What made Franklin Delano Roosevelt such a popular president? To answer that question, Helmut Norpoth undertakes a fascinating analysis of the pioneering public opinion surveys conducted by George Gallup and Hadley Cantril during Roosevelt’s presidency. Conventional wisdom, Norpoth suggests, attributes FDR’s popularity to his New Deal policies and successful effort to combat the Great Depression. While not completely discounting this viewpoint, Norpoth argues convincingly that “the key to FDR’s popularity was foreign policy” (p. 2), particularly his two-year effort to prepare the United States for war before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. By shifting his focus to foreign policy in response to world events, Roosevelt primed the nation for military intervention overseas, and saw his popularity jump by 20%. That boost was cemented by his subsequent actions as wartime commander in chief. Lacking this leadership opportunity, the author suggests, FDR would have left office much less popular, and probably best known for failing to end the Great Depression.
To support this claim, Norpoth analyzes more than 200 surveys conducted by Gallup and Cantril that, with a couple of exceptions, have been mostly ignored by scholars. The polls cover topics ranging from FDR’s popularity to partisan identification among voters to the public’s views regarding the major issues of the day. One reason these polls have not been more deeply scrutinized is that they were conducted using quota—as opposed to probability—sampling, an approach that fell out of favor in part after being incorrectly blamed for well-known forecasting errors. However, Norpoth shows that these early polls do provide accurate snapshots of public opinion even without subsequent weighting designed to correct for their potential lack of representation of the underlying population.
Drawing on the polling data, the author shows that, much like his modern successors, FDR’s approval in peacetime did move in approximate tandem with economic indicators, such as unemployment; when the jobless rate fell, he became more popular. However, because of the sluggish recovery, Norpoth suggests that without the boost in his popularity caused by preparations for a possible military conflict, FDR would have lost a bid for a third term to Wendell Wilkie. This assumes, of course, that FDR decided to run for a third term—something Norpoth deems unlikely absent the war.
Beyond his findings regarding the source of FDR’s enduring popularity, Norpoth’s plumbing of the survey data provides a number of other illuminating insights. Two of the most interesting concern FDR’s economic approach to ending the Great Depression, and his efforts to prepare the country militarily for entering World War II. Regarding the former, the author suggests that FDR’s commitment to a balanced budget as late as 1938 was consistent with prevailing public sentiment against deficit spending in peacetime, but that it also slowed the economic recovery effort. While there is no evidence that the public would have supported massive peacetime deficit spending, had FDR justified deficit spending as early as 1937 in terms of military preparedness, surveys indicate that the public would have backed him. If so, this suggests that FDR might have ended the Great Depression two years earlier.
As it turned out, Roosevelt capitalized on the shift in public focus during 1939–40 from economic to national defense issues, despite a lingering, strong streak of isolationism, to make the case for a third term in office. The key turning point in public opinion, as indicated by Gallup’s polls, occurs in the period between May and October 1940, when an increasing number of Americans express a willingness to help England and France even if it means risking going to war. Norpoth shows that it was this change in sentiment toward greater support for interventionist policies, and not the U.S. involvement in the war itself, that boosted FDR’s approval. It is interesting to note that in contrast to the fate of later wartime presidents, Norpoth finds little evidence that subsequent military events, including rising casualties, had much impact on FDR’s popular approval. The reason, he suggests, is that Americans never lost their belief that FDR’s policies would produce victory.
One of the most fascinating segments in Unsurpassed explores Gallup’s decision in 1937 to poll individuals regarding their partisan identification—the first pollster to ask what has become a staple of survey research and a much-cited statistic for political scientists. Using contemporaneous polling by Gallup, Norpoth shows that the Democratic “realignment” owes much to the cohort of voters who served in the military during World War II, many of whom cast their first vote for FDR and thereafter became consistent Democratic supporters. Lacking this wartime cohort, Norpoth suggests that FDR’s New Deal likely would not by itself have established the durable Democratic voting coalition that dominated electoral politics through the 1960s.
In the concluding chapter, Norpoth makes the case that in explaining FDR’s unprecedented and enduring level of popularity, the president was more than the beneficiary of events outside his control, particular a world war. Rather than a passive bystander, Roosevelt, based in part on private polling conducted by Cantril, proved adept at leveraging events through public appeals to move public opinion toward greater support of his policy proposals. Lacking these events, his appeals might have fallen on deaf ears. At the same time, however, it required skilled leadership to recognize when events gave him the opportunity to utilize the “bully pulpit.” Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in his successful effort, beginning as early as 1937, to lay the groundwork for a more interventionist foreign policy, buttressed by a massive outlay in military expenditures.
Norpoth writes sparingly; his prose is direct, his points succinct. For the most part, he lets the survey data speak for itself, and he makes sure to note when that data is not as conclusive as one might like, as when speculating regarding the impact of the New Deal on FDR’s popular support. The lack of comparable polling during FDR’s first term is unfortunate, since it makes it more difficult to assess Norpoth’s claim that the New Deal did not lead to a durable partisan realignment. Nor does the author address the impact of ideological sorting on popular approval during the two most recent decades and how FDR might have fared in the current era, when partisan affiliation is a much more accurate indicator of ideology than in his time. Some might question whether sustained approval at the levels he enjoyed is even possible in today’s deeply partisan, polarized environment. The lack of answers to these questions, however, should not detract from what is a well-researched, concisely and cogently written examination of a crucial period in public polling—one that sheds new light on the reasons for Roosevelt’s enduring popularity.
