Polls and Elections: The Polarized Presidency: Depth and Breadth of Public Partisanship

In its last issue before the 2004 presidential election, Time magazine declared, "By last week the Republicans were all but declaring that your children will die a gruesome death if John Kerry wins, and Kerry was warning that if you catch the flu, it's because George W. Bush screwed up your shot" (Gibbs 2004, 29). Journalistic accounts of a bitterly divided public had become standard fare after the 2000 election and remained a mainstay of coverage of the 2004 election (see Fiorina, Abrams, and Pope 2006). Over the last decade or so, political scientists have examined the degree of partisan polarization in American politics more systematically (if less colorfully) than their journalistic counter parts (e.g., Bond and Fleisher 2000; Fleisher and Bond 2001; Jacobson 2008; McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal 2006; Nivola and Brady 2008). We add to the study of polarization by asking how deep and wide polarization is in public views of presidents and how polarization during the George W. Bush presidency compares to earlier administrations. We find that the trends of increasing partisan polarization identified during the Bill Clinton administration (Bond and Fleisher 2001) continued during much of the Bush administration. Moreover, the depth and breadth of partisan polarization has also increased in recent decades: views about various facets of presidential performance have become significantly polarized. We offer suggestive evidence that major political events and economic conditions that are especially positive or negative tend to suppress the degree of partisan polarization in presidential approval. Ultimately, the depth and breadth of partisan polarization may hold grim implications for presidential governance. We extend the findings of earlier studies in four ways. First, we broaden the period of study to cover 1972 to 2008. This period begins much before some studies and extends later than others to provide a longer view of polarization in evaluations of the president than previously offered. We know that prior to the George W. Bush presidency, partisans were increasingly polarized in their views of presidents (Bond and Fleisher 2001) and that Republicans and Democrats often held radically different views of George W. Bush (see esp. Jacobson 2008). Putting the Bush 43 presidency in a larger context demonstrates that polarization actually increased beyond the existing trends to reach historically high levels. Second, we probe the depth of partisan polarization by examining the strength of approval or disapproval of presidential performance. Third, we examine the extent of partisan polarization in important additional attitudes toward the president, including evaluations of the president's handling of the economy and foreign affairs, his personal character traits, and views of the president's ideological distance from individuals. Fourth, we offer suggestive evidence about some of the causes of polarization in approval. Such an analysis is timely, allowing us to take stock of trends in partisan polarization as Barack Obama takes the helm of the ship of state with a pledge to restore bipartisanship. Partisanship and Presidential Approval: Literature and Hypotheses Despite disagreement over the extent of polarization among the public (see esp. Fiorina, Abrams, and Pope 2006), two studies in particular have presented clear evidence that Americans' views of the president have polarized along party lines. Examining data from 1972 to 2000, Bond and Fleisher (2001) identified a trend of increasingly polarized responses to the standard presidential approval question, "Do you approve or disapprove of the way [the president] is handling his job as president." More recently, Jacobson (2008) outlined in great detail the extent of partisan polarization during the first six years of the George W. Bush administration, highlighting both the extraordinary partisan unity in the months after 9/11 and the extreme levels of polarization since then. …