The Polls: Popular Views of the Vice President and Vice Presidential Favorability

In my earlier article on public attitudes toward the vice president, which relied on job approval data, I found great overlap and correlation between the approval of Bill Clinton and Al Gore (Cohen 2001). There are several good reasons why we would expect attitudes about the president to affect public opinion toward the vice president. One, the public may generalize its (dis)satisfaction of the president onto his administration partner, the vice president, considering the vice president as part of a presidential team. Two, the public may not readily distinguish the vice president as a political personality. This may be due in part to lack of information about the vice president. The analysis presented in that previous article was plagued by lack of good data. Approval readings on Vice President Gore were infrequent and scattered across his tenure. However, other types of questions have been asked on a more frequent basis. These are the favorability questions, which I describe more fully below. The favorability questions may help us sort through the issue of how distinctively the public thinks about the president and vice president as political personalities. Unlike the approval question, which focuses on job performance, the favorability questions steer attention to the person that the respondent is being asked about. Past research has shown that the public, at least in the case of Bill Clinton, can distinguish between the character of the incumbent from his job performance. That research demonstrated that the public was more approving of than favorable toward Bill Clinton (Cohen 1999, 2000a). Similar research has found that the public also seems to distinguish the president from his First Lady, again at least for the case of the Clintons (Burden and Mughan 1999; Cohen 2000b, 2000c). In the next section, I describe the favorability data on the vice president. The succeeding section compares vice presidential favorability with both presidential approval and presidential favorability during Al Gore's term as vice president. Vice Presidential Favorability Unlike vice presidential job approval, which is plagued by data scarcity, a wealth of data on vice presidential favorability exist, with a large number of polling firms asking the public how favorable it is toward the vice president on numerous occasions. However, not one polling organization has asked the public its opinion about the vice president either frequently or routinely enough to build a time series of any length. Still, one may compile these data across polling firms to create a time series on public favorability toward the vice president. The trick, however, is knitting these disparate data together into a coherent series. As I have done with both the First Lady and the president in earlier articles, I used Jim Stimson's (1999) algorithm to build such a series. A useful property of Stimson's procedure is that it extracts the underlying favorability dimension. This dimension will tend to be free of question wording, house, and other effects, which may tend to overstate or understate the degree of vice presidential favorability. In effect, we can view the resulting dimension as a smoothed time series. Since I described this procedure elsewhere (Cohen 1999, 2000c), as does Stimson (1999), I will not repeat that technical discussion here in much detail. Table 1 presents the polling organizations that posed favorability questions to the public during Al Gore's tenure, through March 2000, along with the questions that each firm used. TABLE 1 Vice Presidential Favorability: Polling Firm and Question Wording Polling Firm Question Wording ABC/Washington Post I'm going to read you a few names. For each, please tell me if you have a favorable or unfavorable impression of that person or group, or perhaps you don't know enough to say. …