A new Diageo/Hotline poll collected 5/16-20/07 of 800 registered voters finds approval at 32%, disapproval at 64%. The Hotline poll usually runs a little above the trend estimate, but in this case is a point under trend, which now stands at 33.0%.
Over the last several polls, approval has moved down a bit. It remains in the 33-35% range we've seen since January, but only just barely.
Since we've been talking about "Ready Red", the sensitive trend estimator in comparison to "Old Blue", the more conservative estimator I use here, I've also run a graph comparing the two. Red is willing to go a point lower in approval than Blue. But notice how well the two trends usually agree once all the data are in. If you can't see the red line below, that's because Blue is on top of it-- i.e. they agree. And usually they agree because Red eventually sees that Blue was right. HOWEVER, when approval or other trends DO change direction suddenly, it is Red that eventually convinces Blue to move along. At the moment, the difference is quite small and I'd say there is little additional evidence from Red at this point.
I've been impressed by the stability of approval for the past five months. I still am. I'll need to see four or five more polls all clearly below trend before I'm convinced that the current dip is real, and not just another false lead from a few polls.
The diagnostics below show no alarming indicators of anything, so nothing more to say.
2 comments:
Of course the current dip is real: the New York Times/CBS poll that came out today has Bush at 30%, the daily Rasmussen poll has had him at or below 35% for the past week (and all-time low for Rasmussen), and new polls will continue to show approval in the low 30's or even lower. The reason is simple: the immigration reform deal between the White House and the Senate is going to alienate many conservatives and seriously erode support for Bush among the only constituency he had left: Republicans.
While Bush lost pretty much all Democrats before the '04 election, and independents turned against him throughout '05 (especially after Katrina and the subsequent reawakening of the media that it brought about, which meant better coverage of Iraq, and greater scrutiny of the Administration's policies on domestic wiretaps, torture and rendition practices), Bush has still enjoyed solid support from an overwhelming majority of Republicans until very recently. But even that is no longer sustainable if the White House continues to push for this immigration reform bill that conservative commentators and radio talk show hosts are already branding as 'amnesty' --just remember Bush's approval dip in April and May of last year, when immigration reform was also at the center of the political debate and Bush was advocating for a guest-worker program and a path to citizenhip for illegal immigrants. If the current bill continues to get opposition from conservatives in the media and from several Republican presidential candidates, it is very likely that Bush's support among Republicans will fall below 60% without seeing any increase among independents or Democrats (who made up their minds about Bush a long time ago), in which case his overall approval rate will fall below 30%.
A minor point: the difference between the "outlierness" of Newsweek and CNN is not itself significant, is it? To put it another way, for what confidence interval is the CNN poll an outlier? I'm guessing it's all the way down to 94% (with Newsweek at, what, 96?)
Post a Comment