Chart of the Day

This chart is by far the most interesting thing about the New York Times article it accompanies. It not only makes the obvious point that Rudy Giuliani was considerably better-liked by white New Yorkers than by black ones, but also the less obvious point that opinion trendlines among these two groups actually diverged quite a bit.

Throughout Giuliani's first term, his popularity with white New Yorkers tended to decline slightly -- the results, one supposes, of inevitable disillusionment. Giuliani's African-American constituents, by contrast, were warming toward him considerably. He was never a popular figure among black New Yorkers, but did go way, way up in the opinion ratings as crime went down. Which leads to under-considered subject of the period between Giuliani's second inauguration and 9/11 -- during his first term, he turned around a lot of skeptics and cruised to re-election in 1997, but by 9/11 he'd managed to re-alienate a huge number of people. Notably, it sort of seemed as if he couldn't handle the idea of liberals and blacks warming to him and was actually casting about for stupid controversies to wade into in order to get back in touch with his combative persona.

Comments

Matt: He was never a popular figure among black New Yorkers, but did go way, way up in the opinion ratings as crime went down.

When you start out at 25% approval, it's hard to go anywhere but up. Still, Giuliani did his very best. The high of 44 or so _might_ qualify as 'way, way up', but the actual trendline from the start of the mayorship to Sept. 10 only takes his approval up to 32 or so.

The bitter memories of his behavior at the low points would overcome the approval of his September 11 handling even in a citywide election -- not to mention a presidential race in which Giuliani would have almost no chance for more than ten percent of New York's African-American vote.

Posted by Nell | July 22, 2007 12:49 PM

Guiliani was a very good mayor in his first term. He is remembered for the reduction in crime, which he probably didn't have that much to do with, but he also improved the city administration considerably. During his second term, he jumped the shark, and his popularity was rescued only because he was the only elected public official who was available to answer questions on 9-11.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I voted for Rudy three times, which has to be worse than voting for Romney. However, he was running against the tired machine hacks the Democrats like to put up for mayor, and his first term performance was fairly impressive. I think he would make a horrible president.

Posted by Ed | July 22, 2007 1:24 PM

Well, let's see, his popularity among blacks was always pretty good for a Republican. What's amazing to me is that his popularty among whites - 70% before 9/11. Indeed, his popularity was below 60% among whites only once during his entire term. If he were able to translate that to the US population at large, where whites are in the majority rather than the minority as in NYC, that could be pretty useful.

Posted by Al | July 22, 2007 1:39 PM

Part of this graph doesn't make sense- in general, as you'd expect, the trends are an average of the black and white trends since they make up a large majority of NYers. But between about Sept 1998 and Dec 1999 both separate lines go down but the total line stays level or rises slightly. Or does "white" mean "non-hispanic white" and for some reason his numbers among hispanics and asians rose drastically during this period, pulling up the total approval number?

Posted by SP | July 22, 2007 3:37 PM

Isn't great when graphs like this completely lack a 50% line and just jump from 40% to 60%? It's like 50% isn't a rather important number when it comes to approval ratings.

Posted by Reality Man | July 22, 2007 5:47 PM

Al has a point. Imagine a Republican presidential candidate who could get 35% of the black vote, and, with his pro-choice stance, tap into the Sex and the City single white female demo, which is the only white demographic Dems reliably dominate?

As 'revolutionary' as Obama and Hillary seem to be with respect to their gender and race, these factors don't help them get new voters. Lefties who long to vote for a black man were going to vote Democrat anyway; on the other hand, Jim Webb-Dems, untroubled by his taunting of Compton blacks as a collegian in Los Angeles, might be less inclined to vote for him.

Posted by Fred | July 22, 2007 5:52 PM

Actually, I should have checked myself on something. The black community in NYC is increasingly less "African American", in the sense of blacks descended from Southern slavery; an increasing percentage of blacks in NYC are Caribbean or African immigrants, or the children of these immigrants. Culturally, these blacks would probably be more inclined to vote Republican than Southern-descended African Americans, so Giuliani's approval among blacks in New York may overstate his potential black support nationally. One could be more precise about this if one had a breakdown of what percentage of black New Yorkers were immigrants or children of immigrants from Africa or the Caribbean.

Posted by Fred | July 22, 2007 6:02 PM

The graph illustrates one of the most bizarre features of human behaviour. How is it that when a population is attacked, as the US was on 9/11, that the approval of the leaders of the attacked country goes up? It has always been thus. This is truly bizarre.

Does anyone have any insights into this particular type of behaviour?

Posted by james hogan | July 22, 2007 10:59 PM

James Hogan-- overall, I think it's the huddle for safety factor. In Guiliani's case, it was because he was the only person willing to show up publicly after 9/11, much less show public compassion for the people who were killed.

I wonder how much of that downward curve before 9/11 was posturing for the Senate campaign he'd originally planned to run against Hillary?

Posted by Persia | July 23, 2007 2:16 PM