Is this the end of popular presidential candidates?
Trump is historically unpopular. The leading 2020 Democrats might not be far behind
The 2016 presidential election featured two of the most disliked presidential candidates in modern history. Hillary Clinton and especially Donald Trump were rated less favorably in public opinion polls than anyone who came before them. The story of the last election largely lies in this troubling fact. Though scholarship has focused on the role than racial conservatism and economics played in Trump’s upset victory, voters who liked neither of the two candidates were also more likely than not to pick Trump over Clinton. Their poor favorability ratings were potentially decisive. Check out this data from Marquette University Law School Professor Charles Franklin:
But if you were hoping for a break next year, I have some bad news for you: 2020 will likely be no different.
Dhrumil Mehta over at FiveThirtyEight put together a chart this week showing declines in the favorability ratings of all the major 2020 Democratic contenders. It's pretty bleak. Each set of ratings averaged over time, all 4 of the top candidates have net-negative favorability ratings:
I showed something similar in an article for The Economist a few weeks ago, though voters were rating Elizabeth Warren positively at the time (they aren’t any longer):
There are two questions I have about this. First, why so unpopular? I can think of a few potential explanations. Affective political polarization is one; as parties automatically shun the candidates from the opposition, their ratings will naturally sag. And if a candidate faces any in-party disloyalty whatsoever—and almost all candidates do—it will be nearly impossible to reach a positive rating.
The other, less satisfying potential answer is that our politicians today are “just worse” than they used to be. Meh.
It is perhaps more worthwhile to ask about the consequences that this has for democracy. Will our politics become more unstable when we have presidents who are perennially unpopular? We know from history that mid-term wave elections are more common with poorly-rated presidents. Will backlashes increase in frequency?
Will the public become even more disenchanted with American politics? Will they become angrier and more susceptible to demagoguery from their in-group leaders? Will they become angrier at each other, with less a sense of shared humanity? (To be sure, the cause here is not the poor favorability ratings of our candidates, but whatever variable comes before both in our causal diagram.) Will political violence become more common?
I'm frankly unsure about the answers to most of these questions. I'll just leave you with this: Whoever the Democrats nominate for president ends up being? they do not seem poised to break from the last election’s pattern of low candidate popularity.
Editor’s note:
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—Elliott