A new Greenberg Quinlan Rosner/Democracy Corps poll, taken 7/25-29/07 finds approval of President Bush at 36%, with disapproval at 60%. The new Pew Center poll, also taken 7/25-29/07 puts approval at 29%, disapproval at 61%.
With these two new polls the trend estimate of approval now stands at 30.8%.
The GQR/Democracy Corps poll is a statistical outlier, falling above the 95% confidence interval around the approval trend. At the moment we have two outliers-- ARG's 25% is below the confidence interval.
GQR/Democracy Corps polls are of likely voters, rather than adults as with most polls here. As a result, they consistently estimate approval levels higher than for the adult population and hence above the trend line as well. This is clear from the plot below showing "Greenberg" surveys tracking high. This is a "design decision" to survey likely voters, and should not be considered a defect in the poll. Inferences are to a different population from that of the general population.
The "house effect" estimate for GQR/Democracy Corps surveys is just below 3 percentage points, with a confidence interval from just under 2 to just under 4 points. Despite this substantial house effect, GQR surveys have only rarely exceeded the confidence interval for presidential approval.
As the number of recent polls has increased, the standard "blue line" estimator of support has increased it's "bend" and is coming closer to the more sensitive "red line" estimator, further evidence that approval trends changed direction around June 28, when the red estimator put approval at 28.7%. Currently the blue estimator agrees with that date as the turning point, though the estimate will continue to change until enough data are available for a stable estimate of the turning point.
While the change in support is now pretty clear, the reasons are less so. The timing coincides with a series of Supreme Court decisions, all carried by the majority created with Bush's appointments of Roberts and Alito. I don't think the Court is salient enough with the general population to be a strong driver of public opinion, especially of presidential approval. However, it is possible that the most politically involved conservatives were both aware of the decisions and gave Bush credit for his appointments, helping arrest his decline in the polls.
The other event about this time was the commutation of Scooter Libby's prison sentence on July 2. Initial reaction among the general population and even many self-described conservatives was disapproving of this decision. But here too the effect may have been positive among conservative Republicans and served to shore up support among that constituency.
But that said, unlike previous sharp turning points that have corresponded to major presidential speeches, this one is harder to account for with "obvious" actions of the President (or of Congress, for that matter.) I invite your speculation on this.
2 comments:
As invited, wild speculation follows. I got two things here, one weakly supported but plausible and one wildly speculative.
Plauible first: the big thing that's been happening over the last couple months (as evidenced by this blog) is that coverage of the upcoming 2008 election has intensified. With all the coverage of the candidates, who are widely felt to be less than fully impressive on both sides, the President winds up looking better by comparison.
In fact, if you look at the presidential approval polls on your site, quite a few of them show a statistically significant upturn at the end of their terms of office. Ford, Reagan, Johnson, G.H.W. Bush- they all left on a pretty significant upswing. Given how Presidential approval trends downward over time, I think there's something to this. (Whose polls end on a downward slope? FDR and JFK, both of whom died in office. Nixon's didn't, really, but given the lingering deathwatch on his Presidency that's not too surprising.) Call it the "lame duck bump", maybe.
My theory here is that when Presidents are no longer seen as the primary political force in a country their ratings go up. With Bush's effectiveness as a leader checked by a Democratic congress and attention increasingly focused on the '08 race, that would seem to apply here.
On to wildly speculative: my gut feeling on why the President's numbers have gotten better is because they possibly get any worse. Bush has proven to have an incredibly strong and supportive base, and I think given the levels he was at it would have taken an extraordinary act to bring his approval ratings any lower.
But why would they actually be getting higher, as opposed to flatlining? Exhaustion, I think. Hate is, for many if not most people, a difficult feeling to sustain over a long period of time, and yields meager rewards. Even hating politicians, which is surely one of the easiest forms of hate in existence, can get old after a while; it's a resource that has to be renewed occasionally, the fires stoked. There hasn't been anything in the news lately to do that. People have gotten used to hearing reports of bombings and attacks every day in Iraq, and even then I think the Iraqi parliament taking a month off has focused a lot of attention, by which I mean blame, on them rather than on the US administration. The stock market had a bad day last week, but I don't know anybody who views that as a harbinger of anything or even a significant long-term problem. If the market were to lose a significant portion of its value two days in a row, maybe that would be a problem.
The most divisive thing Bush has done lately is commuting Libby's sentence, and as much coverage as it got the reaction I saw tended more towards either resignation or vague unhappiness than full-on outrage. Anecdotally, I was a lot less upset by it than I expected to be. And maybe I'm committing the cardinal sin of extrapolating too widely from my personal experience, but I feel like a lot of people are generally burned out on political negativity for the time being. Am I thrilled about the direction the country is taking? No, but we got 17 or so more months here, and I can't stay outraged that long, I'm sorry.
There is currently a massive propaganda campaign (I can think of no other phrase for it) attempting to convince the public that the War in Iraq has turned the corner and things are improving. One example of that is the recent flurry surrounding Ken Pollack and Michael O'Hanlon's op-ed piece in the NY Times, entitled “A War We Just Might Win.” They are being touted as "war critics" (when the opposite is true if you read their past writings) who have "changed their minds" about the War.
I read this as part of the big push to clear the previously announced hurdle of "things had better get better by September."
The recent CBS/NYT poll results bear this out:
"Looking back, do you think the United States did the right thing in taking military action against Iraq, or should the U.S. have stayed out?"
Right Thing; Stayed Out; Unsure
7/20-22/07 42; 51; 7
5/18-23/07 35; 61; 4
(percentages)
A shift of 7-10 points on opinions about the war is bound to have some effect on Presidental approval. It's too bad that it's all hokum.
Post a Comment