A new Fox News poll taken 5/16-18/06 finds approval of President Bush at 35%, with disapproval at 56%. That matches the new CBS News poll and is a point below the 36% reading by CNN. The three polls together provide some evidence that approval may have moved up following the president's Monday night address, though the data remain short of statistical significance. With all three new polls in the data my trend estimate stands at 33.01%, nearly a full point above my estimate as of 5/16 polling which was 32.05%. These revised estimates do NOT mean that approval has turned up, but they do mean that all the polls, when taken together, are painting a less bleak picture for the White House. It takes 6-10 polls for my model to detect a clear upturn in approval, so watch that trend estimate-- if it continues to move up over the next several polls, we'll see a bend start to form in the downward trend line.
The Fox poll is actually a 3 percentage point decline from Fox's previous poll on 5/2-3/06. But that poll was unusually high. I wrote about it here pointing out that Fox appeared to have been too low in the previous poll, then too high at 38%. I concluded
So the rebound from 33% was to be expected. The 38% seems too high now, so I'll bet on another decline to about 34% in the next Fox poll (which should appear in a couple of weeks.)The actual new Fox poll at 35% is a point higher than the 34% I predicted based on the prevailing trend of two weeks ago but does represent the predicted return in the direction of my estimated approval level. In this case, a decline in Fox's poll was actually still good news for Bush-- it was better than expected.
The confluence of three polls this week all registering 3-4 points above my prior estimate (now I mean the estimate BEFORE these polls were added, 32.05%) may indicate some real improvement in the president's standing. At the least they suggest the rate of decline may be a bit less this week than it has been, and at most they may signal a positive turn. See my post on CBS and CNN for more discussion about how political debate over immigration is an opportunity for the White House, but with the threat that Republican members of Congress may stiffle potential gains with their vocal criticism of the president's position on immigration.
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4 comments:
The last few polls clearly show that President Bush's approvals are picking up and the nadir has been reached.
We need to invade Iran in late summer to get more widespread support and milk the war on terror issue to its maximum. Only then can we be assured of retaining both houses of Congress and perhaps even getting a working Senate majority of 60 seats.
My gut says, this is a blip... he'll be going down again soon enough. :)
You've probably said this, but when you plot these time trends what do you use as your measure of the date? Do you use the midpoint of the fielding period?
Also, if you are not planning on writing a book on doing highly effective statistical graphics with code examples, have you considered providing links to your code with some of your posts. I think so many of the graphs you do are exemplary.
The nice thing about the future trend is we just have to wait a while to see it!
Jeremy--
I use the end-date of the polls, the last date of interviewing. If an event occurs during the 2-3 field period, not everyone in the sample will have been exposed. If you use the start date, you know that everyone was exposed to an event that occurred before that, which is more clear but also makes the poll dates seem less current. It is a bother.
I have thought about posting the R code for the graphs. Blogger isn't very flexible for that (or at least I don't know how to use it.) If I were a bit more organized, skilled in html, and had some time, I'd add the source code to my UW or .com websites. Just not enough time yet. Also, I tend to reuse code, for example for the current approval plots, and then interactively add lines for the latest poll, for example. So not everything has full source code available. If I were a better, more disciplined, programmer I'd not do that.
But thanks for the encouragement. Maybe I should do a book.
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