President Obama's approval rating - a strange sub-plot in the polling saga
He's steadily been climbing back from his low of 38 and is now sitting at 52.
Compare that to the past five POTUSes.
President Bush the Younger, after the same number of days in office, had a 47% approval rating; Clinton was at 54%; Reagan was at 58% and had been 54% just a week earlier. In other words, Obama is showing the same level of popularity as the guys who got re-elected.
The guys who did not get re-elected, Bush the Elder and Jimmy Carter, were at 34% and 31% at this stage.
NOTE: about half of the 3500 interviews which produced the 52% approval rating (Oct 1-7) were conducted before the debate. That may be a critical point.
"J" again:
ReplyDeleteThe Favorability rating is another thing that baffles me about the polling trends.
The two things I still can't understand is that Gallup and Rasmussen haven't shown a matching disintegration in Obama support, and even the IBD/TIPP poll has something utterly bizarre. If you look at the bottom, it says the composition of its sample is 39% Dem, 31% GOP and 30% Independent. Wait, what? That's almost exactly the opposite of the collapse in Dem party ID in the Pew and PPP polls. And yet it shows approximately the same net results. It's possible that it's a typo in the IBD press release but they've had 12 hours to be informed of and fix it. (The extreme Tea Party sites are crowing that it proves Romney is really up by 10+.) Are Pew and PPP calls being rerouted to the Marvel Universe and IBD to the DC one?
I remain skeptical but utterly confused. The fundamentals don't make sense but I can't figure out what could be causing the obvious downward momentum besides the obvious explanation for the life of me, and there's still the Rasmussen/Gallup anomaly.
Silver has to be scratching his head about this too. I think I'l just give up and deal with my own problems for a bit instead of polling analysis...
The 39% Democrats cannot be a misprint because the numbers multiply out correctly. If Obama got 86% of Democrats (39%), 3% of Republicans (31%), and 34% of independents (30%), then he got about 44% overall, as shown in the results. If you reverse the D-R ratio to 31-39, Obama would only be at 38% overall.
ReplyDeleteThe scary thing for the President in the TIPP poll is this: Romney is beating him among independents 54-34!!! In the new Pew poll, Obama leads 44-42 among independents. Yet both polls identify independents as roughly the same size group (Pew 31%, TIPP 30%). WTF is that all about?????