Trump Success? Conventional Measures in the Era of an Unconventional President Jon R. Bond Texas A&M University [email protected] and Manny Teodoro Texas A&M University [email protected] Prepared for Presentation at the 115th Annual Meeting & Exhibition of the American Political Science Association August 29 – September 1, 2019 Washington, DC Trump Success? Conventional Measures in the Era of an Unconventional President Abstract Conventional indicators reported in CQ’s 2017 Presidential Support Study show that President Trump racked up a “Record Success Rate”, winning 100 percent of House votes on which he expressed a position. Although presidency scholars have long recognized that winning roll call votes is not an indication of presidential influence, Trump’s unconventional style and his willful ignorance of Congress and basic details of the policies he “supports” lead us to question whether the results of roll call votes should even be interpreted as presidential success. Including this unconventional president in the study of a still small n of presidents requires innovative indicators that do not rely exclusively on traditional Presidential Support Scores that compare members on a static zero to 100 scale. Taking cues from FiveThirtyEight and from the field of sabermetrics, this paper presents two novel metrics that estimate whether House members’ support for the 11 elected presidents from Eisenhower to Trump is higher or lower than should be expected relative to differing political conditions. One metric, Support Above Expectations (SAE), estimates whether members’ presidential support is higher or lower than should be expected given electoral conditions, partisanship, polarization. This metric builds on 538’s “Trump plus-minus” score. The other metric, Votes Above Replacement (VAR), measures members’ presidential support relative to a “replacement-level” member—i.e., the member who is most likely to be replaced. Similar to sabermetrics Wins Above Replacement (WAR), this metric seeks to estimate how valuable a member is from the president’s perspective. Each of these metrics turns the analysis away from the usual focus on average or representative members to outliers. Identifying outliers is unusual in political science. We hope this unusual approach might provide insights about presidential support in this time of a most unusual president. Conventional indicators reported in CQ’s annual Presidential Support Study show that President Trump won 100 percent of House votes on which he expressed position in 2017. CQ proclaims this “a record for success” (Bennett 2018, 26). Trump is, indeed, the only president to get everything he wanted from either chamber of Congress in the more than 60-year history of CQ’s vote study. Some might not be surprised that Trump scored a perfect record in his rookie year. After all, a central theme of Trump’s campaign was his business experience. He pointed to principles in The Art of the Deal (Trump with Schwartz 1987) to convince voters that he would cut the best deals in history. But is it appropriate to credit this score as Trump success? Presidency scholars have long recognized that winning support on floor votes is not an indication of influence, but understanding the conditions that explain presidential success is important in its own right (Bond and Fleisher 1990; Edwards 1989). Even so, crediting the outcome of a floor vote as a presidential win assumes that the president contributed to the policy’s development and its movement through Congress. Trump belies these assumptions: If the president just endorses policies developed by party leaders but remains ignorant of basic details of the policy he “supports”, then calling the results of roll call votes “record high presidential success is akin to giving an ‘A+’ to a student who turned in plagiarized a paper” (Bond 2019a). Including this unconventional president in the study of a still small n of presidents requires unconventional, or at least innovative, indicators. Fortuitously, the data journalism website FiveThirtyEight began identifying roll call votes on which Trump expressed a position in 2017. Of course, since 538’s basic approach mirrors CQ’s, they produce conventional indicators that do not address the threat to empirical research posed by an erratic position taker (Bond 2019b; Bond and Teodoro 2019). However, analysts at 538, developed an innovative indicator—“Trump plus-minus”—that estimates how much more or less members of Congress support Trump than should be expected given how well he ran in their district. The plus-minus concept views support from a perspective that is not common in political science. Rather than compare members on a static zero to 100 scale, it compares members’ support relative to the differing political conditions they face. This perspective turns attention to identifying atypical members. 1 2 Can this indicator developed to gauge unusual support for this unusual president be extended to earlier presidents whose styles varied within normal parameters? Rather than include Trump in the usual analysis of presidential support, we extend 538’s unusual indicator to the usual presidents. Who are the members of Congress who were unusually supportive or unsupportive of Trump, and how do they compare to unusual supporters of previous presidents? This paper builds on the plus-minus” score in three ways. First, based on findings from political science research, we develop a better-specified model to produce more efficient estimates of expected support. Second, for greater generalizability, we estimate House members’ plus-minus scores for presidents back to Eisenhower. Third, we adapt two statistics from sabermetrics—Wins Above Average (WAA) and Wins Above Replacement (WAR)—that gage the value of a major league baseball player relative to other players. Expanding on the plus-minus concept, we develop two analogous metrics—Support Above Expectations (SAE) and Votes Above Replacement (VAR)—that gage House members’ value to the president relative to overall expectations and relative to a hypothetical “replacement” member in each Congress. The Scientific Study of Presidential Support in Congress Richard Neustadt (1960, i) taught that to understand presidential leadership, study presidential behavior—what the president “can do, as one man among many, to carry his own choices through that maze of . institutions called the government of the United States.” One essential maze the president must navigate in order to succeed is Congress. Students of the presidency (Edwards 1976, 1978, 1980) and Congress (Fleisher and Bond 1977; Bond and Fleisher 1980) began using quantitative methods to analyze presidential support on roll call votes.1 Scientific analysis of this leader-follower relationship requires valid and reliable measures of both the president’s position (yea/nay) and how often members’ votes agree with the president’s preference. 1 A floor vote is but one, and not necessarily the most important, aspect of the multi-faceted concept of presidential success. Yet, it is an essential facet, and one that is available in the public record over many years (Bond and Fleisher 1990, 66-69). 3 Observing how members of Congress vote is highly reliable—casting floor votes is a key part of their job, and their revealed preferences are recorded in the public record. Presidents, in contrast, are not expected to express a position on all roll calls, and when they do, it is not part of the public record. Absent an authoritative source, scholars relied on journalists at Congressional Quarterly to identify votes on which the president expressed a position, and what position the president preferred. A recent paper documents inconsistencies in how CQ identified presidential positions over the vote study’s 60-year history, but these are common challenges in conducting empirical research. Trump’s unconventional behavior poses a fundamental threat to the reliability of conventional measures (Bond 2019a). Analyzing presidential support from a different perspective may provide some insight on addressing this threat. A Different Perspective on Presidential Support The traditional Presidential Support Score (PSS) measures how often members vote in agreement with president’s position on roll call votes on a static scale that ranges from zero to 100. Analysis of this indicator seeks to explain why some members support the president more often than do other members. FiveThirtyEight suggests a different way to think about presidential support. Rather than rely exclusively on the traditional support score, the “Trump plus-minus” score estimates whether members supported the president more or less often than should be expected relative to the different political conditions they face. Specifically, 538 estimates expected support by regressing Trump support on his 2016 vote margin in members’ districts. Errors from this regression provide a quantitative estimate of how much more or less members support Trump than should be expected given how well he ran in their constituency. FiveThirtyEight’s research design is consistent with political science research in some ways. While theory building is not a goal of journalism, analysists at 538 suggest electoral threat as the underlying basis for estimating expected support—“we would expect a member in a district where Trump did well to be more in sync with him than a member in a district where Trump did poorly” (Bycoffe n.d.). Prevailing theory in political science research assumes that reelection is a primary