What Happened to Variance
I miss it
I miss it. It might seem like an odd thing to miss, but I truly do. I remember the good ole days when a president would do something good (or at least perceived as good) and their approval rate would increase. Or when they'd make a terrible mistake or there would be some scandal and it would go down. It had a nice sense of "actions have consequences" to it, a bit of grounding in reality. I didn't realize it at the time, but I kinda liked that.
Why is this so important? Well, look at the alternative. A lack of variance means that the output (i.e. the president's approval rating) is invariant to the input. The input, in this case, would be everything that happened in the world. So no matter what the president does or how the world changes, no one changes their mind about the president's performance. Yea, it's a bad thing.
Take a look at 538's Trump approval tracker. There was a bit of fluctuation for the first year, but after that first year, it's mostly flat with what looks like statistical noise.
Looking at that graph, can you tell me when the following important events happened:
It turned out Mexico wasn't going to pay for the wall
Congress fails to repeal Obamacare
Michael Cohen admits to campaign finance violations where he paid $130,000 to an adult actress for keeping quiet about an affair with Trump, and then is sent to prison for it
Special Counsel Robert Mueller announces the completion of his investigation and releases a report
News reports about child separation at the border, and his own attorney general admits that it was an intentional policy - "We Need to Take Away Children"
Two Supreme Court nominations and subsequent confirmations
Many members of Trump senior staff are arrested, including his former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, and chief strategist, Steve Bannon
Longest government shutdown in US history
Whistle-blower reports that Trump tried to get foreign interference in the 2020 election
Trump is impeached
Trump's response to the Charlottesville protest draws universal criticism
Economy enters downward spiral as COVID turns into a global pandemic and Trump downplays the risk
Trump clears protestors for a photo op where he holds "a bible" upside down
The New York Times releases Trump's federal taxes showing that in many years he paid no federal income taxes
ISIS continues to lose territory and essentially becomes an insignificant factor in the region. Leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is killed.
Trump's rollercoaster of nominations and dismissals, including Trump tweeting about his Secretary of State "Rex Tillerson didn’t have the mental capacity needed. He was dumb as a rock and I couldn’t get rid of him fast enough. He was lazy as hell."
I sure couldn't tell you. Based on the chart of Trump's approval rating, I would guess that not a single thing happened during his presidency. That would be incorrect. Let's bring variance back.