Bush Approval: Fox at 31%, Trend at 29.5%

The new Fox poll taken 6/26-27/07 pegs approval of President Bush at 31%, disapproval at 60%. With this addition, my trend estimate of approval stands at 29.5%.

The diagnostics show well behaved data so little to be suspicious of at the moment.

Pres08: Adding Richardson to the Top Dems

Starting today I'm adding Bill Richardson to the Top Democrats charts for both state primaries and the national nomination polling. The graph above shows his substantial movement in Iowa, and New Hampshire looks quite similar. While Richardson is still in fourth place in both states (5th in NH if you include Gore), his is the only trajectory that is clearly moving up. So it seems fitting to start watching it with each new poll.

Richardson's movement is substantially concentrated in Iowa and New Hampshire, so when I include him elsewhere, you might wonder why I'd call him a "Top Democrat." See Florida below for an example.


















Here Richardson has edged up just a little bit (to 3.9%!), but certainly not like the move he has made in Iowa or New Hampshire. But that is EXACTLY the point. By seeing what he is doing everywhere, we can track how his movement in the earliest states compares to how he is doing in the rest of the primary and caucus states. If I left him out of the "Top Dems" everywhere except where he is doing well, you'd have no comparison across states.

Likewise, I'm adding him to the national Top Democrats plot for the same reason. As you can see below, his moves in Iowa and New Hampshire are completely invisible in the national polling.


















And again, that is exactly the point. When you see his campaign move in early states but not others and not nationally, you see the variation in strength and the possibility of future growth elsewhere. But not if I leave him out of the plots.

For other Democratic candidates, we've not seen a substantial upturn anywhere. Richardson stands alone in that respect at the moment.

Of course, I'll continue to monitor the top candidates and make additions (or perhaps deletions!) as developments warrant.

California Presidential Primary Polls

Updated 8/3/07




































This post is updated in place with the latest state polling results. See the links to state primary polls in the column on the right. Or click on the label: "State Primary Polls" for all posts on this topic.

Some of these graphs are large. Click once or twice for full resolution.

Also see the state pages at our partner site Pollster.com for extended coverage of the state polling. There you can see the underlying data and a "zoomed" view of 2007 polling only.

For some technical details, and some warnings about the trends here, see this post at Pollster.

New York Presidential Primary Polls

Updated 8/2/07



































This post is updated in place with the latest state polling results. See the links to state primary polls in the column on the right. Or click on the label: "State Primary Polls" for all posts on this topic.

Some of these graphs are large. Click once or twice for full resolution.

Also see the state pages at our partner site Pollster.com for extended coverage of the state polling. There you can see the underlying data and a "zoomed" view of 2007 polling only.

For some technical details, and some warnings about the trends here, see this post at Pollster.

Bush Approval: CNN at 32%, Trend at 29.4%

A new poll from CNN/ORC taken 6/22-24/07 finds approval at 32% and disapproval at
66%. With this new poll the approval trend estimate stands at 29.4%.

While 3 points above trend, this poll is in line with CNN's recent house effects of about +3 points, so is quite consistent with a trend at 29 or so.

The plots below show the usual diagnostics. There are no recent outliers, and no diagnostics to raise worries, so the approval trend seems to be continuing as recent polls have suggested.

Newsweek Knowledge Survey

Newsweek has a new "what you need to know" survey out this week. (Article, Results). The headline, "Dunce Cap Nation", pretty well captures their summary of the data. Of the 29 items, only a quarter found more than 55% of the public giving the correct answer. Half the items had between 29% and 55% correct, and a quarter fell below 29% correct. (Though defenders of American culture might note that the fourth lowest percentage correct was being able to name the winner of American Idol (A: Jordin Sparks). ) And while the lowest single item was the ability to name the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, both Speaker Pelosi and President Putin made it into the top quarter of awareness.

A few of the items were downright tricky. (But don't let me spoil it for you... try the questions yourself.)

And as my colleague Mark Blumenthal points out, some would argue that the answer to

From what you know about the situation, do you think the United States is losing the fight against al-Qaeda or radical Islamic terrorism?

just might be considered a tad political opinion and not so much objective fact.

But while Newsweek is primly aghast at such public ignorance, I doubt any college teacher would be. Knowledge is remarkably compartmentalized. In areas of interest, students are able to develop stunning depth of knowledge, while outside those interests the acquisition of new knowledge, and the retention of what is acquired (say, for the midterm), is quite meager.

And what is the impact of this? Most of us, most of the time, lack the foundation for and the motivation to do independent analysis of political problems outside our narrow areas of expertise. Instead we rely on political leaders with whom we think we agree to lead us. We accept and repeat the arguments that come from our side, and we reject out of hand the arguments that come from the other side. Seldom is independent knowledge and judgment involved, even as we repeat what we've heard and think we are expressing an informed opinion. And that is as true of the Jane Austen scholar who offers political views as it is of the polling expert who opines about budget policy. Outside our narrow expertise, we seldom form original opinions.

Bush Approval: ARG at 27%, Trend at 29.1%

A new American Research Group poll, taken 6/18-21/97, finds approval at 27%, disapproval at 67%. This puts the approval trend estimate at 29.1%, continuing the decline that began in late April.

This is in line with Newsweek's 26% and NBC/WSJ's 29%, and is within range of Gallup's 32%, the three most recent polls. My post on the Newsweek result yesterday is unchanged by this result. None of the recent polls is an outlier, all falling within the +/-5% confidence interval around the current 29.1% estimate.

By popular request, I've added a plot to my standard approval post contents: The fourth graph contains both the standard "old blue" trend estimate, which is more likely to be correct in the long run but which is slower to detect change, and the "ready red" estimator which catches change quickly but is easily mislead by random noise that isn't actually a change in trend. Now you can see both as part of these posts. The blue line is plotted second, so when the red agrees closely with the blue estimator, the red line is covered up by the blue line. So where you can see red at all is where the estimators disagree. Otherwise red and blue are tracking together.

Bush Approval: Newsweek at 26%; Trend at 29.9%

Newsweek has a new poll taken 6/18-19/07 that finds approval of President Bush at 26%, disapproval at 65%. With this new data point the approval trend estimate stands at 29.9%, the first time the trend has fallen below 30%. The sharpness of the decline is striking. The change-point for approval is April 23, corresponding to the week of the Congressional vote for deadlines and a fund cutoff in Iraq and the President's subsequent veto. It precedes the immigration debate, though that debate may have sustained the decline. (On the other hand there is little evidence that immigration accelerated the decline which was already underway.)

A look at the last six polls is revealing. Newsweek usually has a "house effect" of about 2.2 percentage points below the trend estimate, so finding it below trend is no surprise. But look also at NBC/WSJ. Their house effect has been around -.6, only a shade below trend. But the new NBC/WSJ poll 6/8-11/07 found approval at 29%. And Gallup's house effect is +.55, and their latest reading was 32%. That makes it awfully convincing that approval has now fallen to very nearly 30%, plus or minus 1. (And to reiterate one more time, house effects incorporate many effects that are specific to a given polling organization. These include how don't knows are treated (are people pushed to respond), question wording, sample selection and non-response rates and order of questions within a survey.)
























Given that agreement among polls, it is not surprising that the outlier analysis finds nothing to complain about. The confidence interval around the trend estimate is approximately +/- 5%, so Newsweek at -3.9% is well within that range.
























The trend over the last 20 estimates has been unrelentingly downward. Despite the long stability in approval from December through mid-April, the trajectory of approval has been dramatically down since April 23.
























Newsweek headlines "How low can he go?" We looked at that a while back in this post. One of the keys I pointed out then was the support presidents enjoy from their own supporters. Past unpopular presidents have suffered a substantial loss of support from their party. President Bush has been a significant exception to this. His lows among Democrats and independents have not been accompanied by similar declines among Republicans. When the post was written in March 2006 approval stood at 38%. Approval among Democrats was 10% back then while independents reported 27% approval. These were much lower than history would predict for a president at 38%. The huge difference was that Republican support in March 2006 was an amazing 82%.

That support has been slipping in recent months. The Newsweek poll finds approval at 6% among Democrats, 23% among independents and 60% among Republicans. The GOP partisans still are providing more support than we might expect, but it is clearly no longer the reservoir of support it once was. (Gallup now finds Democrats at 8%, independents at 24% and Republicans at 73%. Since the historical analysis reported above was based on Gallup polling, a fair comparison would be the shift from 82% in March 2006 to 73% now among Republicans, a less dramatic comparison, but one that still demonstrates the strains on Republican support. It also casts some light on differences between polling organization results.)

Because approval among Democrats is so low, further declines there can make little difference to the overall level. Independents could matter a bit more, but how low approval ultimately goes is going to depend on Republicans' willingness to continue to stand by the president.

Bloomberg Hurts Giuliani More Than Clinton

Michael Bloomberg's possible entry into the presidential race appears to hurt Giuliani more than Clinton, based on analysis of data from SurveyUSA's recent polling in 16 states. While support for both candidates declines when Bloomberg is included in the vote question, Giuliani's support declines by an estimated 1.7 more percentage points than does Clinton's.

The SurveyUSA data were collected by interactive voice response (i.e. "automated" survey) in AL, CA, IA, KS, KY, MA, MN, MO, NM, NY, OH, OR, TX, VA, WA and WI June 8-10, 2007 with approximately 500 respondents in each state. Respondents were first asked

If there were an election for President of the United States today, and the only two names on the ballot were Republican Rudy Giuliani and ... Democrat Hillary Clinton, who would you vote for?

The survey then asked

OK, now imagine that the election for president was a 3 way contest, and the 3 candidates on the ballot are Republican Rudolph Giuliani, Democrat Hillary Clinton, and Independent Michael Bloomberg.

(SurveyUSA asked about other candidate pairs as well, but the focus here is only on the Giuliani-Clinton-Bloomberg effects.)

Adding a third option to any vote question should be expected to draw support away from both candidates in the two candidate only form. In the figure above, that means we would certainly expect the data points to fall below the black 45 degree line in the figure, meaning candidates do worse with three candidates than with two. That obviously occurs in the figure.

The differential impact on the candidates is the more crucial point. If both candidates are equally affected, we'd expec the red and blue points in the figure to mix together more or less randomly in the plot. If one candidate is more damaged than the other, then the blue and red points should separate with one generally closer to the 45 degree line than the other. That's what we see.

Generally the Clinton (blue) points are above the Giuliani (red) points. If we take the simple average changes, Clinton loses an average of 3.6 points when Bloomberg is added, while Giuliani loses an average of 5.2 points. When we do a slightly fancier regression estimate, the net loss hurts Giuliani by 1.7 points more than it does Clinton. That difference is visible in the chart as the gap between the red and blue estimated regression lines.

As a Republican until this week, Bloomberg could be expected to draw more from the Republican than the Democratic candidate.

Of course this is all hypothetical with a mayor who says he expects to serve out his term. But you have to admit that an "all New York" three way race would have its charms.

State Presidential Primary Polls

(These are large graphics. Click once or twice for full resolution.)

It is time to turn to state level polling for president. Obviously this is where the nomination is won (and mostly lost). While I believe national polling is valuable, it is Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, Florida and South Carolina that will set the stage for the nearly-national primary on February 5. So starting now Political Arithmetik and our partner site, Pollster.com, will be giving new and increasing coverage to state polling. See the links in the right hand column under "State Presidential Primary Polls". At the moment I am focusing on the five states that come before February 5. As more data accumulate for other states, those will appear here as well. And of course each new poll will trigger an update of the graphs for that state.

So what do we learn from looking at, say, Iowa and New Hampshire that we didn't know from the national polls? We see Giuliani and McCain experiencing significant declines, at least as large as their national declines and larger in some states.

But the most interesting thing on the Republican side is the rise of Mitt Romney in both Iowa and New Hampshire. The Romney campaign and some of his supporters have been pushing this story for a week or two now, and the AP and New York Times have run stories in the last couple of days. But the degree of increase for Romney is striking even when stripped of the hype.

In Iowa, the trend estimate puts Romney in first place at 23.8%, well ahead of the slumping Giuliani at 13.4% or McCain at 14.9%. Upward trend is being influenced by three recent polls around 30%, one of which is an internal poll leaked by the campaign, so that should be discounted. But two others find similar results. More polls come in between 15% and 20% so even if we dismissed all three polls around 30%, the trend estimate would still put Romney slightly ahead of McCain and Giuliani.

Newcomer Fred Thompson has not shown the upward trend in Iowa that he has nationally and in some other states, so at the moment at least he isn't challenging Romney in Iowa. But don't be surprised to see Giuliani and McCain marginalized by plummeting polls in Iowa, and a Thompson-Romney contest develop.

Romney has begun spending quite a bit on television ads, and that plus the rest of his campaign has clearly paid off handsomely in Iowa. McCain and Giuliani decided to skip the Ames IA straw poll on August 11, preferring to invest elsewhere. A loss to Romney there would be bad for either or both. But if these kinds of polling numbers hold into August, a Romney victory at Ames, even an uncontested one, will look awfully impressive.

In national polls Romney has looked like the tortoise to other candidates hares, but that tortoise has been slowly but steadily creeping up in the national polls when Giuliani, McCain and Gingrich have all suffered substantial declines. Toss in IA and (as we'll see in a moment, New Hampshire) and Romney is looking far more impressive than he did a month or two ago when suffering a series of gaffes. If he can deflect the inevitable attacks on his ever changing issue positions (is it the water in Massachusetts or what?) and maintain this trajectory we will be in a great position for the fall.

In New Hampshire, the picture for the Republicans is similar. The same upward trend for Romney puts him at 27.9% to McCain's 20.9% and Giuliani's 17.6%. Here again Romney is the only clearly upwardly mobile Republican. Thompson is at 10.9% with a little bit of a wiggle up but not enough polling to be confident of any conclusions. Romney's performance here can't be attributed to being Governor of a neighboring state. That was also true six months ago when Romney was at just under 15% in New Hampshire while McCain was at 28% and Giuliani at 24%.
















As with Iowa, the downward trends for Giuliani, McCain and Gingrich in New Hampshire do not suggest success. Clearly these campaigns must find a way to arrest their falls, both nationally and in these critical states.

Let me be clear that I do NOT think the current trends are inevitable or are good predictors of what will happen next January. Remember always, John Kerry was at 9% nationally in December 2003 and headed down. BUT, these polls are an excellent indicator of the CURRENT dynamics of the races and whose campaigns are doing well and whose are in trouble. At the moment, Romney is the only Republican clearly happy with what is happening in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Turning to the Democrats, we see much more stasis than in the Republican race, though with a very interesting exception.

In Iowa, Edwards leads at 27.4%, with Clinton at 21.5% and Obama at 20.3%. Clearly a tight races. But compare the trends here to what we saw among Republicans. Clinton has moved down by about 4 points since April. But neither Edwards or Obama have managed to get any gains during the last couple of months. Edwards has been almost completely flat, and Obama is also unchanged in the second quarter. None of these looks like the substantial declines of McCain, Giuliani and Gingrich, but on the other hand they don't inspire confidence in an upward trajectory of the campaigns. Rather the three seem to be in equilibrium (and granted a bit of decline for Clinton.) This should be especially scary to Edwards who has placed a large bet on doing well in Iowa. That worked for Carter in 1976, but not so well for Gephardt in 2004. While he leads the race there at this point, and saw some nice gains in the first quarter of the year, it is disturbing that his trend has so completely flattened out. Far better than, say, McCain's situation, but still not what a frontrunner (in the state) might hope for.

The most interesting trend in Iowa, however, is the rise of Bill Richardson. He currently stands in single digits at 9.1%, but is the only Democrat with a significantly upward trajectory.
















Like Romney, Richardson has debuted ads in Iowa and New Hampshire and it is possible to attribute his rise to ads that aren't being answered yet by any of his competitors. But the last couple of weeks have seen news articles saying Richardson is the big disappointment of the debates, a possible breakout candidate who has completely failed to break out nationally. True enough. But in Iowa (and wait for it-- New Hamphire, see below) Richardson is beginning to show the upward movement that previous success stories would look for. That said he is at half the support in the polls of any of the top three, so Richardson has a long way to go to become genuinely competitive in Iowa. But the stagnation of the top three campaigns in the second quarter, and Iowa's positive response to Richardson's ad campaign (and personal appearances) suggests that it may be too early to write this obituary.

New Hampshire for Democrats looks a lot like Iowa.
















Clinton Leads by a substantial margin, 33.4% to Obama at 19.3% and Edwards at 16.4%. This is good news for the Clinton camp where a possible loss in Iowa could be blunted by a convincing win in New Hampshire. But the Clinton gains in New Hampshire came in the first quarter of the year, with substantial stability in the second quarter. Not by any means bad news, but not showing signs of increasing strength either. Shouldn't an inevitable candidate be showing signs of increasing strength?

Obama and Edwards have both seen small declines in support in the second quarter. Hardly large and certainly not panic inducing. But again not what two insurgents facing the "inevitable" frontrunner would like to see. If Clinton is not showing the gains in strength she would like, Obama and Edwards are suffering from a failure to improve their competitive standing.

And then there is Bill Richardson. At 9.1%, just where he was in Iowa. And with a very similar upward trajectory noticeably lacking for the other candidates.

It is a very long way to go to January. Never, never, never will I suggest the current polls show how the race "must" end. But if I were in the Giuliani, McCain or Gingrich camps I'd be looking really hard for some debate points to reignite what look to be floundering campaigns. And I imagine they are smiling pretty much in Boston at Romney headquarters.

For the Democrats it is hard to say the top three are in anything like the same trouble, but I'd be laying awake nights wondering what I have to do to move any of these three campaigns off the dime. Richardson seems to have capitalized on a nice pair of "job interview" ads to introduce him to Iowa and New Hampshire. Now can he continue to improve on the impressive gains of the second quarter to get himself out of single digits and contend seriously for third place? Or is TV fame fleeting, and this gain won't last?

Very interesting. I think I'll stay tuned to the next episode.

P.S. South Carolina is very interesting too, and rather different. I'll post something on it tomorrow, but if you can't wait, just click here to see the data and come to your own conclusions.

Iowa Presidential Caucus Polls

Updated: 8/3/07




































This post is updated in place with the latest state polling results. See the links to state primary polls in the column on the right. Or click on the label: "State Primary Polls" for all posts on this topic.

Some of these graphs are large. Click once or twice for full resolution.

Also see the state pages at our partner site Pollster.com for extended coverage of the state polling. There you can see the underlying data and a "zoomed" view of 2007 polling only.

For some technical details, and some warnings about the trends here, see this post at Pollster.

Nevada Presidential Caucus Polls

Updated: 6/26/07




































This post is updated in place with the latest state polling results. See the links to state primary polls in the column on the right. Or click on the label: "State Primary Polls" for all posts on this topic.

Some of these graphs are large. Click once or twice for full resolution.

Also see the state pages at our partner site Pollster.com for extended coverage of the state polling. There you can see the underlying data and a "zoomed" view of 2007 polling only.

For some technical details, and some warnings about the trends here, see this post at Pollster.

New Hampshire Presidential Primary Polls

Updated: 8/2/07




































This post is updated in place with the latest state polling results. See the links to state primary polls in the column on the right. Or click on the label: "State Primary Polls" for all posts on this topic.

Some of these graphs are large. Click once or twice for full resolution.

Also see the state pages at our partner site Pollster.com for extended coverage of the state polling. There you can see the underlying data and a "zoomed" view of 2007 polling only.

For some technical details, and some warnings about the trends here, see this post at Pollster.