Campaign Throwback: 'The Beer Question'
25:47 Share

You're a podcast listener, and this is a podcast ad. Reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Lipson Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements, or run a reproduced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Lipson Ads. Go to LipsonAds.com now. That's L-I-B-S-Y-N-Ads.com.

I mean, he seemed like a guy that you'd want to have a beer with and you would entrust with nuclear weapons, which is a difficult balance to strike. Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast. I'm Galen Druk, and this is the third installment of our miniseries, Campaign Throwback.

Across three episodes, we're taking a look back at campaign tropes from past elections and asking where they came from, whether they were actually true at the time, and if they still hold up today. In the first installment, we asked whether James Carville's famous slogan, It's the economy, stupid, accurately describes the role the economy plays in elections. In the second, we re-examined the idea that quote-unquote soccer moms are the quintessential swing voter,

If you haven't heard those yet, go check them out. Today, we're turning our focus to another decades-old trope, the beer question. In other words, with which presidential candidate would you rather have a beer?

Pollsters have been asking about the likability of candidates dating back more than 50 years. But in 2000, a more evocative question took hold and became a way for pollsters and pundits to explain why voters were drawn to George W. Bush. But is likability, or drinking buddy ability, how Americans actually choose their presidents? Two, one, happy 2000!

By many measures, the turn of the 21st century was a fantastic time to live in the United States. First of all, any anxiously anticipated Y2K calamities hadn't happened. That was a relief.

But it wasn't just that. The economy was humming along. Surpluses were in view as far as the eye could see. There was peace on Earth. That's Morris Fiorina, a professor of political science at Stanford University and senior fellow with the Hoover Institution. As Morris says, there was peace on Earth and a strong economy. And the data backs up those sentiments. Since 1980, Gallup has asked Americans whether they're satisfied with the way things are going in the country.

In January 2000, 69% of Americans said they were, one of the highest ratings before or since. For comparison, just 14% of Americans had said they were satisfied when George H.W. Bush was running for re-election eight years earlier. My fellow Americans, are we better off today than we were eight years ago?

In other words, the vibes were very good. And as Bill Clinton's second term wound down, there was every opportunity for the Democratic nominee to take credit for those vibes. In 2000, that was Clinton's vice president, Al Gore. Al Gore should have walked away with that election.

Instead of the biggest deficits in history, we now have the biggest surpluses, the highest home ownership ever, the lowest inflation in a generation. And instead of losing jobs, we now have 22 million good new jobs. The forecasting models that political science had developed were forecasting Al Gore to win by somewhere between 53 and 60 percent of the national vote. That didn't happen.

Gore won only 48.5% of the popular vote. That was half a percentage point better than George W. Bush, but of course, the 2000 election didn't come down to the popular vote margin.

It came down to 537 votes in Florida and a contentious decision at the Supreme Court. Bush was the victor. I say to President-elect Bush that what remains of partisan rancor must now be put aside, and may God bless his stewardship of this country. Lost in all that controversy was a question. If the fundamentals going into 2000 were so great for Democrats, why was the race even close to begin with?

One explanation quickly took hold. And listen closely, because Morris uses some academic jargon here.

There was a widespread view, accurate I think probably, that Al Gore was something of a dork. I'd be interested if he would this evening say that he would put Medicare in a lockbox. I don't think he will because under his plan, if you work out the numbers... Al Gore was the kind of kid who would remind the teacher that she had forgotten to sign homework. Saturday Night Live actually did a segment where they had an Al Gore impersonator.

He was played by Daryl Hammond. Governor Bush and I have two very different plans to offer tax relief to American families. And his plan...

His staff made Gore watch it to see how he was coming across to the mass public. How he came across was, in part, shaped by who he shared a stage with, a charismatic second-term governor from Texas, played on SNL by Will Ferrell. Governor Bush, your response? I don't know what that was all about. But I will tell you this. Don't mess with Texas.

Whatever verbal slip-ups occasionally befell Bush, he was someone who voters perceived as comfortable in his own skin. Bush was relatable, likable. And over the course of the 2000 campaign, and then during his successful reelection campaign in 2004, the likability gap between Bush and the Democrat running against him was often summed up with a particular phrase:

Which person would you rather have the beer with? The kind of guy they'd like to have a beer with. A great guy to have a beer with. Just not someone you'd like to have a beer with. That's really not the kind of guy I would be eager to go out and share a beer with. Political observers called this the beer question. And as the conventional wisdom goes, Gore flunked it in 2000. And that was why he lost the 2000 election. Despite strong fundamentals, voters just didn't really like him.

But was that the deciding factor in the early 2000s? Go grab yourself a cold one. We'll find out after the break. Today's podcast is brought to you by Shopify. Ready to make the smartest choice for your business? Say hello to Shopify, the global commerce platform that makes selling a breeze.

Whether you're starting your online shop, opening your first physical store, or hitting a million orders, Shopify is your growth partner. Sell everywhere with Shopify's all-in-one e-commerce platform and in-person POS system. Turn browsers into buyers with Shopify's best converting checkout, 36% better than other platforms. Effortlessly sell more with Shopify Magic, your AI-powered all-star.

Did you know Shopify powers 10% of all e-commerce in the U.S. and supports global brands like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklinen? Join millions of successful entrepreneurs across 175 countries, backed by Shopify's extensive support and help resources.

Because businesses that grow, grow with Shopify. Start your success story today. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash 538. That's the numbers, not the letters. Shopify.com slash 538.

Today's podcast is brought to you by GiveWell. You're a details person. You want to understand how things really work. So when you're giving to charity, you should look at GiveWell, an independent resource for rigorous, transparent research about great giving opportunities whose website will leave even the most detail-oriented reader busy.

GiveWell has now spent over 17 years researching charitable organizations and only directs funding to a few of the highest impact opportunities they've found. Over 100,000 donors have used GiveWell to donate more than $2 billion. Rigorous evidence suggests that these donations will save over 200,000 lives

and improve the lives of millions more. GiveWell wants as many donors as possible to make informed decisions about high-impact giving. You can find all their research and recommendations on their site for free, and you can make tax-deductible donations to their recommended funds or charities, and GiveWell doesn't take a cut.

Go to GiveWell.org to find out more or make a donation. Select podcast and enter 538 politics at checkout to make sure they know you heard about them from us. Again, that's GiveWell.org to donate or find out more.

You're a podcast listener, and this is a podcast ad. Reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Lipson Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements, or run a reproduced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Lipson Ads. Go to LipsonAds.com now. That's L-I-B-S-Y-N-Ads.com.

Presidential candidates have always wanted people to like them. That's nothing new. Beginning in 1960, when John F. Kennedy debated Richard Nixon in a televised debate, campaigns have been obsessed with how their candidates come across on American screens. And during Gore's rise to power, that trend was in full swing.

His former running mate had even turned to showing off his talents on late-night TV. Bill Clinton, you know, he went on Arsenio Hall and he played saxophone. That's Mark Leibovich, a staff writer at The Atlantic and author of This Town and other books covering the scene in D.C. I think part of it's human nature and everyone wants to be liked, but part of it is just, like, advertising.

You want to create a positive image, a positive brand, and it's much better to be liked than disliked, especially when you're running for something. The big man!

David Foster Wallace wrote a pretty memorable piece where he described Al Gore as being almost lifelike. The stiffness, the kind of closed-in vibe, that was definitely a part of the dynamic. He was seen as like a real stiff. On the other hand was George W. Bush. I mean, he had this Texas credibility. He leaned heavily on the fact that he had a ranch. This is a wonderful spot to come up in here and just kind of

Think about the budget. I mean... You kind of talk Texas. You like to talk about how I talk Texas. August is a dry month in Texas, and it's always hot. It's never not been hot. And Dallas... You could backslap he's religious in so much as there was a want-to-have-a-beer-with primary in 2000. W probably won it.

Four years later, in the 2004 race, Democrats nominated Massachusetts Senator John Kerry. Kerry had a tough combination to overcome. He's not naturally likable. He has like a big kind of supercilious bearing, Yankee, WASPy, you know, Yale guy. One of Kerry's former Yale classmates said that even as an 18-year-old, Kerry had a, quote, "senatorial accent."

— Are we sufficiently prepared to prevent this from happening or to understand precisely where we're going with respect to our future policy? — In addition to being called long-winded and aloof, he battled the perception that he was out of touch with most Americans. — Kerry windsurfed while he was attacked at the Republican convention. — At a cheesesteak joint in Philly, he ordered a sandwich with Swiss cheese instead of the obligatory Cheez Whiz. Reinforced his elitist image, some said.

Swiss cheese, the third rail of American politics.

Add to that the fact that he tried so hard to overcome that and to reverse that. I did a profile of him in 2002. You know, you could tell he was trying really hard, which is never a good thing for a politician. Kerry was trying hard to be likable, was your sense? Yeah, I mean, partly because no one really knew him. He was making an introduction. Kerry drove, I think, a real clunky, it was like a midsize, bad gas mileage car.

There was a lot of talk in the early profiles about Kerry talking a lot about the really shitty car he would drive around. It was an attempt to be relatable. The Detroit Free Press reported that Kerry, in fact, owned at least four cars, including a Chevy Suburban.

Despite the efforts of Kerry and Gore, they fell short on that all-important question. I was able to find the beer question data going back to 2000. That's Elliot Morris, editorial director of data analytics for ABC News and FiveThirtyEight. We have a poll asking who Americans would rather have a beer with, George W. Bush or Al Gore. 40% said George Bush and 37% said Al Gore.

Four years later, Bush wins on the beer question again. An August 2004 poll of undecided voters found that 57% would rather have a beer with him than Kerry. By the end of the 2004 cycle, the beer question had firmly established itself as perhaps the go-to cliche for discussing a candidate's likability. And pollsters kept asking about it. In 2008 and 2012,

Barack Obama, more Americans would rather have a beer with him. In 2016, Trump has the advantage on this beer question. If you're keeping track, you might have noticed that in five consecutive presidential elections, from 2000 to 2016, the winner of the beer question also won the White House, though not necessarily the popular vote. Which makes it fair to wonder, is it a good question?

Ultimately, what we care about is the type of opinions that people have that impact their voting behavior. The question is, is this a good predictor of the outcome? Then not really. If you're writing a story about who Americans see themselves as represented more by, then you can just ask them that.

The generous interpretation of the beer question is that, yes, it's silly, but it's one way to get at something more complex, which is voters' perceptions of candidates' personal qualities. But to Elliott's point, why not just ask voters about that straight up? Why not ask, is a candidate likable, honest, relatable? Do they keep their promises? Do they care about people like you? Of course, pollsters do ask these questions.

The tougher thing to answer, though, is whether likability or relatability actually matters when voters are choosing their presidents. This is the question that interested Morris Fiorina, the political scientist we heard from earlier. After the 2000 election, he wanted to investigate why Gore lost, and whether it really did have something to do with his supposed lack of likability. His approach was simple, and a little labor-intensive.

Basically, we had three people go over the American National Election Study. The voters answer in their own words. Their answers are taken ad verbatim. And then an army of coders goes in and classifies them. There were 700 different categories at the time we did the study. 700 different categories for classifying a voter's views of a candidate. Morris then divided that long list of categories into two piles —

The first pile included all the comments about a candidate's personal qualities. The second pile included things like a candidate's experience, their record, and so on. If somebody's intelligent, inspirational, trustworthy, etc., those are personal. Whereas if somebody says that he lowered inflation or he stood up to the Russians, that's more record. They did this for every presidential election going back to 1952.

When they were finished, they had created a rough metric for candidate likability going back decades. Then came the moment of truth. We looked at the personal qualities of the candidates as determinants of who won and who lost. And what we found was sometimes the most liked candidate won, sometimes the most liked candidate lost. There wasn't much of a relationship. In other words, likability did not seem to have an effect on presidential election outcomes.

Democrats tended to be the most liked candidates, the most positively evaluated in a personal dimension. But over the course of that period, they lost most of the presidential elections. And it wasn't a big deal either way for the most part. And as Morris surveyed the results, something else stood out. He saw case studies. In particular, he saw two elections where the results cut against the idea that likability wins out. Exhibit A, the 1980 election.

Ronald Reagan, you know, we remember him now as sort of a grandfatherly figure and so forth. But in 1980, voters regarded him as scary. They regarded him as a bomb thrower. Remember, Reagan entered American politics as a new kind of conservative. He was less compromising than many Republicans who came before him. But it wasn't just that. He had a reputation for shooting from the hip.

And no, not just because he had once starred in Westerns. You wanted law and order in this town. You've got it. I'll shoot the first man who starts for those steps. Starring Ronald Reagan as Frame Johnson. In September 1980, Gallup asked Americans if anything worried them about candidate Reagan. The most popular response, getting 52% of respondents, was that Reagan, quote, put his foot in his mouth and, quote, says things without thinking or considering the consequences.

He was actually, on a personal dimension, the lowest rated Republican candidate of the second half of the 20th century. And yet he won the election. He won the election simply because he was running against Jimmy Carter. And interestingly, Jimmy Carter was the most liked Democratic candidate of that postwar period. People thought he was honest, he was trustworthy, etc. My folks have been farmers in Georgia.

for more than 200 years. But his administration had been such a disaster. We had the Iranian hostage crisis, gas lines, inflation, and so forth. And people decided they just couldn't take another four years of Jimmy Carter. So they went with the dangerous, the risky alternative. But voters don't always go for the risky alternative. Sometimes they want more of the same. Even when more of the same means backing a candidate they find morally suspect.

1996, Bill Clinton had very high approval ratings, but his personal ratings were in the tank. People really thought this guy's a sleazeball. But the fact is, they voted for him anyway. He won a very comfortable victory because people thought he'd done a good job. To a lot of voters, the reputation that had earned Clinton the nickname Slick Willie, it didn't matter.

And just to hammer this point home, according to Morris's measure, Al Gore's personal rating in the 2000 election was actually higher than Bill Clinton's rating in 1996. Al Gore was well within historical norms. Voters didn't think he was as bad as a lot of the punditariat. So among the many factors that could have led Gore to underperform, likability doesn't seem significant.

Instead, the conclusion Morris came to about the deciding factor in the 2000 election? Basically, in the end, people tend to judge on how the economy's doing, on have we kept out of war, is there social order and so forth. Now, the answer for Gore, the fact was he had moved the party farther left perceptually by voters after Clinton had pulled it into the center. He had also declined to take any credit for Clinton's performance.

It was sort of encouraging from our standpoint that people tend to focus on what's really important and not who you'd like to have a beer with. Still, in an election that came down to 537 votes in Florida, it's hard not to feel like anything could have made the difference. What if Gore was seen as more charismatic?

Morris says he's skeptical it would have made the difference. And he sees parallels to today. This is just pure serendipity, but the Gallup front page today has some poll numbers. And they found that they asked the likability question, which candidate is more likable? Biden has a 20-point lead on Trump on that question. It's 57 to 37. So why, in fact, is he running neck and neck with Trump in the national popular vote?

It's not necessarily that every Trump voter likes Trump. I mean, you can always see, 20-37% think he's likable. There's obviously a lot of people supporting him who don't like him.

Even though Biden outperforms Trump on likability, more Americans rate Trump a strong and decisive leader. On that measure, it's the reverse. Trump beats Biden by nearly 20 points. Of course, someone who is strong and decisive might not be someone you want to share a beer with. But Morris says that's the point.

One of the greatest quotations I saw in some polling back in 2016 was they interviewed a working class woman in the Midwest and asked how could she support Trump given all the things he'd said about women. And she said, "When I have rats in the basement, I don't care if the exterminator is ugly."

I think that a lot of people felt that way about Trump, and I think a lot of people still feel that way. Okay, he's not likable. I don't want my kids to grow up like that. I don't even want my kids to listen to this stuff. But nevertheless, they're going to vote for Trump, given the alternative. We tried to find a poll that asked voters a version of the beer question in 2020, or this year. But we couldn't find one. Maybe that's because pollsters have found better ways of assessing how voters feel about the candidates.

Also, maybe in an environment where voters feel like the stakes are higher, the beer question just feels frivolous. But maybe there's another reason too. Neither Joe Biden nor Donald Trump drinks alcohol. Famously, Trump prefers Diet Coke while Biden reportedly drinks orange Gatorade. And the man who's arguably most identified with the beer question, George W. Bush, he says he hasn't had a drink since 1986.

So, if you asked Americans whether they'd like to have a beer with any of these politicians, it might be a fun hypothetical. But you shouldn't expect it to tell you much more than that. My name is Galen Druk. This episode was produced and mixed by Shane McKeon. Additional production help from Amira Williams, Cameron Chertavian, and Jayla Everett. Fact-checking by Alex Kimball and editing help from Laura Mayer.

You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet at us with questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple Podcast Store or wherever you get your podcasts or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening and we'll see you soon.