I.R.S. Approved Dozens of Tea Party Groups Following Congressional Scrutiny

Public data from the Internal Revenue Service, which recently acknowledged that agency officials singled out conservative groups for special scrutiny, shows that dozens of Tea Party groups were approved for tax exempt status beginning in May 2012. That was the same month that Representative Dave Camp of Michigan wrote to the I.R.S. asking for information about all â€œsocial welfareâ€ groups that had applied for tax-exempt status in 2010 and 2011, to determine whether the I.R.S. was targeting conservative groups.

The flurry of approvals that came in the next few months was a sharp break from the previous two years, during which the agency approved just a handful of 501(c)(4) applications from Tea Party groups.

The public data provided by the I.R.S. does not include information on when groups submitted their applications for tax-exempt status, or how long they waited compared to the average application.

But an inspector general's report indicated that I.R.S. officials began targeting conservative groups in March 2010 by searching for groups with names containing â€œTea Party,â€ â€œpatriotâ€ or â€œ9/12.â€ The report says officials then switched to more expansive, less partisan search criteria in July 2011 and in January 2012, before broadening the criteria a third time on May 17, two weeks after Mr. Camp's letter.

But the first two revisions to the search criteria do not appear to have resulted in more Tea Party groups gaining approval. During the entire two-year span - from March 2010, when the agency began singling out conservative groups, to April 2012, just before it received Mr. Camp's letter and changed its search criteria for the last time - the I.R.S. approved the applications of just four groups with those conservative keywords in their names. After the I.R.S. altered its search criteria the final time, the agency approved more than 40 Tea Party applications.

According to the I.R.S. records, 54 organizations were granted 501(c)(4) status since 2010 with â€œTea Party,â€ â€œpatriotâ€ or â€œ9/12â€³ in their names. Five of those groups were approved in the first three months of 2010. Approvals then slowed considerably, I.R.S. data shows.

The Indiana Armstrong Patriots was the only Tea Party organization approved during all of 2011, and it was one of just four groups with â€œTea Party,â€ â€œpatriotâ€ or â€œ9/12â€³ in their names that were approved from April 2010 through April 2012.

The I.R.S. then approved 45 Tea Party groups in just 11 months, from May 2012 to March 2013. About half of those approvals - 23 - came in June, July and August, the first three full months after the final revision of the search criteria.

As a point of comparison, we tried to identify liberal groups approved for 501(c)(4) status since 2010. A search for â€œprogress,â€ â€œprogressive,â€ â€œliberalâ€ and â€œequalityâ€ finds 32 groups. (This might not be a representative sample - identifying left-leaning groups is more difficult, as there are is no clearly defined nomenclature on the left equivalent to the Tea Party.) The I.R.S. approved these groups at a fairly steady rate from 2010 through 2012. The I.R.S. approved 13 in 2010, nine in 2011 and 10 in 2012.

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 16, 2013

Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this post misstated the number of Tea Party groups (with "Tea Party," "patriot" or "9/12" in their names) granted nonprofit status by the I.R.S. from April 2010 through April 2012. The total is four, including the Indiana Armstrong Patriots, not four in addition to the Indiana group.

Is There Really a Second-Term Curse?

President Obama is facing one of his roughest stretches in office after questions about the government's response to the attacks in Benghazi, Libya, the admission by the Internal Revenue Service that it inappropriately targeted conservative groups which sought tax-exempt status, and the revelation that the Justice Department subpoenaed communications by The Associated Press.

In reaction, some commentators have written about a second-term curse â€" the supposed tendency of presidencies to unravel, especially because of scandal, in their second term.

Is there really anything to this? Or is this a case of selective memory, with pundits recalling administrations like George W. Bush's, which struggled in its second term, while neglecting those like Bill Clinton's, in which the sitting president remained reasonably popular in spite of his impeachment by the House of Representatives?

The chart below presents average approval ratings for the seven two-term presidents since World War II and before Mr. Obama. There's nothing complicated about the analysis; I've just averaged the approval ratings for all polls in the Roper Center database, and broken the results down by the year of the term. (I've used Jan. 1 as the cutoff for a new year, even though the anniversary of the inauguration is technically Jan. 20). For Richard M. Nixon, who resigned in 1974, the second year of his second term, I've used his very last approval rating while still in office (24 percent approval in early August 1974) as a substitute for his approval ratings in his third and fourth years.

There are several things to observe from this data. First, the seven presidents were quite popular, on average, in their first term. Their approval ratings averaged 59 percent throughout their first term, and 57 percent in the final year of their first term, when they faced an election.

By contrast, the same presidents averaged a 48 percent approval rating during their second term. Moreover, their approval ratings declined throughout their second term â€" to an average of only 42 percent by the final year of their second term.

So does this provide proof of the second-term curse? Actually, there are a couple of complications.

As we noted, the two-term presidents were quite popular in their first term, but one reason for that is because the unpopular presidents â€" like Jimmy Carter and, to a lesser degree, George Bush â€" never made it to a second term, so they were selected out of the sample. Some of the decline in approval ratings, then, is a case of reversion to the mean. In that sense, the second-term curse is a bit like the Sports Illustrated cover jinx, the tendency for an athlete's performance to decline after he is featured on the cover of that magazine. The reason for this is that the athlete usually appears on the cover right after he's accomplished something amazing - so if he goes back to being a merely good player, his performance will pale by comparison.

However, the popularity of some of these presidents is poor not just by comparison, but by any standard. Three of the seven - Mr. Nixon, George W. Bush, and Harry S. Truman - had approval ratings below 30 percent by the time they left office.

But nor does there appear to be anything inevitable about a second-term decline. Two of the presidents, Mr. Clinton and Ronald Reagan, were more popular on average during their second term than during their first. And while Dwight D. Eisenhower's approval ratings declined from a very high first-term average, he remained quite popular in his second term.

It's also the case presidents' approval ratings did not normally decline in the second term without good reason. Some presidents, like Mr. Bush, were harmed by poor economic performance; some, like Mr. Truman and Lyndon B. Johnson, by unpopular foreign wars; and some, like, Mr. Nixon, by scandal.

What's less clear is if there is any systematic tendency for a president's approval ratings to decline in his second term, other factors held equal - like, for example, because the public is increasingly fatigued by having the same person in office. It is also hard to make very many generalizations from only seven data points, some of which reflect different circumstances than the ones that Mr. Obama now faces. (For instance, Mr. Truman and Mr. Johnson, who had among the largest declines in their approval ratings, were serving their first elected term in their second overall term.)

There is some evidence, from the political scientist Brendan Nyhan, that scandals are more likely occur in the second term (PDF). However, Mr. Nyhan defines scandals mainly by what the news media refer to as â€œscandals.â€ Not all of these scandals had a major impact on public opinion. (In at least one case â€" the impeachment of Mr. Clinton in 1998 resulting from the Monica Lewinsky disrepute and Paula Jones lawsuit â€" the scandal may have ultimately helped the president because the other party was perceived as overreaching.) It may be that the news media judge presidents more harshly during their second terms, but the extent to which this might influence the broader public is an open question.

My view, then, is that the idea of the second-term curse is sloppy as an analytical concept. There is certainly a historical tendency for presidents who earn a second term to become less popular - but some of this reflects reversion to the mean. And some recent presidents have overcome the supposed curse and actually become more popular on average during their second terms.

Finally, the term â€œcurseâ€ might seem to imply that the decline in approval ratings is a matter of bad luck or otherwise beyond the president's power to control. But the presidents who experienced the largest decline in approval ratings, like Mr. Nixon and Mr. Bush, were punished because of decisions that they made.

New Audit Allegations Show Flawed Statistical Thinking

The Internal Revenue Service is under fire for inappropriately targeting conservative groups that sought tax-exempt status. As I wrote earlier this week, the revelation has the potential to motivate conservative turnout in the 2014 elections, perhaps costing Democrats as they seek to gain seats in the House and retain control of the Senate.

William B. Plowman /NBC Peggy Noonan has offered anecdotal evidence but no proof that the I.R.S. targeted taxpayers for political reasons.

Some conservatives, however, are alleging that there is another component to the scandal. They accuse the I.R.S. of targeting not just conservative groups that sought 501(c)(4) status, but also individual taxpayers who oppose President Obama or have supported conservative causes. â€œThe second part of the scandal is the auditing of political activists who have opposed the administration,â€ the Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan wrote on Thursday, describing the I.R.S.'s actions as the â€œworst Washington scandal since Watergate.â€

What evidence does Ms. Noonan present for this second allegation? She reports on four cases of conservatives who she says were targeted for audits, and infers that there were undoubtedly many more:

The Journal's Kim Strassel reported an Idaho businessman named Frank VanderSloot, who'd donated more than a million dollars to groups supporting Mitt Romney. He found himself last June, for the first time in 30 years, the target of I.R.S. auditors. His wife and his business were also soon audited. Hal Scherz, a Georgia physician, also came to the government's attention. He told ABC News: â€œIt is odd that nothing changed on my tax return and I was never audited until I publicly criticized Obamacare.â€ Franklin Graham, son of Billy, told Politico he believes his father was targeted. A conservative Catholic academic who has written for these pages faced questions about her meager freelance writing income. Many of these stories will come out, but not as many as there are.

Ms. Noonan is surely correct that many conservative taxpayers were audited. In fact, based on some simple math that I'll present in a moment, it's likely that hundreds of thousands of Mitt Romney voters were selected for an audit in 2012.

However, it's also likely that hundreds of thousands of Mr. Obama's supporters were audited. Although the percentage of taxpayers who are audited is relatively low - about 1 percent - the number of taxpayers in the United States is so large that this still yields well more than a million audits every year, across the political spectrum.

The I.R.S. publishes data each year on the number of taxpayers it audits. In 2012, it conducted just shy of 1.5 million audits out of 144 million individual income tax returns.

The probability of being audited is highest for high-income taxpayers - about 12 percent of individuals who made more than $1 million were audited in 2012 - although taxpayers who report little to no income are audited at higher rates than those with average incomes. In fact, about one-third of audits pertained to people who claimed the Earned Income Tax Credit, a benefit for low-income taxpayers.

In the table below, I've estimated the number of taxpayers in each income group who were audited in 2012, as derived from statistics in the I.R.S.'s 2012 Data Book. It is also possible to estimate how many Mitt Romney and Barack Obama voters would have been audited last year. The calculation assumes that an individual's chance of being audited was related to their income, but not to their political views.

I estimate the number of voters in each income bracket from the 2012 Current Population Survey. I then estimate the share of the vote in each income bracket that went to Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama based on last year's national exit poll. (Note that the income brackets used in the exit poll and the Current Population Survey do not exactly match the income brackets listed in the I.R.S.'s audit data, so I use the closest available approximations.)

This results in an estimate that about 380,000 of Mr. Romney's voters were audited last year, as were about 480,000 of Mr. Obama's voters.

To be clear, this calculation assumes that individuals' risk of being audited is independent of their political views. In fact, there is no way to know exactly how many supporters of each candidate were chosen for an audit - nor could there be, since individual-level voting records and audit records are private.

The point is, however, that even with no political targeting at all, hundreds of thousands of conservative voters would have been chosen for audits in the I.R.S.'s normal course of business. Among these hundreds of thousands of voters, thousands would undoubtedly have gone beyond merely voting to become political activists.

The fact that Ms. Noonan has identified four conservatives from that group of thousands provides no evidence at all toward her hypothesis. Nor would it tell us very much if dozens or even hundreds of conservative activists disclosed that they had been audited. This is exactly what you would expect in a country where there are 1.5 million audits every year.

None of this ought to take away from the major part of the I.R.S. scandal - the targeting of conservative groups that applied for 501(c)(4) status, which the I.R.S. has admitted to and for which the statistical evidence is very clear. And evidence could yet emerge that there was targeting of politically active individual taxpayers.

But the principle is important: a handful of anecdotal data points are not worth very much in a country of more than 300 million people. Ms. Noonan, and many other commentators, made a similar mistake last year in their analysis of the presidential election, when they cited evidence like the number of Mitt Romney yard signs in certain neighborhoods as an indication that he was likely to win, while dismissing polls that collectively surveyed hundreds of thousands of voters in swing states and largely showed Mr. Obama ahead.