The Official Obama Approval Ratings Thread

[The Vorlon]

Obama is pretty stable re job approval right now.

A poll to the same poll comparison shows approval staying in the upper end of the 40-45% range, and disapproval hanging in right around 50% for a net of -6 or -7.

Normally....

50% approval = reelection
40% approval = dead in the water

Obama is slightly to the dark side of the grey area.

Of course these numbers are meaningless right now, tune in in 3 months and these numbers start to have an actual predictive value for November 2012.

 

[The Vorlon]

Please give this President some credit for the end of the decline, if nothing more than credit for not making things worse and for promoting some gimmicks to stop the economic bleeding.  

That is actually a matter of some debate.

Obama has essentially slow walked the housing crisis, he has made it harder for the banks for foreclose, but he has put very little of actual substance on the table to actually fix the problem.

I would also note that according to the Director of the Congressional Budget office, that the net effect of Obama's "stimulus" will be a slightly smaller economy and a lower GDP than if it had never been enacted. - Again, this is from the Director of the (semi) non-partisan Congressional Budget Office.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2h_rDrd97sY&feature=player_embedded

Hundreds of billions of dollars in payoffs to teachers, labor unions, and crony capitalism friends, in exchange for a massively higher debt, larger debt servicing costs AND fewer jobs and a lower GDP at the end of it all is not exactly a matter that is universally regarded as beneficial.

[The Vorlon]

Hmmm... He's back down to -7 to -9 territory now.  I wonder what caused the late October-early November bump when it looked like he was moving back to 50/50 approvals?  It doesn't seem obvious at all.

Very little, if any, real change...

A lot of the changes in RCP and other averages is just polls more favorable to Obama (Pew, CBS, Ipsos, etc) rolling in and out or the average...

Both Gallup and Rasmussen have had a few odd runs.  I wonder if there is some issue with samples getting out of sync or something.  Both Rasmussen and Gallup buy their raw survey calling lists from the same supplier (Survey Sample International) and I sometimes think there may be some glitch there...

Obama is at the upper end of the 40-45 band for approval, and 50% ish disapproval..

Not good, but not dead in the water either...

[The Vorlon]

Well he could still be following a delayed Reagan path where good economic news props him back up over 50 by late winter and he stays there.  This assumes that Europe stabilizes and the recent uptick in employment and consumer confidence accelerates.

Other than that, or something particularly heroic in foreign policy, I don't know how he gets out of the 42% strong disapproval rut.

Can't see where an economic uptick comes from though.

The Euro zone, even assuming an optimistic scenario where it doesn't implode, will certainly not be an engine of growth.

China is wobbly, Japan is, well, Japan...

The overhang of the housing bubble is still huge.  ObamaCare is an unknown.  The EuroZone remains a ticking time bomb. China is massively overbuilt and their economy is waaay short of enough internal demand to be self sustaining.

 I just don't see where the investment and risk taking need to jump start things comes from.

[The Vorlon]

Rasmussen Obama (National)

Approve 47%, u.

Disapprove 51%, -1.

"Strongly Approve" is at 23%, u.  "Strongly Disapprove" is at 39%,-3.

What the heck is going on with the 'bots? 

The Bots do not call cell phones.  At least conceptually if you have a known and stable sample universe you can use other demographic weights (age, gender, income, race, region, communty size, etc) to get around this.

During the Christmas Festive Holiday Season, this may not work as well.

Rasmussen gets a tad quirky around big travel seasons. - Just the way it is

[The Vorlon]

So assuming that these polls are beginning to have more of a predictive value, where would we say we are at this point?

The "horse race" polls still have very weak predictive power, they are worth a glace in the sense that if Romney were to open up a consistent and stable lead it might mean something, but there is such a long way to go....

If you track losing Presidents, Carter had a big lead on Reagan at this point, and Bush #1 was still up on Bubba at this point in the race.

Job approval still is a far better predictor of outcome at this point, and the current results are pretty inconclusive.

If Obama's broad aggregate approval over an averaged range of polls is above 50% he is just about certain to win.  If the GOP had a super duper amazing candidate, you could maybe knock out Obama if he was 50%+, but this is not the case.

On the other hand, if Obama is below 45% by the same measure, he is pretty much doomed.

Bush II was polling very similarly to Obama in the summer of 2004.  Given that GOPers tend to gain a couple % when we shift to a likely voter model, and Dens tend to drop a point or two, I would say Obama is pretty much right on the bubble right now.

An interesting point will be how the shift in financial resources will impact the race.  In 2008 Obama had roughly a 2 to 1 financial advantage over McCain, and this allowed Obama to expand the playing field to places like North Carolina, Virginia, etc and McCain simply did not have the resources to fight back.

In 2012 it seems like outside GOP aligned groups (Crossroads GPS, Restore Our Future, etc) may come fairly close to bridging the spending gap that the Dems traditionally enjoy from Labor unions, Hollywood, etc.

GOP friendly groups might pour a lot of money into places like Pennsylvania and Michigan not so much to actually win those states, but to pull time and money from the Obama campaign away from places like Ohio and perhaps Virginia that are likely the pivotal states.

The continued decline of Dem friendly mainstream media and the rise of internet and alternative media also represents a shift that favors the GOP.

Right now, this looks like an amazingly close race to me.

[The Vorlon]

The rise of the internet helping the GOP? Dems usually enjoying a money advantage? Uh....

Actually, I said "internet and alternative media ".. which I do think is valid.

30 years ago there was the big networks and the newspapers which utterly dominated the flow of information... today there are a zillion sources...

The rise of "Talk Radio", as a classic example is clearly pretty darn helpful to the GOP.

The internet is, due to it's utter lack of centralization and control, a place where the GOP can compete.

For example, in 2004 when CBS and Dan Ra^ther fabricated a story about Bush and his ANG days, the GOP and conservatives had a method and a medium to fight back with... if the same thing had happened in 1964 the fabrication likely would have represented a successful attack.

With respect to the traditional Dem spending advantage, this is well documented.

If you take the true value of the literally tens of thousands of paid political operatives who are paid by the likes of the Teacher's Union, UAW, AFL-CIO and then "volunteer" for various democratic candidates (thus not counting as a campaign expenditure) the Dems have held a rather large advantage in actual campaign resources for many years.

The unlimited spending allowed by "Citizens United" is, if one steps back and looks at it objectively, a counterweight to the unlimited Union expenditures that have gone on for decades.

Some sort of sanity would be nice on the campaign spending side, but at least having, essentially, no rules is fair in the sense that there are, well, no rules.

[The Vorlon]

This is a recession caused by plummeting house prices which affected nearly every home owners wealth. This meant they started deleveraging by not taking on other loans and increasing their savings rate. This is not the same as other recessions. When people need to reduce their debt load, the recovery is meek like we have seen. Any economist will tell you a recovery after a housing crash is going to be slow.

This recession is fundamentally different from the 70s and 80s ones, because those were the results of  the cyclical business cycle. This was the result of a financial crisis, and financial crises almost always result in low growth recoveries.

In some respects you are both talking about different manifestations of the same root cause - Government policy distorting the "true" value of a major element of the economy by way of assorted silly policies.

In the late 70s the substantial growth of the government, first with LBJ and the War + the "great society" then Nixon with the decoupling of the Dollar from Gold (I don't support tying the currency to Gold, but I do support anchoring it to "something" other than government whim and folly) then Carter with his insane energy policies (among other economic madneses) diluted and debased the currency while artificially driving many prices (primarily energy) upward. - After a while 10% inflation got "baked into the cake" and tainted any and all long term economic planning. - In some respects the 1980 era recession was "planned" in the sense the Volker and company judged that 20% interest rates were they only way to wring inflation out of the system.

The 2008 housing bubble also had at it's root silly government policy.  The demand for housing was artificially massively inflated by, essentially, mandating that Fanny and Ginny guarantee loans to people who in any remotely sane universe simply has no business buying a home.  

This broke the "iron law" of economics that requires that the entity making the profit from a loan also needs to take the hit if the loan goes bad. (This is the same reason why life insurance salesmen don't get to do their own underwriting) When banks and other institutions could make all the profit from a loan (the points, the fees, etc) and then shift the risk to the taxpayer....  well.... what ultimately happened was damn near inevitable.....  It would have been utterly astonishing if the market DIDN'T collapse.

My beef with Obama folks on housing is that they have slow walked the pain.

A house that sold for $400K that is now worth $200K means somewhere there is going to need to be $200K worth of pain.... the market and every sane economist and investor knows this, and until this pain is inflicted upon somebody, nobody will invest.  The "pain" is like winter snow in the mountains - it's gonna melt, the question is just when....

If you factor in inflation, interest rates are now negative.. what does that say?

The smart folks (the ones with trillions of dollars) have concluded that a negative rate of return is the best possible choice for their money right now.  Until that changes the chances of new factories, plants, businesses being created in adequate numbers is pretty much zero.

[The Vorlon]

How long until we expect to see any convention bump? Was there any?

Probably not until mid week.  It's a holiday weekend, so I don't know if the 'bots will be calling.

Long weekend polling is always a bit of a "funky" matter, Even if the 'Bots are going full bore, not quite sure I trust what they generate anyway....