Rauner's approval rating at 36%

[muon2]

I honestly think his election was a fluke. Illinois will have enough sense to fire Scott Walker Rauner 3 years from now. Maybe I should move to Illinois and run for State Senate in 2016.

WOLVERINE22 FOR SENATE: Shut down Rauner, take back Illinois

Do you have a favorite Senate district? Two-thirds of them are up in 2016. However, the IL Constitution requires a residency in district of two years prior to election, so it's a bit late to move to IL for the 2016 cycle. In fact petition circulation for 2016 is scheduled to begin in Sep of this year and ends in Nov.

[muon2]

No wonder why he has disappeared from the radar again. This was done repeatedly during the campaign, while he made one on one press conferences avaliable to Dupage county voters. That's why Quinn caught up. Good luck with strategy Gov, its not working.

Rauner is invisible in Chicagoland because he's hitting Metro East hard this week. It's a big state and Chicago media doesn't necessarily cover events in the 90+ counties outside of its main area.

As for the polls, I would remind everyone about how Kasich started out four years ago (story from 5/19/11). Note that in Apr 2011 Kasich had only a 30% approval.

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[muon2]

I honestly think his election was a fluke. Illinois will have enough sense to fire Scott Walker Rauner 3 years from now. Maybe I should move to Illinois and run for State Senate in 2016.

WOLVERINE22 FOR SENATE: Shut down Rauner, take back Illinois

Do you have a favorite Senate district? Two-thirds of them are up in 2016. However, the IL Constitution requires a residency in district of two years prior to election, so it's a bit late to move to IL for the 2016 cycle. In fact petition circulation for 2016 is scheduled to begin in Sep of this year and ends in Nov.

Ah, too bad. I'd just move to Chicago to be quite honest. Then again, Alan Keyes lived in Illinois for what, 4 hours before declaring for Senate?

If that, but that is a federal office not covered by the requirements of the IL constitution.

[muon2]

Seems like a garbage poll.

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Ok, so 100 - 31.4 who don't approve - 23.1 who don't know sh!t = 45.5. What do the other 9% think? This seems poorly done in any case, as a poll taken of a newly-elected Governor shouldn't have so many iffy people in it; nobody really cares what non-voters think.

     At least they had the courtesy of giving tenths of a percentage point, so we can tell immediately that the poll is garbage and to be ignored.

Hey PiT, you should know that a measured value of 45.5% ± 3.1% is an acceptable measurement. Two significant figures are widely used to quote errors. For example the current official value of the mass of the muon is 105.6583715 ± 0.0000035 MeV. The error on most polls should include one decimal point, so there's nothing wrong with decimal points on poll results as along as the reader understands the nature of the quoted error.

[muon2]

Seems like a garbage poll.

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Ok, so 100 - 31.4 who don't approve - 23.1 who don't know sh!t = 45.5. What do the other 9% think? This seems poorly done in any case, as a poll taken of a newly-elected Governor shouldn't have so many iffy people in it; nobody really cares what non-voters think.

     At least they had the courtesy of giving tenths of a percentage point, so we can tell immediately that the poll is garbage and to be ignored.

Hey PiT, you should know that a measured value of 45.5% ± 3.1% is an acceptable measurement. Two significant figures are widely used to quote errors. For example the current official value of the mass of the muon is 105.6583715 ± 0.0000035 MeV. The error on most polls should include one decimal point, so there's nothing wrong with decimal points on poll results as along as the reader understands the nature of the quoted error.

     How come then polls that give decimal places are typically crummy?

The problem is how journalists use them. Many raw polls give decimal points on their top line results. Writers often don't understand the meaning of a margin of error or rounding. The linked story is a good example - it reported decimal points on the top line but rounded the error to 3%. That is bad use of statistics. Good reporters round both numbers since they can assume their readers aren't going to derive any benefit from the decimal points and aren't going to interpret the error correctly. Many pollsters save journalists the trouble of interpreting the results and do the rounding before releasing the data.

In this article two different polls are quoted. The first one is a university poll from the Paul Simon institute at SIU, and they always quote decimal points in their releases. The second one is from Ogden and Fry, and like many private firms they round the decimals before they publish the results.