Four new polls find approval of President Bush has declined substantially since the end of September, following revelations of "overly friendly" email and IM messages from Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL) to pre-adult House pages. All these polls were completed before North Korea tested what appears to have been a nuclear weapon on October 9.
The ABC/Washington Post poll, taken 10/5-8/06 finds approval at 39%, disapproval at 60%. CNN/ORC's poll from 10/6-8/06 also has approval at 39% with disapproval at 56%. The Gallup/USAToday poll (10/6-8/06) found approval at 37%, disapproval 59%. The CBS/New York Times poll (10/5-8/06) comes in low among this group, with approval at 34% and disapproval at 60%.
With these new polls, the approval trend estimate has fallen sharply to 38.1%, a bit more than a 2 point drop since mid-September.
Each of the polls shows a decline from the same poll's previous reading. These are too crowded to plot all four in one image, so here they are by poll.
The CBS/NYT poll is quite low compared to the others, raising the possibility that it is another outlier, as was the Newsweek poll over the weekend. The graph below checks this, and finds that CBS/NYT is NOT an outlier, despite it's low reading of approval. With the new data, Newsweek remains an outlier, though less extreme than before the trend was revised by the four new polls.
The conclusion is obvious. Approval has now given up most of the gains made in the August-September rally.
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