There is one big inconsistency that I ultimately had to make a subjective choice on – the Season One Finale (“What Kind of Day Has it Been”) aired in May and appears to have occurred around that time because it comes just one week after a string of spring episodes (starting with “Let Bartlet be Bartlet.”) In the Season Two Premiere (“Midterms”), however, it’s stated that the assassination occurred 14 weeks before Election day, placing the shooting in August. For episodes without those markers, I assumed that the air-date was the same as the “In-universe” dates, excepting times where this would have been inconsistent with one of the in-universe cues.
DATA WING GAME WHITEWATER SERIES
The series creators have said that there intention was not to peg the Bartlet administration to any specific year, but that ship sailed when Sam Seaborne talks about using a particular room for the “Millennial Celebration.” I assumed that the years of the show matched up with the years of the Presidency, and I relied extensively on the work already done at the “Unofficial Continuity Guide.” Some episodes have very specific events that date them (Holidays, the Inauguration, etc.), and those served as anchors for the rest of the timeline. All told, I found 13 explicit mentions of the President’s approval rating, spread out over his first four years (there is also a flashback to the first few weeks in office that provided two data point.)Īfter finding all of those mentions I matched the episodes up with a timeline of the administration. I am fairly certain that I got all explicit mentions of where the approval rating was, but it’s possible that it was discussed colloquially in a way that did not come up in my search – if you find one, please let me know in the comments. I used the “West Wing Transcripts” website and scoured them for any mention of “Approval”, “Points”, “Percent”, etc. If you want to know more, read on, otherwise you can skip to “Analysis” below. Add some noise to make it look more realistic.Make a subjective judgment for each episode whether the approval rating was like to go up or down following the events of the episode.Find all explicit mentions of approval rating in the transcripts.I’ve got a more detailed description of my methodology below, but if you want to skip right to the graph, the basic process was: I also made one major assumption: that any event significant enough to move the needle more than a few points would have been portrayed in an episode – it’s unlikely that we fought a major war or the administration suffered a major scandal that happened entirely off-screen. Seasons 5-7 just didn’t have enough data to make much headway – mentions of approval rating disappeared almost entirely. First of all, I focused only on Bartlet’s first term in office, taking it through the half-way point of Season 4. Presidents.īefore I dive in, I’d like to discuss how I arrived at the data. With that much data out there, I set out to chart President Bartlet’s approval rating over this first term, and compare it to the modern era of U.S. The show was on for more than 100 episodes, and like any real-life POTUS, he guarded his approval rating jealously.
For fans of the show, President Bartlet was the kind of President we could only dream of having. But, this is Overthinking It, so we have to ask: can we use these tools to look at fictional Presidents? How does our most famous pop-culture Commander in Chief stack up against real-life Presidents?įor 7 years beginning in1999, “The West Wing” was the most prominent pop-culture portrayal of Presidential power and of politics.
For the most serious political thinkers, polls and numbers are one of the the most important tools of political analysis. Whether we’re looking at President Obama’s team of number-crunchers or the rise of Nate Silver’s 538 Blog, politics is more quantitative than ever. The election of 2012 saw an important shift in the way politics is conducted and in the way it is covered by the media.
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