Four more polls in today revise the trend estimate of approval of President Bush to 36.2%. CNN/ORC taken 10/20-22/06 has approval at 39%, disapproval at 58%. ABC/Washington Post, taken 10/19-22/06 has approval at 37%, disapproval at 60%. Newsweek, 10/19-20/06 found approval at 35%, disapproval at 57%. The new Cook/RT Strategies poll, taken 10/19-22/06, got approval at 37%, disapproval at 53%.
The trend estimate is revised up from 35.8% as of polling through 10/15. The trend line (the blue line) remains down because the new data revises the rate of decline, rather than demonstrating (so far) a reversal of the decline. It typically takes 6-12 polls for a change of direction to be clearly revealed by the trend estimate. So far, the data do not hint that a reversal of direction has occurred. For example, the "sensitive" estimator shows a hint of flattening, but no upturn. Since the sensitive estimator is easily fooled, it is too soon to say approval has stabilized. More data this week should help clarify this, however.
The figure below shows the four new polls. All results are reasonably close to the trend estimate. In response to a comment on the earlier item, I reran the analysis of Newsweek's previous poll, which I showed was an outlier, beyond the 90% confidence interval. Repeating that analysis with the new polls included does not change that result. For the time it was conducted, the previous Newsweek poll is still unusually low. Their new poll, in contrast, is well within the 90% CI, as are the vast majority of their polls.
