Why are recent presidents so unpopular?

an "unpopularity" contest

Take a look at this graph of presidential candidate approval ratings:

On first inspection, you’ll clearly see that recent candidates are pretty terrible. But on closer inspection, you’ll realize that it’s actually worse than it appears: the losers from the 2012, 2008, 2004, 2000, and 1996 elections were all more popular than the three most recent winners!

I think this is a pretty underrated political development. To take a closer look, and I do apologize to Nate Silver, but I’ll share a partial graph of historical approval ratings from under his paywall to make a point.¹

Trump-2 is off to an inexplicably bad start compared to past presidents, outdone only by Trump-1. Biden’s is not that much better, and taken as a whole, the recent Trump-Biden-Trump series of administrations have been horrendous in terms of popularity. The situation looks even bleaker when you look at the losers of the last 3 elections, not including Trump in 2020 obviously. Kamala and Hillary are just total goose eggs of candidates.

So what is happening here? Why are presidents and candidates just so widely disliked?

Primaries and the media

This is an argument that summarizes at least a couple issues that could be contributing to approval rating decline of presidential candidates over the last ~10 years. Obviously non-exhaustive:

Primaries

To make a long story short, originally presidential candidates were selected by their party leaders, and presidents were selected by the electoral college with no national vote determining the allocation of electoral votes. Washington, John Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, John Quincy Adams were all elected through this system, negatively referred to as the “King Caucus”, because very few states even held popular elections, with the presidency actually being determined by D.C. insiders. That system of electing the president was replaced by state level voting in the 1820s, but presidential candidates were still selected by the party.

Then in the progressive era, primaries were introduced to allow candidate selection, and this gradually increased in importance, but primary results were ignored in favor of smokey-room discussions determining candidates instead. This persisted until the drama of the 1968 Democratic primary season.

To make an even longer story shorter, LBJ was unpopular due to the Vietnam war. Robert F. Kennedy (Yes, that RFK) was the frontrunner, as he won critical primary elections, but got assassinated (on the night he won California). Hubert Humphrey was then chosen by party insiders to face off against Nixon, sending democratic voters into an outrage, and then lost to Nixon, sending democratic voters into an even larger outrage. This spelled the end of party insiders choosing candidates, as primaries were reformed to increase the importance of the primary election votes.²

Now, what does this have to do with candidates being unpopular? The issue is that what we see at least with a rudimentary time series observation, is that candidates were popular in the past, back when candidates were actually just selected in the smoke filled rooms. I feel really bad because I said I wouldn’t share the rest of the paywalled content, but now that I’m here I need to show it to make the point that I want to make.

The green line is Trump so far

Now to pay it forward, I’ll gift one of my subscribers a Silver Bulletin sub. I highly recommend you subscribe here.

So it seems like the story goes like this: All of our favorite presidents, Washington, Jefferson, JFK, LBJ, RFK, CIA, and ETC, were all picked by elitist D.C. insiders. This was the case for essentially 200 years. Then we (the non-elite masses) thought we could do it better and instead messed everything up by picking increasingly unlikeable people. Seems plausible enough.

The media

Since I literally cannot stop stealing now that I’ve started, here’s yet another graph from Nate:

Source

The gist is that at this point, you’d probably rather be the challenger than the incumbent. In 2024, incumbents got beaten to a pulp. There was this entire mini-discourse on why this was the case, with some people being team vibes versus team inflation. The gist of this discourse was that team vibes blamed the media for brainwashing everyone into hating incumbents, and team inflation saying that voters simply reacted to inflation very negatively which explains the world-wide nature of the reaction. For what it’s worth, I think it’s a little bit of column A and B, and that the media being very negative and rising in ideological tone over time.

The end of the limited network era of TV, back when there were only a few channels, basically lines up with when candidates started becoming unpopular. The end of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 cleared the way for the likes of Rush Limbaugh and cable news networks to increase the temperature of the room and stoke negativity, and the rise of the internet, while taking a while, eventually gave rise to alternative media which ratched up the temperature even more. Maybe incumbents have it so hard because, well, they’re in office and getting constantly attacked! This could help explain the bipartisan nature of the ratings decline.

We should all know less about each other

In a recent Econ 102 podcast episode, Noah Smith argued that one explanation of what has been going wrong lately is the internet. In summary, his point goes that America is a large country with a geographically dispersed population. We’re not all next to each other. If you were a hippy, you would live with the hippies. If you were a redneck live with the rednecks. And this was basically stable for the 20th century. Then came along social media, and now these once separate groups became directly exposed to each other. Now you have the left trying to cancel the rednecks, and the rednecks are freaking out about drag shows, and that is raising the temperature of the room.

Before, these groups could live in the same country, just separated by hundreds of miles - but basically Twitter came along and destroyed everything.

I like this argument because the timeline basically lines up exactly, with the rise of social media surging after 2012, Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter all doubled in usage from 2012-2016.

It would be nice to think about what life would be like if we could shut X down tomorrow and let D.C. insiders pick candidates again, but for now we’ll have to work with the system we have. I hope our presidents can win the people over, but for now it looks like they’re not.

1. just this once.

2. if my history is just way off, let me know. I’m filling in the gaps of my historical knowledge with wikipedia and chatGPT