The Electoral Consequences of Presidential Support

Conventional wisdom suggests that the president’s standing with the public affects his success in Congress. Electoral self-interest is the primary reason to expect a relationship between presidential popularity and the behavior of members of Congress. Although numerous studies have analyzed the effects of presidential popularity, the lack of presidential approval data at the congressional constituency level has hindered a definitive test. This paper offers a way to estimate presidential job approval at the state level, and analyzes Senate elections from 19902000 to test whether senators suffer any electoral consequences if their level of presidential support diverges from constituents’ preferences. Controlling for conditions known to influence competition in congressional elections, we find no evidence that divergent presidential support systematically affects incumbents’ election margins or the emergence of experienced, wellfinanced challengers across six Senate election cycles (1990-2000). The Electoral Consequences of Presidential Support The proposition that the president’s standing with the public affects his ability to achieve legislative success is widely accepted among Washington insiders (Edwards 1997). Evidence from systematic quantitative studies testing this relationship, however, is decidedly mixed. An assortment of studies has analyzed different time periods using different research designs, measures, and methods, but a common theoretical rationale--electoral self-interest--motivates this line of research. The logic is straightforward: because members of Congress need to please their constituents to get reelected, they will support the president if he is popular with their constituents and distance themselves if he is unpopular. Such a linkage assumes that voters hold members of Congress accountable if they fail to adjust their support for the president depending on his popularity, but this assumption has yet to be tested directly. The data necessary for a direct test—presidential popularity in each member’s constituency—has only recently become available. Using state level opinion data (Niemi, Beyle, and Sigelman 2001), we analyze Senate elections to test whether senators suffer any electoral consequences if their level of presidential support deviates from the preferences of their constituents, controlling for variables known to influence congressional elections. We begin with an overview of research analyzing the effects of public approval of the president on congressional behavior. Then we turn to research on congressional elections to identify the causes of competition in order to establish a baseline against which to compare the electoral consequences of divergent presidential support. Next we discuss our research design, including how we overcame some problems with the state level presidential approval data. Our analysis fails to uncover any systematic impact of divergent presidential support on election