September 3, 2008
Coleman: Maverick or McSame?
John
Coleman is a the Chair of the Department Political Science at the
Joe Biden has supported President Bush 70% of the time. You may not have heard this mentioned at the Democratic National Convention or in Barack Obama's acceptance speech.
The Obama team--and Obama himself--has been working hard to link John McCain to George W. Bush by noting that he "votes with Bush 90% of the time." And if 90% isn't enough Bush for you, Democrats note, McCain supported the president 95% of the time in 2007. One Obama ad even lists this voting record as the first plank in McCain's economic program.
The figures being used by Democrats are presidential support
scores computed by CQ Weekly, a leading weekly magazine
monitoring events in
As the chart below shows, John McCain has indeed voted consistent with the preferences of President Bush about 90% of the time on these presidential support roll-calls. This has been roughly the same level of support as the average Republican senator.
McCain's presidential support level was 95% in 2007, but this is somewhat misleading. Because he was running for president, McCain was present for only 38 of the 97 roll calls CQ used to calculate the presidential support score. There were 442 roll-call votes in total in the Senate in 2007. Looking at only those votes for which both McCain and Obama were present that year--33 votes--McCain's support score was 94% while Obama's was 48%. CQ also noted in a recent post that McCain, Obama, and Biden voted on less than half the presidential support votes from January through August 2008.
Using the same figures the Obama campaign has used to tie John McCain to President Bush, Biden was a 77% supporter of President Bush's positions in 2002, 70% in 2004, and over a 50% supporter of Bush in 4 of the president's 7 full years in office. Up through the August 2008 congressional recess, Biden had supported Bush's positions 52% of the time since January 2001. Obama himself supported the president's positions just under 50% in 2006 and 40% since he joined the Senate in January 2005.
It is doubtful that many Americans hearing the Obama team's 90% charge against McCain realize that Obama and Biden themselves have supported the president anywhere from 33 to 77% of the time during his term.
In addition to linking McCain to Bush, another goal of the Obama campaign in using the 90% support figure is to blunt McCain's claim to be a maverick who shows independence from his party. Establishing McCain's independent credentials was a major theme at the Republican National Convention on Tuesday night.
Given that even Obama and Biden sometimes had relatively high levels of support for Bush, a better measure of independence than the presidential support score would be to look at the party support score, also calculated by CQ Weekly. Looking at "party votes"--those roll-call votes on which a majority of Republicans oppose a majority of Democrats--CQ calculates whether a senator voted with his party's majority or against it. The party support score is the percentage of times a senator voted with his party majority on party votes. There were 266 party votes in the Senate in 2007, or 60% of all Senate roll-call votes.
Looking at his party support scores during the Bush
presidency, the chart below shows that McCain regularly was less supportive of
his party than the average Republican senator. His voting in 2007, when McCain
was frequently out of
McCain's professed independent streak is supported by these data. About 75 to 85% of the time, McCain voted with his party's majority. More frequently than the average Republican, however, McCain voted with the Democratic majority rather than the Republican majority on votes that put the two parties on opposite sides.
Obama and Biden, on the other hand, have both been more likely than the typical Democratic senator to vote with the Democratic party position. In each of his three full years, Obama voted over 95% of the time with the Democratic majority on party votes. McCain reached 90% only once, in 2007.Biden's party support level has hovered between about 90 to 95%. From these data, McCain can more credibly make the claim that he is willing to buck his party. He has voted against his party majority about 15 to 25% of the time across the Bush years, compared to about 3% for Obama and 5 to 10% for Biden.
I've plotted these data in a different format in the chart below. Here, zero on the left axis indicates the baseline party support level of the average senator for each party. I then plot the difference between the average Republican senator's party support and McCain's, and the average Democratic senator's support and Obama's and Biden's. During the Bush years, McCain was usually about 5 to 10 percentage points less likely to vote with his party than the average Republican senator. Obama's party support level was about 10 points higher than the average Democratic senator, while Biden was usually between about 5 to 12 points more likely to vote with the party majority than the average Democrat.
These numbers burnish McCain's independent credentials, at least compared to his two senatorial rivals. But they also point to one of the key dilemmas of the McCain candidacy. To weaken McCain's maverick image, Democrats can tie McCain to Bush by emphasizing McCain's presidential support percentage, while not mentioning the sometimes high Bush support level of his Democratic opponents themselves. McCain can respond by noting that, compared to his rivals, his party support percentage shows he is less likely to vote along party lines and has more of an independent streak. Emphasizing that streak may endear him to independents and some Democrats, but it is of course one of the chief aspects of McCain's legislative life that has historically created problems for him within his own party and among party activists. It is one of the tasks of the Republican convention to convince Republicans of the virtue of that independent streak as a matter of character, even if they disagree with McCain on policy particulars.
By Guest Pollster on September 3, 2008 12:46 PM | Permalink
Comments
McCain made a deal with the devil in 2004. After the nasty campaign in 2000 with GWB, he knew he had to side with the enemy in order to gain his support for this run at the presidency. I did support McCain in 2000 as he was somewhat of a change agent in DC, etc.. For 2008, he just doesn't impress me anymore. He's your typical inside the beltway Republican. And very stubborn to boot. I don't see him being effective with a heavy majority of Dems in the House and a nice majority of Dems in the Senate. It may be a good thing however to have a stalemated government. They do tend to screw up many things! :)
It's a good point that the 95% might be somewhat misleading. The baseline really isn't 0% to be against Bush. That said, it's not the most striking thing I get from the numbers.
It's that McCain has completely changed since running for President. He spikes towards the party and Bush in every graph in 2007. This is why he doesn't seem like the same man he was back in 2000 or even 2004. Look at that last graph, he's way below the average senator's party score in 2001. That is what a maverick looks like. He continues to be somewhat below the average party line for 2002 - 2006. Then in 2007 he radically moves toward towing the party line in almost every case. The story to take out of this article, McCain will change his own values to become President.
The article says, "Obama himself supported the president's positions just under 50% in 2006 and 40% since he joined the Senate in January 2005." I think this area of the analysis is very misleading. Even with zero correlation (complete independence), you'd expect 50% match. (Imagine two independent coin tosses - you get two heads or two tails about 50% of the time.) Under 50% matching indicates at least a slight negative correlation between Obama and Bush.
I also think there's something revealing being glossed over with this analysis - there's a measurement of the proportion of votes which were on bipartisan issues vs. polarizing issues. The more above 50% the Democratic numbers are, the more bipartisan the issues are likely to have been; the more below 50%, the more polarizing. Zero would be all polarizing issues; one hundred would be pure bipartisan. I'd hope to see those numbers head upwards in the years ahead.
The last graph also supports (at least somewhat) the assertion McCain is less independent now than he was before. I think we need years 2000 and before to get a better idea of that, though.
The bottom line is that Mccain has become more of a party man to get elected president. More importantly he was and is very conserative. Anti-choice, Pro-gun and favorable to big business interest. If those are the positions you support you should vote for him,if not then you should vote for Obama. The last congressional election and the projections for the current one indicate that wheather or not he is more or less supportive of Bush than the average Republican office holder,he is far closer to Bush then the electorate. End of story.
Using the 95% voting-with-Bush figure is just as legitimate as the GOP attack that Obama is the most liberal Senator (as McCain said, "I don't know that Obama is a Marxist..." or words to that effect).
But a key point is that McCain was mad against Bush et al. in 2001, and was apparently considering switching parties. So he bucked the President and his Party to that high level.
Post-2005, McCain started becoming more supportive of the President than fellow GOP Senators - as someone pointed out, maybe a deal with the Devil. The GOP also started somewhat bucking the President around this time, which explains why it appears McCain does not vote as often along Party lines in later years.
I also wonder how many of these votes were on Immigration (2005/2006?), a subject where the GOP opposed President Bush, but Senator McCain supported Bush. Now of course, Candidate McCain is opposed to that... ;-)
I think it's worth noting that Maverick v.McSame is somewhat a false binary. It's possible that McCain can disagree with his party more than Obama to a small but statistically significant degree, and still be largely similar to the last 8 years of governance. Even if it is a roundabout way of getting there, this perspective lends more credence to Obama's line that he "[didn't] want to take a ten percent chance on change". Because that's what we're relying on, if we're expecting McCain to change things soley because he deviates from party orthodoxy more than average.
Also, I would like to know a bit more about the methodology involved. The data here suggests McCain is more rebellious to his party, and Obama more supportive of his. I'd be a little more interested in seeing how often they supported the winning position. The majority of democrats may have voted against the majority of republicans, but with massive democratic defections the harder position to take may have been the losing one.
Thanks for laboring over the multiple plots. The bottom line seems to be: when the chips are down, Maverick turns into McSame.
"Joe Biden has supported President Bush 70% of the time. You may not have heard this mentioned at the Democratic National Convention or in Barack Obama's acceptance speech."
We didn't hear it because it isn't true -- as the poster himself acknowledges later in the post:
"Up through the August 2008 congressional recess, Biden had supported Bush's positions 52% of the time since January 2001."
52% is pretty close to being a coin flip either way -- which may or may not say something about Joe Biden's chameleon instincts, but is a lot different than 70%, much less McCain's 90% (measured over the same full period).
Nice try. But I think I detect a partisan agenda here.
Obama fixed in the public mind that 90% number. That is devastating to McCain's maverick image. The next two days will frame McCain's counter-attack against Obama. But with all the focus on Palin, McCain has a media attention problem again. We are not talking about McCain's reform agenda because we are immersed in identity politics.
Now they are trying the "blame the media" tactic. I don't think you can win doing that. A candidate needs the media to transmit the message. I think that the campaign is imploding on itself. McCain's temperament increasingly will become the subject of the campaign. He will be seen more and more as an angry, bitter old man as each new strategy backfires on him.
Ok, let's assume your numbers are correct.. So Biden did side with the president that much. What was one of Obama's most important keys to somebody becoming VP???
That would be .. somebody who would have opposing ideas and would stand up and see the other side of decisions. VP that would could offer other sided opinions? That's a fresh idea, isn't it. Who's the first President who comes to mind doing that? Oh yeah .. Lincoln.
Obama-Biden '08
the biden apologists are debating numbers. great. but outside of that, obama said that clinton "lacked judgment" because she supported the war. he also lambasted her for supposedly supporting nafta and for supporting the bankruptcy reform legislation. biden supported all of these things as well. on many BIG issues, biden has been with bush...
The serious question is not what he has done, but what he intends to do.
If we take what we heard at the Republican convention as a guide, we should not call him McSame, but McNothing, a man who will sit in the Oval Office only because he fought in Vietnam and was tortured, and whose only clear policy notions are to cut people's taxes and drill for oil.
I frankly doubt if he has any genuine opinions left and think he is operating merely on impulse, and the ghostly memory of what he once believed. This will certainly not make him the same as George W. Bush, but it may very well push him in the direction of Warren Harding.
What sticks out to me is how everyone seemed to be running away from Bush in 2005 (the only year McCain dropped below the 90s and Biden and Obama were hovering around 30). I wonder if that was all Katrina-related, or what else was going on then.
Fascinating, but your lede is misleading. The 77% number comes from the post-9/11 legislative activity and matches the Democratic average at that time. The more compelling issue is the party adherence score, which makes up the latter half of your post. I'm intrigued by the change in McCain seemingly becoming more supportive of Bush than the typical GOP Senator in 2007. Of course, there are the missed votes (and we would have to score those bills in terms of their party splits).
Posted on September 3, 2008 1:28 PM