproval series for other prominent political actors.Congressional job approval has attracted less inter-est than presidential over the years, but pollstershave asked, Do you approve or disapprove of theway Congress is handling its job? (or slight varia-tions thereof) frequently enough to provide somesense for the long-term dynamics of public ap-

proval of the legislature. Over the second Clintonterm, for instance, the approval level for Congresswas typically 1020 points below that of thepresident, with movements in the two series beingweakly correlated. Before September 11, thispresidential edge had shrunk, as Bush was leadingCongress only slightly in most polls. According toabout 40 polls measuring congressional approval,Congresss approval level also shot up immediatelyafter the attacks. Gallup recorded 84% approval ina poll taken over the period October 1114, andpolls taken for CBS/New York Times, Gallup,IPSOS-Reid, and the Los Angeles Times over thenext month detected about 70% approval, on aver-age. However, this rally did not match its executive

counterpart in persistence: the average approvallevel for Congress in 14 polls in 2002 has beenonly 56%, and the lowest readings have been be-low 50%. Disapproval, likewise, seems to have shot upwardsover late 2001, and then leveled off between 30% and 40% inthe new year. So Americans may have instinctively ralliedaround their legislature briefly, but approval of public figuresis in no sense automatic at the moment, as most of the con-gressional surge quickly came undone. That said, recent pollsshow higher congressional approval than did polls from 1998to mid-2001, so it might be fair to conclude that someAmericans (maybe 10%) continue to rally around the Hill.

A few more clues lie in public attitudes toward prominenCabinet figures. Figure 3 shows Harris data (again, retrievedfrom National Journals online poll track) on public atti-tudes towards a selection of figures over the rally months.Here the question is not framed in terms of approval, butquality of job performance: How would you rate the jobthe following officials are doingexcellent, pretty good,only fair or poor? Support for President Bush is roughlywhat one might have expected from his approval numbers:


Figure 3Ratings of President Bush, Donald Rumsfeld,Democrats in Congress


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although excellent ratings have declined, there has beenonly a small movement from pretty good or excellent toonly fair, and poor remains a fringe response. Secretaryof Defense Donald Rumsfeld was omitted from the Septembersurvey, and thus missed a chance to record an immediate,post-attack high. But his October to March values look verymuch like those of Bush. Colin Powells ratings (not shown)are more impressive still, in fact slightly better than those of

the president. The Democrats in Congress, by contrast, en-joyed a sensational September report card, but then sawmore and more ratings of only fair and even 12% choos-ing poor by March. So, again, enthusiasm for Congresslooks to have been short lived. There seems to be a smallpartisan effect, as the Republicans in Congress have doneslightly better than their Democratic colleagues over this pe-riod. But their series looks more like the bottom panel thaneither of the top two, and by March only 50% were ratingthem pretty good or better. It would seem that Americansare less appreciative of the Congress than of President Bushor his Cabinet.

In the absence of quality data on media por-trayals of Rumsfeld and his colleagues, onecannot easily discriminate between an explana-tion for their rallies that stresses spillover fromtheir boss from a rival account emphasizingmedia and/or elite friendliness. My impression-ist sense about Rumsfeld is that he initiallyreceived poor press, emphasizing his age andthe sense that he was one of yesterdaysmen, but that his command of the war inAfghanistan later produced glowing coverage.

A more interesting and suggestive case is At-torney General John Ashcroft. With the possi-ble exception of Tom Ridge, no other seniorBush Administration figure seems to have facedas much media hostility. Ashcroft and the presscorps face one another across a wide culturaldivide, and a flurry of stories in January playedup his alleged prudery when, at a press confer-ence, his staff erected a backdrop that hap-pened to screen out a nude statue of Justice.Even more memorably, in December,New YorkTimes columnist Anthony Lewis used his finalcolumn to equate Ashcroft and OsamaBin-Laden, without a hint of irony.4 Late nightcomedians (including pseudo news anchor JohnStewart of The Daily Show) followed suit.In short, even if there has been something of asuspension of criticism of Bush Administrationofficials since September 11, Ashcroft seems tobe the preferred whipping boy in the media.Yet, his ratings in the Harris polls of Januaryand March were better than those of theDemocrats in Congress or Tom Daschle(e.g., roughly 60% rating his performancepretty good or better, to Daschles 45%).Again, then, I detect some signs that theAmerican publics rallying behind PresidentBush and his cabinet is populist, in the sensethat it seems at least partially independent of

media cues.

Issues, Rallies, and Trust

Along with the standard approval item, anumber of pollsters have been asking re-

spondents to discriminate between approval of overall jobperformance and approval of handling of the economy,foreign policy, and so on. Reactions seem to vary whenquestions are framed by issue, and, predictably, Bush hastypically (but not uniformly) scored better for management offoreign policy and the war on terrorism than for his handlingof the economy. It will be interesting, eventually, to testwhether George W. Bushs approval levels have responded to

economic trends over this period of elevated support, as, forinstance, Reagans approval seems to have done notwith-standing the conventional wisdom that he was a teflonpresident, approval for whom was impervious to bad-newscorrections (e.g., Ostrom and Smith 1993). For present pur-poses, what is intriguing about differences in issue-specificapproval ratings is that they work against an understandingof the rally as being purely knee-jerk, or divorced frompolicy considerations.

In an early January Public Opinion Strategies poll, 55%strongly approved and 27% approved somewhat ofBushs job performance. Approving respondents were asked


Standing Guard. While approval marks for Congress were strong immediately followingSeptember 11, Senate majority leader Thomas Daschle (top, right) and Senate minorityleader Trent Lott (top, left) have seen their numbers dip. Gaines notes that It would seemthat Americans are less appreciative of the Congress than of President Bush and hisCabinet. Top: (AP Photo/ Kenneth Lambert); Bottom: (AP Photo/ Doug Mills).


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to identify the reason for Bushs high ratings,with the choices: his policies have resulted in nofurther terrorist attacks; his response to the eventsof Sept. 11 and the direction of the war inAfghanistan; his general personal strength andsense of leadership since Sept. 11; or, the presentadministrations response dealing with the eco-nomic downturn. Only 6% selected the first orfourth options, while 44% cited his personalstrength and leadership, and 34% said the rallywas based on the direction of the war. Since the

question was not open-ended, and none of theoptions allowed respondents to locate the changein the American people rather than the president,these figures do not necessarily allow one to con-clude that the current climate of support is neces-sarily personalized. But to the extent that supportdoes stem from the success of the war andBushs inspiring tone of leadership, it would seemthere is no reason to believe there will necessarilybe any long-term traces of the rally.

On the other hand, a few survey items havetried to tap into the American publics sense oftrust in government and institutions, to examinewhether the swing of public mood is, in some re-spects, deeper than mere approval of the policiesand personalities in the current administration.ABC news found no post-attack change of priori-ties, as respondents favored providing neededservices over holding down the size of govern-ment by identical 63%36% margins in July 2001and January 2002. But trust in the governmentsability to solve (general) problems rose from 51%in 2000 to 66% in 2002. Curiously, government elicitedhigher levels of trust with respect to its ability to deal withnational security than with social issues. Asked, When itcomes to handling social issues like the economy, health care,Social Security and education, how much of the time do youtrust the government in Washington to do what is right?Would you say just about always, most of the time or only

some of the time? only 38% chose the first two, optimisticresponses. However, 70% made those choices when the lead-in was, When it comes to handling national security and thewar on terrorism. That gap is quite puzzling if respondentsreason retrospectively, given the manifest failure of govern-ment to prevent terrorists from killing thousands only monthsbefore. The responses may reflect prospective evaluations anda realistic sense that governmental priorities had shifted to-wards security in a major way. Or, it might be that thetrust terminology here is misleading, and that what theseresponses best demonstrate is Americans willingness to ex-press solidarity with their government in times and realms ofcrisis. That Republicans express more confidence than Democ-rats on both items (48% to 32% on social issues and 80% to62% on security) probably demonstrates that Bushs shadow

falls across the vaguely specified government.Last, what about the most general trust in government

item for which we have a long time series? Figure 4 showsboth the National Election Study (NES) and the ABCNews/Washington Post series for trust levels, with a post-9/11ABC reading as the final observation. Here, then, is yet anotherspike in public sentiment following the attacks, a surge everybit as striking in magnitude as was the presidential approval

rally. Whether this new willingness to express faith that government is usually doing what is right will persist cannot easily bprojected at this point. The contrast between ABC and the NEin recent years makes that question all the more intriguing,since the biennial NES results suggest that trust has beensteadily rising since a local minimum in 1994, while ABCsannual surveys seemed to show that the mid-1990s trust rally

quickly fizzled, and that the public has in very recent yearsbeen moving back towards the late-1970s nadir in general trusA caveat about the 64% final observation is that it came in alate September poll, and even Congress seemed to be enjoyinga surge in approval at that point. Hence, this figure seems par-ticularly prone to future revision, and it would almost certainlybe imprudent to declare that the bright side of Septemberstragic loss of lives is that they helped usher in a new era oftrust in government amongst the broader public.

Conclusion

The American public continues to rally around the presideneight months after a few tragically efficient terrorists shockedthe nation. The rally has been long-lived, and somewhat deep

insofar as it seems to encompass the Cabinet, and maybe evenCongress, albeit in a much muted form. There are hints thatthis has been an unusually unmediated response, although Ihave not presented any evidence that I would regard as con-clusive on that front. On the most intriguing question, ofwhether the publics newly high approval for politicians por-tends a turnaround in cynicism about government, I suspectthat it is still too early to tell.


Figure 4Trust in Government*, 19582001

*The series shows the percentage of respondents answering just about always ormost of the time to How much of the time do you think you can trust thegovernment in Washington to do what is rightjust about always, most of the timeor only some of the time?


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Notes

*Thanks to Scott Althaus and Peter Nardulli for helpful suggestions.1. The figure shows the proportion of all respondents answering

approve to the question: Do you approve or disapprove of the wayGeorge W. Bush is handling his job as president? The Gallup presidential-approval time series has been called, the longest and most valuable inpublic opinion history (King and Ragsdale 1988, 278), and it has certainlybeen much studied. Since September 11, it seems likely that more peoplethan ever have been exposed to these data. Of course, all of the usualcaveats about survey items apply. In particular, the figure shows only pointestimates, and 95% confidence intervals generally span an interval of plusor minus three or four points.

2. Note too that there is also little sign of any substantial rally aroundGeorge W. Bush in April 2001, during the standoff with China over adowned U.S. spy plane, following its collision with a Chinese fighter jet.

3. The data plotted in Figure 2 were obtained from National Journalsonline poll track. I included every national-sample poll, most ofwhich had about 1,000 respondents. I aggregated responses for thosepolls that asked respondents to express degrees of approval or disap-proval, and I also include some polls that sampled registered voters orlikely voters rather than adults, since the variation in responsesappeared to be slight.

4. certainty is the enemy of decency and humanity in people whoare sure they are right, like Osama bin Laden and John Ashcroft(Abroad at Home; Hail And Farewell, New York Times, 15 December2001, sec. A). This was not Lewiss only assault on Ashcroft, and Lewiswas not a lone critic. For instance, Al Hunt, from the pages of the WallStreet Journal, has nearly matched Lewis for strident rhetoric directed atthe Attorney General.


References

Brody, Richard A. 1991.Assessing the President: The Media, Elite Opinion,and Public Support. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

King, Gary, and Lyn Ragsdale. 1988. The Elusive Executive: DiscoveringStatistical Patterns in the Presidency. Washington, DC: CQ Press.

Ostrom, Charles W. Jr., and Rene M. Smith. 1993. Error Correction,Attitude Persistence, and Executive Rewards and Punishments:

A Behavioral Theory of Presidential Approval. Political Analysis4:12783.

Zaller, John. 1999. The Myth of Massive Media Impact Revived: NewSupport for a Discredited Idea. In Political Persuasion and AttitudeChange, ed. Diana C. Mutz, Paul M. Sniderman, and Richard A.Brody. Ann Arbor: Univeristy of Michigan Press, 1778.

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