A new poll from Zogby (5/12-16/06) finds approval of President Bush at 32%, disapproval at 68%. With the addition of this poll, my trend estimate now stands at 32.05%, continuing down from 32.2% as of polling through 5/15.
There has been little variation in the rate of approval decline since the State of the Union address on January 31. Over the period from 2/1/06-5/16/06 the rate of decline has been -.074% per day, or one percentage point each 13.5 days. As of the first of May that estimate was slightly lower, one percentage point each 13.9 days. This is NOT a statistically significant difference, but remains a perilous rate of decline for the White House. No news there. Still no sign of a lower limit (though I don't think we are close even if there is such a thing.)
Despite the recent Harris poll at 29% approval, at this rate it will be June 13 before the trend estimate reaches 30% approval. I keep waiting for this rate to change. The President's Monday night address on immigration is not yet a significant factor in the polling. CNN's snap poll found 40% of speech viewers responded "very positively" and another 39% "somewhat positively". But this is a highly self-selected sample of viewers of the President's address. MysteryPollster has written convincingly on the bias inherent in such polls (see his related pieces too) and I think their results are highly suspect if extrapolated to the population of adults. So let's see some new national samples of post-speech respondents to estimate any impact of the address. Given the elite fury this week, I doubt we'll see a "win". If there was a window for presidential leadership on this issue it appears to have closed. (And I thought there WAS such a window a few months ago.)
Zogby uses a four point approval question:
“Overall, how would you rate President Bush's performance on the job? Excellent, Good, Fair, or Poor?”This is similar to Harris' four point phrasing, but not quite the same. Harris' is
"How would you rate the overall job President George W. Bush is doing as president: excellent, pretty good, only fair, or poor?"What is the difference between "good" and "pretty good" and between "fair" and "only fair"? In my post on Harris' 29% approval poll, I speculated that "only fair" might be attractive to disillusioned former Bush supporters, partially accounting for the low 29% approval rate. The Zogby poll is 3% above that reading, with a similar if not identical "fair" option. The difference is within the margin of error, but not entirely consistent with my speculation, which would have predicted Zogby to be clearly below trend, which it is not.
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4 comments:
Do you have any idea why the trend is so linear? It is pretty striking. Is this just coincidence, or is there some (political science) reason for this?
I will admit to be a little puzzled by the enthusiasm for a linear trend. What would be the theory of opinion change that would lead to prediction of linear change from the mid-forties to the mid-thirties?
Well I don't know what the 'theory' is, but I'll tell you what's going on... it's a loss of confidence, a crumbling of conservative and Republican support.
All,
It isn't "enthusiasm" for a linear trend per se. Rather to make the point that the rate of decline has been essentially constant since Feb 1 and that rate is political poison.
I'm not aware of a micro-level model of approval that predicts linear aggregate change, though maybe that's worth investigating.
If you look at the plot for approval of all presidents (see the right hand sidebar for the link) some have periods of linear change, but all are punctuated by sharp changes. And sometimes trends appear to bend a bit, rather than follow a linear growth. So no general theory here, at least.
With President Bush, I've fit linear trends combined with dummy event variables and found that the fit closely approximates the non-linear fit I get from the local regression. That makes sense-- given enough "locality" a linear fit with shifts will always find a decent fit. But in this case, it doesn't take much effort to specify the events-- 9/11, Iraq, Saddam, reelect campaign, start of 2nd term, Katrina, Libby/Meiers, Nov 11 offensive, post SotU. Those are all selected TOTALLY post-hoc, so the fit SHOULD be good or I wouldn't use it! I view this as descriptive statistics of the rate of change in approval, not a test of any a priori theory.
Charles
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