I've been off-line the past week, recovering from vacation. But the polls haven't stopped, and I'm now back to work as well.
We saw five new polls last week on approval of President Bush. A CNN/ORC poll taken 8/6-8/07 found approval at 36%, disapproval at 61%. The Associated Press/Ipsos poll also on 8/6-8/07 has approval at 35%, disapproval at 62%. The Reuters/Zogby poll done 8/9-11/07 got approval at 32%, disapproval at 67%. The CBS News poll done 8/8-12/07 put approval at 29%, disapproval at 65% and the Quinnipiac University survey of 8/7-13/07 finds approval at 29% and disapproval at 64%.
With these new polls the trend estimate of approval now stands at 32.4%. At the moment none of the last 10 polls qualify as outliers, with some above and some below the trend estimate but none further away than we would expect given the variability in polling. It remains to be seen whether the current upturn in approval that began after June 28 is continuing up. The Quinnipiac and CBS results at 29% are more than 3 points below trend, but not abnormally so and both polls typically run a bit below trend, so they don't give much evidence of a new downturn. Let's get some more data to answer that question.
