The Polls: The Dynamics of Presidential Favorability, 1991–1998

During 1998 and early 1999, the months when scandal and impeachment plagued President Clinton, a disconnect was noted between his job approval and favorability ratings. Specifically, Clinton's job approval soared while his favorability ratings dropped. Many commentators took note of this as if it were to be expected. The economy was strong, and Clinton had alienated many with his seamy personal behavior. Hence, the public did not want to remove him from office because of their economic quality of life but neither did the public approve of his personal demeanor. However, we as social scientists and presidency watchers do not know how common it is for the public to view a president on one hand as a capable chief executive and on the other hand as a person of morally flawed character. Nor do we know what the public reaction would be if the president were viewed as being incompetent but was well liked. In other words, what are the connections between favorability and job approval? And on an even more basic level, what are the dynamics and trends of public favorability to the president? In this article, I begin to sort out some of issues. First, I offer a monthly time series indicator of public favorability to the president from late 1991 through 1998. Despite my warnings in using the favorability questions that I raised in an earlier article in the journal (Cohen 1999), a methodology exists that can help construct a reliable time series. From creating such a series, we may be able to overcome some of the issues associated with individual questions that survey organizations use to tap into the public's favorability mood toward the president. Furthermore, by inspecting the temporal dynamics of presidential favorability, we may get a sense of the nature of this public reaction and assessment of its top political leader. It is important for us to expand the scope of our knowledge about public orientations and opinions toward the presidency. Most of our knowledge of this topic is grounded in two types of data: voting studies and the Gallup-type job approval question. However, as Greenstein (1974) wrote almost a quarter of a century ago, the presidency has many meanings to the public. The president is the focal point for public attention about politics, providing leadership through the thickets of politics and a sense of security in a bewildering and often threatening political world. The favorability questions, despite their many flaws and vagaries, offer us a second dimension of public assessment of presidents besides the workhorse Gallup approval-style questions. Whereas the approval questions focus on how well the public thinks the president is doing from a policy perspective, the favorability question focuses more on matters of presidential character. Currently, there is considerable debate over the importance of character in the presidency (Hargrove 1998). Investigation of this question from the lens of public assessments should broaden our understanding of this important issue and aspect of the presidency. Creating an Indicator of Public Favorability to the President Since the late 1970s, polling firms have been asking the public a variety of favorability questions. However, only in the 1990s have those questions been asked frequently enough for us to create a time series. In this article, I present a favorability time series spanning the period from October 1991 to December 1998 that is created by combining such questions from eight organizations: ABC/Washington Post, CBS/New York Times, Fox, Gallup/Time/CNN, Los Angeles Times, NBC/Wall Street Journal, Pew, and Yankelovich/CNN. By combining the polls of these eight organizations, we have favorability ratings for eighty-three of these eighty-seven months. Pushing the data series back earlier into time would dramatically increase the missing data problem. Still, this period includes not only the first six years of Clinton's term but also the last 15 months of the Bush administration, a period noted for highs in job approval that quickly sank once the Gulf War ended and the forces associated with an eroding economy set in. …