The Official Obama Approval Ratings Thread

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What happened in Iowa?

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The thing that's worried me the most about polling this round is how disparate some of the partisan break downs have been between pollsters. Do I trust the ones with the more standard break down or is there really this huge wave of republicans? I have a feeling that its a little of both. Many indies do lean towards one party or another but in most elections hate identifying with their party of choice. Maybe this year the Rep leaning indies have opted to drop the independent facade and tell their true feelings finally?

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Obama is in decline. The majority of polls show that he's in negative territory. Ironically, Rasmussen is one of the most positive for him...

It's the news cycle. If there should be a rash of forest fires, then the President's approval rating goes down even if the culprit is an insane arsonist.

You have realized that the President is the media golden boy now, and no longer the media scapegoat, right?

My dear talking hair, not all people are rational beings. One can realize this just by looking around this forum. People that answers polls sometimes are among the nonsensical. They could of lost their car keys and now are having a bad day and thus don't like the president as much as they did yesterday when they found a kitten. It doesn't matter if the media loves or hates the president. If there's lots of bad news going on people get upset and thus more negative. The moon could suddenly explode for no good reason, sending shrapnel at us that will likely kill us all and there'd be people who blame the president.

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Saying nothing on the mosque issue would of very quickly lead to opportunists who are using it to demagogue announcing loudly "Where does the president stand on this?", which would increase the amount of exposure he would get on the issue. So it is better to give the answer before there becomes lots of cries about it and have people go 'oh' and give the country time to move onto things that are actually important (jobs, the economy, ect). So basically as it was quickly becoming a distraction, it was best to go out there and grab hold of a position before things got even sillier.

Still, a tough move to make. And a possibly unpopular one (I'm still not sold that a majority wanted the government to intervene, but its obvious that the mosque as planned was unpopular). But I'll give him props for standing up for what he believes is right.

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Big news -- the last US combat troops are leaving Iraq.

Hallelujah!

Until the questions, "Who lost Iraq," is asked or an Iranian problem comes up.

Easy, the same people thought we'd win in six months due to being greeted as liberators.

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after all, how many people predicted the '08 crash?

Weirdly enough, I did. Going forward, I predict that things will muddle through until at least next year and then start a good recovery once again.

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Tis different meanings for what fair means for folks. For some, compared to the other more positive options, it means bad but not horrible. To others, good and fair are interchangeable. And to others, Good and Excellent are almost the same so fair is the middle ground of default.

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That is interesting. It almost implies that the partisans on both sides get that Obama was doing just about anything that could be done, but those people in the middle think that a President has a magical power to make everything better. It explains why some independents swings around so much based on right track/wrong track, based on assumption that the Pres could fix economy overnight if he just really tried harder

It reminds me of that one scene in Family Guy in the Lois vs. Adam West debate all over again. The President is not a wizard folks, quit pretending he is.

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I was one of those predicting just a small and temporary bounce, but those Rasmussen numbers seem quite ridiculous.

Obama's had a big runup in the Ras poll in the week PRIOR to the OBL killing...this runup is already reflected in the numbers.  so Ras is not saying Obama has not improved, it is say Obama's improvement was already taking place in the week prior to the killing.

So... the people that Rassy was talking to then knew Obama was going to give the order that resulted in bin Laden's death?!? I think we need to have Rassy call them back to ask them about the lottery, who's going to win the world series, and who's going to win the 2028 election.

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Light green might now be weak clowns vs. Romney + Pawlenty + Huntsman now or some such. Its not entirely clear and won't be until more polling is done with the cast of characters we'll actually have to watch.

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Yes, and its apt. Zogby polls are typically horrible at best.

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Obama at 38% and only 41% want him re-elect

http://www.harrisinteractive.com/NewsRoom/HarrisPolls/tabid/447/ctl/ReadCustom%20Default/mid/1508/ArticleId/824/Default.aspx

Uck, silly approval rating scale in use there. There is no one single definition of fair that all people use in polls like this.

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Right, but it seems downright WEIRD that Obama can somehow be in the mid 40s with the economy the way it is. Doesn't it?

Easy. The general assumption is that poor economy = hate the president. And for some people it is true, but not everyone. For some people its poor economy = hate the people that caused it. Some with very short term memories think Obama caused it. But most folks yet put the blame on Bush and the Republicans. This explains some of the feelings about congress perhaps but doesn't really apply to Obama. So for the set of folks that are not short term thinkers, the question is: Is the President doing enough to fix the economy? This is a much more mixed view. Of the people with less extremely set views on the president no matter what he does (tea party for example) there are people who are able to be convinced one way or another on how the president is doing in this department. Some of them pay a lot of attention. Others not so much. Some of them understand the complexity of the economy. Some do not. Most have inherent biases of some sort and are more easily swayed but certain arguments. And at present they're being swayed on the average towards thinking the president is either unable or unwilling to do what it takes to fix things, and thus are leaning towards disapproval. But its not a solid sell as this sup set of voters is hardly homogeneous. And as such, there is divisions here.

There is another possibility of course. That being that if the president has lost almost all the sway-able voters described above then he'd be near his base partisan limit. Basically the folks that would vote for a terrible Democrat in almost all cases because they know the Republican will always be worse for them and their interests. This kind of base solidity is not very well understood as some people claim to be persuadable but always seem to pull the lever for one party, and thus are not easily identified by polls and only sometimes by demographics (for instances, African American voters) So if this is the case, you could have 15% unemployment and the President would be maintaining 40% approval.

The question then is, what about the end of the Bush years when his approvals dropped crazy low? It might be that the Republican super base is much smaller then it likes to think itself or a very different dynamic was in play. Because Bush was not up for reelection in 2008, his base voters were liberated from having to pretend they like him. This plays well in two different directions. It allows some of them to feel good about themselves because Bush 'wasn't a real conservative'. Another direction is simply jumping on the bandwagon. The rest of the country was starting to hate him, so if one is going to keep looking like a mainstream guy, ya gotta start hating him to.

If Obama is reelected and things go much worse then they are today, it will be interesting to see how this dynamic plays out. I'd prefer of course that the economy grows strong and the yahoos who can hire start doing so again. But if disaster hits an Obama second term you might see him dip below his solid base level.

But I'm not sure what that is yet.

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Building off what I said before, I'm starting to ponder looking at state by state polling data to try to find the percentage for each party that represents the core base for each in every state. Basically by looking at the minimal support Obama gets and the minimal support any of the Republicans get in credible non-partisan-biased polls. If the hard core base is most of what's left of those that approve of Obama enough to vote for him again, then against the strongest challenger he'd have only them left over. And for the lesser known or most disliked Republican candidates or would be candidates those that would vote Republican are those that would vote against Obama under any circumstances and thus most likely to be the core Republican base.

For instance, that PPP poll of Texas in June has the limits of Obama at 40% against Paul and Republican at 43% with Cain. This would suggest a Republican edge in the base there. It does not predict how the more swingy voters would fall in the election, but can provide some information on the size of that pool. So if some how Obama gets a winning strategy to get more then half of these folks on his side, he could win Texas. Its just very unlikely.

Another example, Utah. Obama's worst is 23% vs Huntsman and the Republicans worst is 43% with Palin or Cain. Obama would have to get almost all the swingable voters to be even competitive in Utah. So even if you didn't know the electoral history of Utah previous to this election, this would suggest not to bother sending resources there.

On the dem leaning side of things, there's Vermont. The latest poll has Obama's worst against Huckabee at 53% and the Republicans worst with 26% with Cain. Barring a very radical shift in the socio-political structure of the entire country or Obama going on a murderous rampage through an orphanage, any Republican efforts to win Vermont would be pointless to the extreme as there is not enough swing voters to get to a majority.

Then there's Virginia. The latest poll (all these seem to be PPP... other pollsters need to stop being lazy!) has Obama's worst at 47% vs Romeny and the Republicans worst at 37% with Palin. This is a very good sign for Obama as despite the conservative history of Virginia, it would appear that he's near a lock for the state as he only needs a small fraction of the swing voters to nab it.

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Its not really fair to define the Republican base by whether or not they support Palin. 

Tis not Palin specifically that's the boundary, its just Palin has the lowest support in some match ups against the president and thus provides the upper bound for the unwavering base of the Republican party. The actual core might be smaller then this as this number would include them and those who like Palin but might yet be persuaded towards Obama somehow. I'm also not saying that large sections of of the softer support would yet vote for Palin over Obama, just that those folks are unwilling to support Palin at this point. So their unwillingness to say they support Palin now labels them as being softer supporters of the Republican ticket then those who do support Palin at this time.

This thought experiment is not a hard gauge of the core support, but a best answer that we can come up with given the evidence available. You are of course free to find better evidence and argue for it. But at this point this is all I got.

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I still find it excessively odd how different Rass and Gallup trend. I know a good deal of it is with their weighting schemes, but still.

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Obama will probably look very week in the summer if gas prices matter this much. He might want to consider opening up reserves in the summer, but it'd be a dangerously overpolitical move.

He can rightly claim that he's trying to protect the economic recovery. The Republicans can call it a political move but people will be happy to see him doing anything he can to help them. This is especially true if things remain hot in the middle east (mainly with Iran). The country is used to trouble in the middle east = energy prices going up. And if Iran is the focus on the summer gas prices might be high but people have their minds on other things.

As for the ARG poll being good or not, a poll's worth is not tested until the election hits. And there's no other election in the world like the US Presidential one, so I'd wait to say its hitting the numbers right or not this year, and rely on past successes and failures to color the reliability of polls.