CT Sen: Final polls show Lamont by 6 and 10

Two final polls in Connecticut show the primary tightening a bit but with Lamont leading by 6 points (slightly within the margin of error for the difference, which is 6.9%) in a Quinnipiac poll taken 7/31-8/06, and Lamont leading by 10 points (outside the MOE for the difference, 7.8%) in a Research 2000 poll taken 8/1-3/06.

Some news outlets are excited over the shift in the margin from +13 to +6 for Lamont between the Quinnipiac polls taken 7/25-31 and the one done 7/31-8/6. One offers an interesting explanation for the shift "The why is fairly simple: Lieberman had a fairly good weekend of news coverage". He may have had a good weekend, but since most of the poll was completed BEFORE the weekend it isn't an entirely convincing explanation for the change in the poll!

MysteryPollster Mark Blumenthal has a very nice post on the CT polls here. See his take on these and other issues.

Nor is the shift as statistically exciting as it first appears. Lieberman gained 4 points while Lamont lost 3. But since 95 or 96 percent have a preference, what one gains the other almost exactly has to lose. That makes comparison of the margins look like bigger changes than they actually are. The two Quinnipiac polls are of 890 and 784 likely Dem primary voters. The margin of error for the CHANGE between these two polls for Lieberman is 4.75% and for Lamont it is 4.79%. Neither shifted by that much, so statistically speaking we aren't justified in concluding there was a turn towards Lieberman. (You can also calculate the MOE for the change in the margin between the two, which shifted from +13 to +6, a change of -7. The MOE for this change of margins, however, is 9.34%, so that isn't statistically significant either.) The Quinnipiac news release is notably silent on the statistical significance of the changes it reports, and not surprisingly journalists haven't grabbed their calculators before writing about the results.

But that said, remember that polls rarely change by statistically significant amounts over a period of just a week or so. (This is a controversial statement among the brotherhood of campaign consultants and pollsters who will swear that such statistically significant changes do take place. I won't say never, but I will offer evidence that such large change is rare.) This doesn't mean that real trends are not shifting, just that the polls are too blunt an instrument to detect such shifts in trends without a number of polls or extraordinarily large sample sizes. So we are left to informed speculation rather than statistical inference.

I'd not be surprised if Lieberman closed the race a bit at the end. Some do think he had a pretty good weekend, and voting against a long time incumbent is not something partisans normally do. It is the perception that Lieberman has betrayed his partisans (first on the war and Bush, then by rushing to establish an independent candidacy-- in effect refusing to cast his lot with those who had put him in office before) that has sapped his support. The first of these presumably has hurt him the most among liberals, but the second has hurt him among the moderates who make up his natural supporters.

If we look at trends by ideology we see how much damage has been done among the moderates (plus the small number of conservative Democratic primary voters-- Quinnipiac doesn't separate moderates from conservatives, but I assume there are very few of the latter.)
























Not surprising is the sharp trends in liberal support for Lieberman and Lamont. As the former collapsed the latter surged. The race among liberals switched from a 60-22 Lieberman lead on 4/30 to a 32-65 Lieberman deficit on 8/6. But Liberals make up about 40-something percent in the Quinnipiac polls (among likely Dem primary voters it appears to be between 38% and 50% depending on the poll and with some assumptions in order to calculate this-- the Quinnipiac news releases don't give this detail.)

Lieberman's losses among his core supporters, the moderates, are less extreme but politically devastating. From a 67-18 lead 4/30 he dropped to a thin 49-45 margin 7/31, and has recovered a bit in the 8/6 poll to 53-43. (Note that what I said above about the lack of statistical significance of the changes applies even more so here. These shifts are great fun to look at and speculate about and interpret, just as I am about to do!, but they aren't distinguishable from random noise in the samples.) It may be that moderate Dems will have a hard time bringing themselves to vote against Lieberman and for Lamont, and so here at the end we'll see some upturn in support. It seems quite unlikely that the same dynamic would affect liberals, who have cut their ties to Lieberman by 2-1.

The press and political blogs have reported that Lieberman's get out the vote (GOTV) effort has been cut back. If so, the inability to exploit this possible "return to the fold" among moderates may haunt Lieberman Tuesday night. Two weeks ago nothing seemed to be going his way in the polls. Now when there is a small glimmer of hope, the campaign may no longer be prepared to exploit that.

And for a final word on the fallibility of polling. Above I pointed out that these polls have a margin of error of 3-4% on the percentages for each candidate, but that the MOE on the DIFFERENCE between Lamont and Lieberman (+6%) in the final Quinnipiac poll is actually about 6.8%. That is based on sampling theory alone. Add in uncertainty in correctly identifying likely primary voters, plus the usual response error, and the race is certainly close enough that we should not bet the entire farm on the polling. The consistency of recent results across the last 4 polls certainly increases our confidence that Lamont is ahead. But it is easy to overstate that confidence. Likewise the Research2000 poll over the weekend found a +10 Lamont lead, which was outside the MOE of 7.8%. My analysis of several thousand polls since 2000 finds that as predictors of election outcomes, we need to expand the MOE by about 30-50%. So while I believe Lamont is ahead, there is a non-trivial chance that the polls will be wrong-- say about 20% for the Research 2000 poll, and about 28% for the last Quinnipiac poll.


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CT Sen: Lieberman falls, Lamont Surges

With only five days to go, the Connecticut Senate primary polling points to a continued decline in Sen. Joe Lieberman's support, while Ned Lamont as surged dramatically. Two Quinnipiac polls, one completed August 31 and the other July 18, sampled likely Democratic primary voters. These and earlier Quinnipiac samples point to a steady and sharp decline in Lieberman's standing with voters, and the ineffectiveness of his campaign for renomination by his party. Meanwhile, previously unknown challenger Net Lamont has surged from under 20% of the vote in February to 54% in the latest survey compared to 41% for Lieberman.

There are important caveat's about the difficulty of sampling likely primary voters in Connecticut. See MysteryPollster's excellent analysis of that here. In the graph, it is also important to note the change from a registered Democratic sample prior to June and to a sample of likely Democratic primary voters since then. This change is responsible for some (but not all) of the apparent decline in Lieberman support and Lamont's rise. But focusing on only the three polls since June, the trends are clear.

Perhaps the single most disturbing result (from Lieberman's perspective) from the latest Quinnipiac survey is Lieberman's loss of support among moderate and conservative Democrats in Connecticut. In June (6/6) he held 61% of moderate or conservative Democrats likely to vote in the primary vs 26% for Lamont. In mid-July (7/18) that still held at 59% vs 39%. But in the latest sample (7/31) Lieberman's support among this group has fallen to 49% (vs 45% for Lamont.) If anyone in the Democratic party could save Lieberman, it would be the moderate/conservative Dems who make up a slight majority of the likely primary voters. That earlier advantage in support seems to have now essentially vanished. (Liberals have shifted from 49% to 32% to 31% over this same time in Lieberman support, with Lamont support rising from 41% to 67% to 66%.)

This is a remarkable collapse for Lieberman. While the war issue is the most mentioned reason for opposing him and supporting Lamont, the inability of a veteran Senator to respond to this challenge and rally his campaign supporters is stunning. Next Tuesday we'll find out if the polls were right or not. But regardless, the ineffectual Lieberman campaign is a reminder that incumbents are "safe" only when they have the skill to keep themselves so.


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Bush approval at 40% in LATimes/Bloomberg

Approval of President Bush is at 40% in the new LA Times/Bloomberg poll taken 7/28-8/1/06. Disapproval is at 58%. This is a one point decline in approval from the previous LA Times/Bloomberg poll taken 6/24-27. As the figure makes clear, the LATimes survey has been running 2-4 points above the trend for the last three polls, though earlier ones are quite close to trend. At two points above trend, the latest survey is certainly far from being an outlier, and roughly balances the negative deviation for the CBS/NYTimes poll of last week. With the addition of the LA Times poll, my trend estimate of approval now stands at 38.4%.

The blue trend line continues up, and has now straightened completely out after some hesitancy following the CBS/NYTimes result for 7/21-25. Polls completed on July 20 or later are 38% (Hotline), 39% (NBC/WSJ), 36% (CBS/NYT), 40% (Gallup), 39% (Cook/RT), and 40% (LATimes/Bloomberg). The five polls prior to July 20th produced approval results of 35% (Time), 34% (Harris), 36% (AP/Ipsos), 36% (Fox) and 36% (Pew). That string in the mid-30s produced some evidence of a possible downturn in approval (discussed in detail here but retracted here) but with the current string of 5 polls it seems clear that the upward trend has continued.

The current rally has had two apparent phases: May 12-June 19 in which approval rose from 34.0% to 36.8%, a rise of 1 percentage point each 13.4 days. From June 19 to August 1 the rate has been 1 percentage point each 27.1 days.

This reduced rate of increase helps explain why many polls appear to be finding little evidence of change. At this rate, we would need more than three and a half months of polling to expect to detect a "statistically significant" difference given typical sample sizes. The evidence of my trend estimate is that approval is clearly still rising and has been for the last 81 days, but no single poll will be able to detect this reliably with a 3% margin of error when polls are taken at one week, two week or even four week intervals. So we get conclusions of "stability", "unchanged" or "flat approval ratings" even when the clear evidence of the figure above is that the trend remains up. This is a clear example of the power of aggregating across many polls. (For those who are tuning in late, these issues of detecting change in approval are discussed at length here, here, here and here.)

If the current rate continues, we should see approval at about 42% on election day, with polls varying between 48% and 36%, with most polls between 39% and 45%. (The variability of polls around my trend estimate is actually +/- 6.7% at a 95% confidence interval.)

Of course there is no reason to believe the current trend will continue unchanged for the next 97 days. This rally is already the longest running since January of 2005. The fall campaigning is apt to change the rate as President Bush plays a central roll. But which way?


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Bush Approval at 40% in Gallup

A Gallup poll taken 7/28-30/06 has come in with approval of President Bush at 40%, disapproval at 56%. This is a 3 point uptick from the Gallup poll of a week earlier, which in turn was a 3 point downtick from the poll before that. Gallup points out that none of these recent changes are statistically significant. With the addition of Gallup, the trend estimate of approval (the dark blue line) stands at 38.3%. That's a change from 38% earlier in the day before adding Gallup's result.

Gallup's write-up of the results stresses stability over the past 6 weeks or so. Of course here at PoliticalArithmetik we have a slightly different interpretation. The trend among all polls has continued up since May 15, though the rate of increase slowed in late-June. Gallup is right that the poll-to-poll changes in their samples are not statistically significant but the estimated trend suggests a different story. Gallup's ups and downs of late reflect the random variability from poll to poll. The scatter of gray points around the dark blue trend line in the figure above shows how much variability there is across polls compared to the small but steady upward movement in estimated approval. Gallup tracks this trend quite well, with a small upward bias. (CAREFUL: "Bias" here is a purely statistical term-- it just means the average Gallup is slightly higher than the trend across all polls. It does NOT mean a political bias. Go debate that somewhere else! <;-)) The difference in interpretation is that my trend estimate has shown approval continuing to rise in late June through July. This rate has slowed from what came before, gaining about 1.25 percentage points between June 25 and July 30. Yet that is still upward movement during a time in which we might well conclude that approval was flat. In fact, I said "essentially flat" myself in a post here last week ("Since early July, the standard blue trend line has remained on a very slight upward path, but a better reading would be "flat" for the last 3 weeks.") That was right after I suggested here that maybe things had begun to turn down (though I, of course, carefully qualified that! "With the addition of the new Gallup data, approval has clearly changed its upward trajectory, though by how much remains to be seen. My standard, conservative, estimate shown as the blue line has noticably reduced the upward slope, though continuing to suggest a rise.")

At the risk of proving my stats are smarter than I am (why prove the obvious, you might ask), compare the series of posts in which I've grappled with what is happening to approval. But pay attention to the blue line in the figures-- it is quite consistent. It is my prose that tilts one way or another more than the trend line does. First, there was some evidence of a downturn beginning. The "sensitive but gullible red-line" estimator thought there was a downturn. Stable, reliable, "old blue" reduced the estimated gain a bit, but still trended a bit up. Then some new data reduced the evidence for a downturn, and sensitive red came closer to flat. Blue continued up. More data and red was completely flat while blue still saw an upward trend. Finally, today's data brings the red estimator back into near complete agreement to my standard, and conservative, blue line trend (see the figure below). And what that blue line is trying to tell us is that approval has been inching up for the last five or six weeks, after a period of fairly rapid rise. If only I would listen.

























So let this be a lesson to me (and to you, dear reader.) The stats may not be "right", and they certainly may not foretell the future. But the blue line doesn't really much care what other commentators are saying, and it doesn't try to beat the competition with a scoop. It just tries its best to model the data and tell us what its best estimate of approval is, given all the data we've seen so far. The hasty red estimator, which has a lot of fans out there judging from the email, should blush a bit from its performance this last week. What looked like a possible new trend has turned out (so far!) to be an illusion. I'll try to remember that lesson as well.



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Bush Approval: Cook/RT at 39%

The new Cook Political Report/RT Strategies poll taken 7/28-30/06 finds approval of President Bush at 39%, with disapproval at 51%. This poll is of registered voters. The 39% approval is up two points from June 4th and up three points from April 30, near the low point of my estimated approval trend. The addition of this poll puts my trend estimate at 37.96%, so let's call that 38%. The blue trend line continues up, though at a noticably slower rate than in May and early June. Since mid-June approval has risen by about 1%, while it climbed by 3 points the previous month (May 15-June 11).

If I use my more sensitive "red line" estimate, then approval appears to have been flat since mid-June. I didn't plot that this time. "Hasty red" is clearly having a tough time deciding what the trend should be. Last week it was a bit down, and I wrote a piece asking if Bush was again in decline. All the polls since then have reduced that estimate to where it now stands at no change. This is an example of "hasty red" suggesting something that seems to have been too much response to a couple of polls. My standard "blue line" estimate meanwhile has continued to show a mild gain since mid-June. For now, I'm sticking with it-- but always watching for Red to give us a hint. Right now, that hint isn't very convincing!

With events in the Middle East plus the summer doldrums at home, I'm not making any bets which way approval is going to move next. You can make cases for either direction. So I'll stick to the thing I do have confidence in-- "old blue".

It has been a while since we looked at approval by party identification, and the Cook/RT poll gives us a nice comparison. They include strength of approval, which many others do not do. That lets us look a little deeper than the simple dichotomy, and by party id categories.

The graph below divides approval into seven categories: strongly approve, somewhat approve, lean towards approval, (neither, not sure, mixed, don't lean either way), lean disapprove, somewhat disapprove and strongly disapprove. The rows of the figure correspond to these categories from top to bottom. The columns are the three party identification categories.

The thing that jumps out of this figure is the very large strongly disapprove group among independents. Fully 46% of independents strongly disapprove of the President's handling of his job. That compares to 59% among Democrats. Just visually comparing the independent with the Dem columns of the figure shows how much independents resemble Democrats at this point. They certainly don't evenly split the difference between Dems and Reps. And that isn't just mild disapproval-- by far the largest single category among independents is strongly disapprove.
























The two partisan camps are approximately symmetric: 78% of Reps approve strongly or somewhat, while 76% of Dems DISapprove strongly or somewhat. What tips the balance against the White House is the large group of unhappy independents: 56% of whom disapprove strongly or somewhat. Only 27% approve strongly or somewhat.

As we come into the fall campaign, I wonder if these disapproving independents can be persuaded to back Republican congressional candidates. These folks are not natural supporters of Dems but they seem so put out with the President that I'm not sure a campaign based on anti-terrorism can win them over again. Despite a first ever veto (and failure to override) I'm not sure there is much daylight between the Republican congress and the White House. I expect a number of districts will swing one way or the other on the votes of these unhappy independents. Can they be won back? How? And the flip side of that question: Can Democrats capitalize on this dissatisfaction when the congressional race is between two particular candidates, and not just a referendum on Bush's performance? We know the generic ballot has been favoring the Dems for a while, but then it has done that most of the years since 1994 without a change in control of congress. Any evidence? Yes, thanks to the Cook/RT poll.

The Cook/RT poll uses the following question on preference for control of Congress, rather than the usual "generic ballot" house vote:

Now, thinking about the election for U.S. Congress in November, regardless of how you might plan to vote in your own district, which party would you like to see in control of Congress after the congressional elections in November: The Democrats or the Republicans? (If not sure:) Well, which way do you lean, more towards the Democrats or the Republicans?

This item may or may not predict individual House votes well, but it does give us a measure of preference that lets us look at how independents split on this question of control compared to their substantial disapproval of President Bush.

The categories shown as rows run from "Prefer Rep Control", "Lean Rep", "Undecided", "Lean Dem" and "Prefer Dem Control", as we go from top (Red) to bottom (Blue).
























That dissatisfaction among independents translates only partially into support for a Democratic congress. While 45% of independents say they prefer a Democratic Congress, this pales by comparison to the Democrats where an overwhelming 90% say the same. That's not at all surprising, but while Independents disapprove of Bush in numbers not too far behind those of Dems, this doesn't translate as strongly into a preference for Congressional control.

Republicans can hardly rest easy from this figure, however. They would need to capture all the undecided and leaning independents in order to break even on the control question. Barely a quarter (26%) of independents say outright they prefer a Republican Congress, while 45% pick the Democrats. That is a lot of ground to pick up for Republicans.

Finally, Republicans have often been more loyal to their party than Democrats. In this figure, there is a small deficit in Republican loyalty: 80% of Reps want a Republican Congress, 10 points less than the Democratic preference among Dems.

Everyone should know the dangers of using this or other "generic ballot" questions to forecast actual votes, let alone swings in seats. But the data do speak to the difficulties Republican's face in the fall elections. Approval shows a massive deficit among independents, and the preference for control suggests that at the very least the Republican party has to win over the vast majority of wavering independents. (At least given this kind of "national level view". If you want district by district analysis, go to the Cook Political Report!)



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Feingold at home: no censure/withdrawal reaction

Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold has gained a good deal of national publicity with his March 12 call for the censure of President Bush, and more recently with the Kerry-Feingold resolution for withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. These positions have gained Feingold visibility and considerable enthusiasm from Democrats who think the party has been wimpy in response to the war and other administration initiatives. I wrote a while back about the considerable bounce in fundraising for Feingold's PAC following the censure proposal here and here.

In today's Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Washington correspondent Craig Gilbert writes about the effect of Feingold's actions on his support at home. Gilbert asked me to comment on the trends for Feingold, so naturally I had to make a graph. I also thought it would be good to compare Feingold with Wisconsin's other Senator, Herb Kohl who has not been so outspoken on these issues. The result is the graph above. The data are from Strategic Vision and from SurveyUSA's 50 state tracking poll. The period covered in May 2005 through July 2006.

The bottom line is that Feingold and Kohl track each other very closely in job approval. Feingold has averaged 54.5% approval and Kohl 56.1%. Feingold's disapproval is a bit higher at 36.1% while Kohl's is 31.6%. But the important point is that there is no evidence at all that Feingold's censure proposal or subsequent outspoken calls for troop withdrawal has had any effect, either positive or negative, on his approval back home. The trend in Feingold's approval is about as close to flat as it can be, and that doesn't change after the March 12 censure call. There is a statistically insignificant shift down after March 12, by -1.8% but that has been made up by an equally tiny and equally insignificant positive trend in approval after that. The simple story the data tell is that the best fit to this trend is a flat line at 54.5% approval.

Feingold's disapproval rate has shown a very slight upward trend, not statistically significant, but not so far from it as with approval. But again, there is absolutely no evidence that that trend shifted at all after March 12.

Kohl's trends similarly show no systematic shift. His approval has a non-significant slight upward trend but no evidence that this changed when his junior colleague made his proposals. If anything, it is striking how similar Kohl and Feingold's approval records are. Feingold has faced serious electoral competition while Kohl has faced generally weaker opponents, yet Kohl is not much more popular than Feingold.

So not much effect. But let's also look at it another way. In the rest of the country, Feingold has benefited significantly from his outspoken positions, at least among liberal/progressive Democratic constituencies. His possible bid for the presidency hasn't soared to first place, but he has moved out of the low single digits into the high sigle digits in many polls. And his blogosphere support seems to have risen substantially. So given that, why isn't there any impact back home?

My guess is that here in Wisconsin we've had 14 years to get to know Feingold. Many Dems love him, and many Reps hate him, but both sides know him well enough to no longer be surprised by his positions or his willingness to speak out when others are more timid. The rest of the country is just beginning to know who this guy is, and for them, the signals Feingold is sending are entirely "new" information. The result is some modest but meaningful change in polling in primary states or in national measures of presidential preferences. So far, at least, that has worked to Feingold's advantage nationally as at least a small share of progressive Democrats have been taken by him. Of course there is also considerable opposition to his positions, but that hasn't hurt him nationally, at least not yet, and apparently not back home either.


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Basic Trends: Right Direction/Wrong Track

After presidential approval, no polling indicator seems to get more attention than the "right direction/wrong track" question. Many polls open the survey with this question and almost all include it in some form or another (though there are a variety of wordings.)

The AP/Ipsos version of the question is reasonably representative:

"Generally speaking, would you say things in this country are heading in the right direction, or are they off on the wrong track?"

Gallup, Pew and Newsweek use a "satisfied/dissatisfied" variation:

"All in all, are you satisfied or dissatisfied with the way things are going in this country today?"

(There is variation within each of these two types, but these are representative of the major differences.)

The question is, presumably, intended to guage optimism or disappointment with the state of the nation in some general sense. No mention of political leaders, parties or events is used to structure the question. Over the past five and a half years, the mood of the country has been decidedly down-hill by this measure. The "right direction" option got a huge boost from 9/11 but fell below 50% by mid-2002 and has rallied over 50% only once, at the start of the Iraq war. Since early 2004 over 50% of Americans have said we are "off on the wrong track." There was some improvement in right direction during the 2004 election campaign, but not enough to get back to a positive net balance of right direction over wrong track. Since 2005, the indicator has trended to a decidedly worse state. In 2004 it averaged 41% right, 53% wrong. In 2005 that moved to 36% right and 58% wrong. So far in 2006 the averages are 30% right, 64% wrong. If this trend predicted votes, someone would be in trouble.

But it isn't clear that the right direction/wrong track is actually a very good harbinger of political change. In 2004, for example, President Bush won reelection while averaging a net -12.4% on this measure. By comparison, Al Gore managed to only just break even in the popular vote while enjoying an amazing +19.2% net reading. Republicans did well in in the 2002 midterm despite a net of only +0.7% in the second half of the year. So as a predictor of electoral shifts, the right direction/wrong track variable doesn't have an obviously strong track record.

During the Bush administration, the right direction response has closely mirrored President Bush's approval rating. The figure below shows the parallel rise and fall of both approval and right direction. Approval has averaged 11.7 points higher than right direction, but the two trends are near mirrors of each other-- the correlation between estimated trends is +.94. That doesn't leave much room for independent variation.
























Because of this very high correlation, we can't gain very much from using the right direction/wrong track measure rather than the more obvious presidential approval. While there are clearly some people who approve of the president's handling of his job while still thinking the country is off on the wrong track, the two series are essentially carrying the same information. If we were to predict midterm vote with the right direction measure, we wouldn't do any better than if we used presidential approval instead. Likewise, there is no evidence here that one of these indicators shifts before the other. If one did, that would be a potential leading indicator of things to come. Alas, they seem to both respond to the same things and at the same time. What could that be? I'd bet presidential leadership and the odd random event.

The interest in the right direction/wrong track indicator seems unlikely to go away. Pollsters and their clients seem fascinated with the measure. Newspapers and other media report the results. But what the answers actually mean, other than reflecting good and bad presidential performance and conditions in the country is a bit of a mystery. My preference is for items that measure reactions to "real" objects, such as the president or congress or your senator or a particular issue. While this item has its defenders, the evidence in the Bush administration at least is that it isn't really distinct from presidential approval.


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P.S. I've been planning the "Basic indicators" section for a while. There will be several, and they will be updated in place. So come back to check on future trends of this and other favorites.

My thanks to "Anonymous" who posted a question about the right direction/wrong track question today. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find that comment on any of the posts. I don't know where it was posted, and Blogger doesn't seem anxious to report which item a comment is attached to. So my thanks for the nudge to finally get something up about this. I'm sorry to not be able to reply to the comment (wherever it may be) but I hope this answers the question.

Bush Approval: Hotline says 38%

Just as I finished this post on new approval data, the Hotline released their new poll finding approval of President Bush at 38% with disapproval at 59%. The Hotline numbers come in between NBC/WSJ's 39% and CBS/NYT at 36% and the Gallup poll earlier in the week at 37%. That's a lot of consistency, and it all points to an approval level in the 37-38% range. My standard trend estimate is 37.7% with the addition of the Hotline result. (It was 37.6 before adding Hotline.)

See the earlier post here for a discussion of how the new polling affects my estimates of the trend in approval. Bottom line is that it looks like it has been pretty stable since June 11, despite three polls that reached 40% or more. While my standard blue trend sees some slight continuing increase, the more responsive red line estimator sees flat and a very slight recent decline. But I mean VERY slight. None of these estimates is clear enough to be willing to declare a trend has begun either way. The revised estimates do, however, argue that the rise in approval never actually reached as high as I thought (and the estimators estimated) in early July.

It has been a good week for polling after a long drought. Maybe we'll see a couple more by early next week. Maybe they will help determine what is happening to the trend. Maybe.


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Bush Approval: CBS/NYT 36%, NBC/WSJ 39%

Approval of President Bush is up in two new polls, compared to those poll's previous readings, but the trend across all polls is essentially flat. That contrasts to data earlier in the week that suggested approval had started to decline. In short-- it remains a puzzle.

The NBC/Wall Street Journal poll taken 7/21-24/06 found approval at 39%, disapproval at 56%. That is a 2 percentage point increase from the NBC/WSJ poll of 6/9-12. The CBS/New York Times poll of 7/21-25/06 registered approval at 36% and disapproval at 55%. That was a 3 percentage point increase from their 6/10-11 poll. So both these readings are modest rises from previous polls by the same organizations. So approval is up, right? Well... maybe not.

Between the two June readings and now, however, were three polls that suggested approval had reached 40%, and for one brief moment my trend estimate reached 40.009% on July 11, which promptly fell below 40 with the next poll on the 13th. With all subsequent polling the trend estimate has been revised down to it's current level of 37.6%. The revisions imply that the high for the trend was never actually much above 37%. Close inspection of the figure below shows that when several polls came in at or above 40%, these were balanced by a number of other readings in the 35-38% range. With all those data taken into account, the blue trend line estimates that approval was actually around 37% with scatter above and below that. Since early July, the standard blue trend line has remained on a very slight upward path, but a better reading would be "flat" for the last 3 weeks.
























But what about the less conservative "red line" estimate, that was telling us two days ago that approval had started to decline? With the addition of these two new polls, "hasty red" isn't so sure anymore. There is still a slight downturn in the red trend, but it is considerably less than it was on Tuesday. Then the red-line estimate of approval was 36.2% but with these two new polls "red" thinks 36.7% is more like it. That's still a bit lower than "old blue" at 37.6%, but the shift shows that the more sensitive estimate is being buffetted about by the polling, rather than detecting a clear trend that the conservative blue line estimate can't yet see. A fair characterization of their stories would be that both see approval within +/- 1 point of 37% and have had it there since about June 11. There may be as much as a 1 point trend in that period, but it is clearly a flatter period than in the month from mid-May to mid-June.

I've fussed over the differences between the sensitive red-line estimator and the conservative blue-line quite a bit. In this case, the recent history isn't that affected by how sensitive an estimate I use. The figure below shows a number of red-line estimates that vary from extremely sensitive to almost as conservative as the blue line. What this shows is that the sensitivity doesn't really tell a very different story here. Compare that to the variation at some earlier points, especially in the bottom of approval in late 2005 and the peak of approval just before January 2006. There the red lines differ a good bit from the blue line when we make them most sensitive. By contrast, the variation in May and now is rather small.
























So in this light, the peak of approval was probably significantly over-estimated when some polls passed 40%. Even the most sensitive estimate doesn't produce a trend now that would reach that level. The improvement in approval between mid-May and mid-June now looks to have been about 3-4 percentage points, a significant improvement, and an important reversal of the previous trend. But this now looks like it was comparable to the November-December 2005 rally. Earlier it looked to have considerably surpassed that earlier run. With all the data now in hand, it looks at most like the polls over 40 were very brief spikes in approval, or more likely they were simply random draws from the high end of the error distribution.

All of which leaves open the question of what will happen next? Is this really a plateau of approval, or is it the beginning of a decline? Or might events produce another rise? Wait and see.

FLASH: Hotline just came in with approval at 38%. That more or less splits the difference between CBS and NBC so won't change the estimates above by very much. But it does add to the sense that approval has flattened out. I'll post on this late this afternoon, after a meeting.


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Bush approval in decline? Gallup at 37%

President Bush's approval ratings appear to have ended an upswing that began May 15, though the jury is not yet unanimous. The latest USAToday/Gallup poll conducted 7/21-23/06 finds approval at 37% and disapproval at 59%. The previous Gallup approval reading was 40% on 7/6-9. Since then we've seen AP at 36%, Fox at 36% and Harris at 34% (though those were small increases from previous AP and Harris results, a decline for Fox.)

With the addition of the new Gallup data, approval has clearly changed its upward trajectory, though by how much remains to be seen. My standard, conservative, estimate shown as the blue line has noticably reduced the upward slope, though continuing to suggest a rise. That estimate is 37.8% approval as of 7/23. This estimate is deliberately slow to believe what new polls are saying, and takes some 6-10 new polls to be convinced of a change in trend. The current shift in slope is a "leading indicator" that the trend is shifting and that eventually the estimator will acknowledge it.

Meanwhile, my hasty, impetuous and sensitive red-line estimate is ready to declare that approval is on the way down, and that indeed the decline started in mid-to-late June (the current estimate being June 19th, but let's not be too hasty about that! This will change as new data accumulate. There were three polls in the 40-41% range in the second or third weeks of June, and I'd bet that ends up being the peak when we get enough data for "old-blue" to sniff out the date of the maximum reliably.) The red-line estimate is currently 36.2% approval, down from a peak of 37.4%.

As a believer in conservative statistical estimates, I'd still say we need more data to develop a reliable estimate of where approval is, and where it is headed. But after two months of good polling, the White House needs to brace for some less good times to come. The general lifting of Republican pessimism recently must now adjust to uncertainty as to where Presidential approval is headed and how that will play in November's elections. The Gallup survey finds that evaluation of the President's handling of the Israel-Lebanon-Hezbollah conflict (37-56, the question is actually about "the situation in the Middle East") is no better and no worse than his overall approval rating. So at the moment that is a wash. Secretary Rice's current trip could possibly change that, either way. But given the limited likelihood for a diplomatic breakthrough, this doesn't look to be a big help for the President.


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WI Gov: Pollster (and sample) still matters most

Three recent polls in the Wisconsin Governor's race continue to conflict with one another but all can agree that not much has changed. The new polls are the UW-Survey Center/Badger Poll 6/23-7/2, a Rasmussen Report's robo-poll done 7/12 and a Strategic Vision survey conducted 7/14-16.

I wrote about the considerable differences we have been seeing across pollsters in the Wisconsin race, and those differences remain clearly visible in the plot above. The Badger poll of adults, using conventional telephone methods, finds Doyle at 49% to Green's 36%. That result is right in line with other conventional phone polls of adults, most notably the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute's mid-June poll at 49-37 . The new Rasmussen automated interview poll of likely voters finds Doyle at 47% and Green at 41%, a narrower margin, but one that is almost unchanged since Rasmussen's previous April poll at 47-43. Today Strategic Vision checked in with a conventional poll of likely voters finding Doyle at 43% to Green's 42%, a modest shift from their 45-46 result for 6/2-4 (though a psychological, if statistically meaningless, shift of lead.)

So it is a tossup, a modest lead or a comfortable margin, all depending on which pollster you care to read, just as we saw before. The graph above also makes clear that support for Doyle is quite stable across the polls. It is the Green vote that varies substantially. Also, note that the green line (pun intended) of adult samples shows a modest but steady trend up for Green. We'll return to that below.

We can shift the focus to "who's ahead?" by comparing the Doyle minus Green margin in each poll. Once more we see that pollster matters most.
























The clearest comparison here is between the green line for samples of adults and the blue line for Strategic Vision's samples of likely voters. All these polls use conventional telephone interviews with live interviewers, though there are several different survey organizations represented in the green line. Despite that, both blue and green lines maintain their differences of about 10 percentage points on the Doyle-Green margin. This difference is substantially due to the differences between samples of adults and of likely voters. ("House effects" are also part of it, but we lack enough polls to estimate how big that effect is in this case.) The greater interest and political knowledge of likely voters (meaning they are more likely to be aware of Mark Green), and the modest tendency of Democrats not to turn out at as high a rate as Republicans, makes the likely voter sample appear much more competitive than the sample of adults.

One might assume that voters at the polls will determine the outcome in November, so sampling likely voters would be the obviously correct thing to do. However, it introduces some perils of its own. The most important is the difficulty of determining who is likely to vote, especially this far from election day. Some pollsters rely on just the respondent's report of whether they voted last time. Others ask a battery of questions about registration status, past voting, and certainty that you will vote in the upcoming election. (Strategic vision, like many pollsters, does not describe their method of selecting likely voters on their website.) But it is clear that motivation to vote can change over the course of a campaign, so variation in who is a likely voter can lead to differences in poll results regardless of changes in preferences between the candidates. In some cases, shifts in the likely voter pool may dwarf shifts in preferences, resulting in instability of the poll results due mostly to shifting classification of likely voters. And that classification is, of course, also subject to measurement error, resulting in random movement.

Moreover, if interest in the campaign rises over time and results in initially uninterested potential respondents coming to be classified later as likely voters, we can build in an artificial trend by accident. If those who are activated to vote by the campaign have a partisan bias, then their inclusion in later samples will result in an apparent trend in the direction of their bias. In one sense this is absolutely correct-- as recent campaigns have shown, elections are as much about mobilizing your supporters as winning new converts. But so long as the classification of likely voters is subject to fluctuation and trend there will be shifts in measured support that we might not want to confound with opinion change in the population.

Samples of adults don't face these problems of definition of the pool of voters. Thus trends in adult samples are generally not confounded with changes in interest in the race or motivation to vote. That's useful if we want to follow the process of activation and candidate persuasion.
For example, at this stage of the race, I'm most interested in Mark Green's progress as he introduces himself to the electorate. Current vote estimates will obviously be a poor reflection of his ultimate strength at the polls because many people are just getting to know who he is (if they are yet aware of him at all.) Trends in impression of Green (his name recognition and favorability towards him, perceptions of his issue positions) over time would be very important to observe without any chance of confounding these trends with the growth of motivation to vote, which would affect samples of likely voters. If I'm working for Green, I want the best estimate of that trend as a measure of our progress in reaching voters. I don't want it confounded with changing the denominator by including more (or fewer) "likely" voters. Remember that green line in the top figure? It shows that Green has had a positive trend in vote support among adults. For a challenger who is not yet advertising, and so is relying on free ("earned") news coverage and personal appearances, this is a good trend. As an estimate of his November vote, it is, of course, far too low. But it does reflect both his current standing and the modest but steady upward trend. That will move more rapidly as both candidates put up their ads.

We can also learn more from an adult sample than a likely voter one. If I have a sample of adults I can always estimate who is more or less likely to vote, and calculate an unbiased vote estimate from that, discounting the preferences of those less likely to turn out. If all I have are "likely" voters, I can never use that sample to estimate the potential for mobilization because by definition I excluded those not yet motilized from my sample.

Of course, campaigns may prefer to rely on "likely" voter samples to minimize survey costs from talking to too many respondents who are clearly unlikely to turn out. But for analysis of what is happening in the campaign, samples of adults have considerable advantage over samples that exclude some potential voters right off the bat. Likewise news organizations or others who are just interested in the "bottom line" of the horse race may not want to engage in analysis of the survey and for them the sample of likely voters gives them a simple number to report without having to explain how "likely voter" was defined, and how much that might matter as the campaign moves along.

Given good analysis, you should be able to learn everything from a sample of adults that you can learn from a sample of likely voters. But you can also learn OTHER things from adults that can't be estimated at all from samples of only likely voters. Adults are easier to sample accurately and the population of adults only changes at a glacial pace. The cost of a larger sample of adults versus a smaller sample of likely voters is the primary reason to prefer likely voters. It also takes more work to get the greater information out of the adult sample than if you just place your (somewhat blind) faith in the poll's ability to identify "likely voters".


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Public support for stem cell research

The Senate voted on Tuesday (July 18) to broaden the range of stem cell lines that would be eligible for federal funding. President Bush has indicated he plans to veto the legislation (passed last year by the House of Representatives). The House is expected to vote promptly on a possible veto override, but there is no expectation that such a vote will pass. The willingness of both houses of congress to pass such legislation in the face of a presidential veto threat is quite interesting. What are the public attitudes that set the stage for this vote?

ABC News and the Washington Post provide handy survey data with which to address this question. The ABC/WP poll asked a simple "do you support or oppose stem cell research" question in polls of 7/26-30/2001 and 6/2-5/2005. The first of these was taken before President Bush announced his limitation of federal funding for stem cell research to a few cell lines created before his decision, effectively banning federal support for the creation of new stem cell lines. (There is little polling available on stem cells in 2006. However, I think there is little reason to expect substantial change in opinion since 2005.)

The question wording is different between these questions, but the marginal distributions are all but identical. The question in 2001 was prefaced by a lengthy introduction to stem cells:

Sometimes fertility clinics produce extra ferilized eggs, also called embryos, that are not implanted in a woman's womb. These extra embryos either are discarded, or couples can donate them for use in medical research called stem-cell research.

Some people support stem-cell research, saying it's an important way to find treatments for many diseases. Other people oppose stem-cell research, saying it's wrong to use any human embryos for research purposes.

What about you--- do you support or oppose stem-cell research?

In contrast, the 2005 question simply asked, with no introduction:

Do you support or oppose embryonic stem cell research?

Despite the differences in wording and a gap of four years, the two items produce remarkably similar readings of public support for stem cell research:

In 2001, 65.7% supported stem cell research, in 2005 it was 63.9%.

So one might be tempted to conclude that nothing had changed over this period. But a look at the data tells another story.

I pool the data from the two surveys in 2001 and 2005 and estimate the change in structure of support for stem cell research. The most powerful result is that party identification had absolutely no role in structuring opinion about stem cells in July of 2001. Whether we look at the simple percentages by party, or use a more sophisticated model controlling for several other variables, the simple fact is there is no discernable effect of partisanship in 2001. By 2005 this is dramatically different with Republicans much more likely to oppose stem cell research than Democrats.

Catholics and born-again believers became substantially more opposed to stem-cell research between 2001 and 2005. The non-religious population had been more supportive than average in 2001 but by 2005 no longer differed from "mainstream (non-evangelical) Christians. African-Americans who were skeptical in 2001 appear to have moved to open opposition by 2005. The only strong regional effect is that the northeast is the region most likely to support stem cell research. Age played no role in 2001 but became significantly and positively related to support in 2005. For the obsessive in the house, here are the estimated parameters of the model. Survey is coded 0 for 2001 and 1 for 2005 and is allowed to interact with all terms in the model. This effectively allows the fit to be independent between years.

The most striking thing about the second figure above is that the Republican party is indeed divided on this issue. The "right hump" in the figure betrays the possibility that Republicans are quite divided on this issue.























The top two figures show the magnitude of these changes. In 2001, there was little difference betwen the parties, and the three distributions clearly overlap far more than they differ. By 2005, the parties are far more differentiated, with approximately half of the Republican identifiers in the ABC/Washington Post poll opposing stem cell research while something close to 90% of Democrats support this research.

The top figure shows the distribution of probability of supporting stem cell research in 2001. The overlap of the party distributions is striking. Below that is the estimate based on interviews conducted in June 2005. The Democrats have moved stikingly to the right, that is into increased support for stem cell research. The Republicans have clearly shifted to lower probability of support, with an important increase in bi-modality. Independents are between these two extremes.

In the lower panel we see the problems facing Republican's on this issue. While there is a substantial anti-stem cell contingent in the Republican party, there is also a substantial group that resembles independents more than anything else. Indeed, the "right hump" of the Republican distribution could actually "blend" into the independent support for stem cells without much trouble (at least as we've measured things here.)


Meanwhile Democratic attitudes have become more homogeneous with strong support for stem cells. To be sure there is a long left tail to the Democrati distribution, but the vast majority of this distribution is to the right in the figure.

So the bottom line is that despite the seeming stability of the marginals, there has been considerable shifting of preferences within parties and in largely opposite directions.

In 2005, ABC also asked if respondents wanted to see federal funding extended or remain restricted acording to the Presidents previous policy. Here the results largely mirror the opinion on stem cell research more generally. There is considerable spread, and Republican bimodality.
























The most powerful contributor to that bimodality is religion. Born again Christians are quite strongly opposed to stem cell research, and became even more opposed in 2005. Catholics also increased their opposition to stem cell research.


We can see the gross dynamics of opinion by using the model to estimate individual change over the four years between 2001 and 2005. The gist of the statistical model is to estimate the factors affecting support for stem cells in 2001 and use those parameters to estimate for 2005 respondents what we should expect their attitudes to have been in 2001. My two-stage auxiliary instrumental variables technique (2SAIV) shows that such a method can produce reliable inferences over time even without panel data, which interviews the same people.

What we see in the figure below is that Democrats almost all increased their support for stem cell research. Republicans, on the other hand, show more heterogeneity. SOME Republicans, between about .6 and .8 in probability of support in 2001, increased their support over the four years. In contrast, those at the lower tail of estimated support became dramatically more opposed, as did those towards the high end of support. Independents shifted more or less randomly, with little evidence of stong effects.


























Democrats would appear to have a chance to split the Republican coalition between the two "humps" in the stem cell support distribution. Doing so would divide those who are already close to the independents in these data from those Republicans who could be labeled "extreme". The trick for Democrats is finding issues that reveal important divisions in the Republican party. On the issue of stem cells, it appears the Republicans themselves have brought up the opportunity.


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AP finds Bush approval at 36%, matching Fox

The new AP/Ipsos poll is out, taken 7/10-12/06. The AP poll finds approval at 36% and disapproval at 63%. The 36% approval matches the results of the Fox poll completed 7/11-12. This is a 1 percentage point increase from AP's previous poll of 6/5-7.

The four most recent polls have checked in at 35% (Time, 6/27-29), 40% (Gallup, 7/6-9), 36% (Fox) and 36% in this AP poll. Three of these are below my estimated trend, with only Gallup above the trend. (My estimated trend is the blue line in the figure.)

With the AP and Fox polls added to the dataset, the revised approval trend estimate of 7/12 stands at 38.6%. That's revised down from 39.4% yesterday (before adding AP) and down from 40.0% after Gallup's 40% result on Tuesday. With these revisions the blue trend line is still estimated to be continuing up, but clearly the two new polls reduce the estimated approval fom 40.0% to 38.6%.

The recent polls raise the question of whether the upturn in approval that began May 12 has now flattened or even turned down. The blue trend line doesn't suggest a downturn yet. However, as I've explained before, it takes between 6 and 12 polls before the blue trend is "convinced" that the change is real. For a more sensitive but also more gullible estimate, we turn to the red line estimate. That uses fewer polls in the estimate, so it is more sensitive to short term change. It also is more easily fooled by random noise. Since we now see three out of four polls below trend, it is time to bring the red line back to the analysis.

The red line estimate does show a very modest but clear downturn. The red line peaks at 37.9% on 6/29. It declines to 37.6% on 7/12 with the inclusion of both Fox and AP polls, a decline of 0.3%. For comparison, the blue line estimate is 37.7 and 38.6% for those two dates respectively. So the discrepancy between the two estimates is one percentage point as of today. That's not close to a statistically distinguishable difference. But the qualitative difference is important: the rougher red line fit suggests a downturn has begun while the more robust but less sensitive blue line says the improvement in approval that began in May continues.

At this point there is not enough data to be at all confident as to what is happening. The lack of polls in early July (due perhaps to the holiday on the 4th rather than the mainstream media conspiracy to suppress polls) has given us less leverage than we'd like to detect a change of trend. Some can't wait for an answer, but I'm content to see if blue and red lines continue to diverge over the next 6 or 8 polls. If so, or if blue turns down, then the President has lost his momentum. If red turns back up, then we probably just got a couple of low values by chance and old reliable blue has again shown it is better not to jump to conclusions. Alas patience is required in either case to know what is happening to approval.


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Fox poll has Bush approval at 36%

A new Fox poll conducted 7/11-12/06 finds a surprising 5 point drop in approval of President Bush, to 36%, with disapproval at 53%. The drop is quite substantial compared to typical poll-to-poll changes we see and comes in the face of a steady, substantial, and sustained upturn in approval based on all polls incorporated into my approval trend estimate. That trend is revised to 39.4% with the Fox data, down from 40.0% prior to the Fox poll. However, with this revision the trend estimate continues to estimate approval is increasing, though less rapidly than estimated on Tuesday when the latest Gallup poll became available (showing a 40% approval rate.)

Dems were quick to claim that the post-Zarqawi "bounce" is now over if "even Fox" finds approval down. That's a serious misunderstanding of how polls work, and of the dynamics of public opinion. At the same time, we do have to wonder how long the upward trend in approval can be sustained. It is now both longer than, and substantially greater than, the increase we saw in November-January. Then approval recovered only 3.7%. The current estimated increase is now 5.6%. Only during the 2004 election campaign have we seen a sustained upward trend in approval of President Bush. Can this one last?

The Dems are wrong to take this Fox poll as vindication (just as Reps are wrong to take Fox's upticks as vindication.) Both sides have rather studiously ignored polling that goes against them. Let's take a look at the evidence for a moment.

The graph shows that the current Fox downturn is both large and counter to trend, in the Fox poll itself and the blue estimated approval trend line. Does this mean approval cannot have leveled or even started down? No. But at the moment the downturn is counter to other data. Therefore we should treat this result with special caution because it goes against the accumulated weight of other evidence. Second, the shift is SUBSTANTIAL, at a time when there seems to be little ready explanation for such a turn down. Over the past week or two there is no readily discernible event that would "obviously" be a negative for the White House. Indeed, judging from the news of the President's trip to Chicago and Wisconsin, the generally good economic news (granted the budget deficit reduction is a large portion of spin) and the current European trip, there hasn't been much news that would make you think the President should suddenly take a 5 percentage point hit. Especially when the normal movement, EVEN IN BAD times of 2005 was on the order of 1 or 2 percentage points a month. So this large a movement, in the past week's news environment, is not credible.

So there may be movement, but not this large. The much more likely explanation is that Fox got a goodly bit of random variation below the expected value. The poll isn't so discrepant as to qualify as a statistical outlier, but it is still a ways below trend, -4% in fact. So imagine that approval is right where my trend estimate stood before adding Fox: 40.0%. Normal variation around that estimate is +/- 6.5 percentage points. Given that range (observed over five and a half years and 1167 polls) a discrepancy of -4% is small potatoes.

Fox's previous two polls were also noticeably ABOVE trend as well. So even if Fox's latest sampling had simply returned to trend we would have seen some downturn in their approval numbers. I pointed out here then that Fox was about 3 points above trend in their last poll (which was at 41%.)

So before Dems celebrate or Reps sulk, be aware of what poll dynamics are really like. Random draws of +/- 6.5 percentage points around the trend. The trend is what to watch and celebrate or worry about. The random noise around it is a distraction that makes fools of those who try to interpret it. This week's random low will be followed by a random high. If you are serious about political analysis, then you'll ignore that. Don't let the partisan rhetoric cloud your judgment. Your party will be better off if you are a rational analyst than if you are a giddy cheerleader. Both parties have too many of the latter and not enough of the former.


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Bush approval passes 40%, and rising.

The Gallup/USAToday poll taken 7/6-9/06 finds approval at 40%, with disapproval at 55%. This is the first time approval has been as high as 40% in the Gallup poll since Feb 9, 2006. My estimated approval trend (the blue line) also stands at over 40%: 40.009% to be specific. The last time the trend was that high was Feb 16.

The current rally in approval of President Bush has now gained 9 percentage points from the Gallup low of 31% on May 7. My trend estimate has seen a gain of just over 6 points from it's low of 33.98% on May 12. For comparison, the President lost 8.37 percentage points between January 5, 2006 and May 12. The current movement has erased about three quarters of that loss.

The current rally is also impressive for outpacing the November 11-January 5 increase which amounted to only a 3.7 percent increase over a similar length of time, based on my trend estimate.

Republican enthusiasm seems to be on the upturn as well. The President is in Wisconsin today raising money for Republican Gubernatorial candidate Mark Green (the incumbent from the 8th congressional district). One interesting question is how much Green and Bush will appear together. In recent months, the President has been welcome to visit and do fundraisers but Republican candidates have seemed reluctant to do joint campaign appearances. With the approval momentum going up, that may change. In Wisconsin we have the interesting circumstance of BOTH parties welcoming the President's visit. Democrats seem convinced that Bush's still low approval rating will hurt Republican candidates and will help them "nationalize" the race as a referendum on Bush. Republicans seem to be responding to the trend rather than the absolute level of approval and welcome the President's visit as a strength of their campaign. Part of the proof of that will be how much film appears of Rep. Green and President Bush together in the same picture. (I'm out of state at the moment, so don't know what's happening on that count.)

The White House announced this week that the President will be traveling the country for much of the summer, spending relatively little time in Crawford. It will be very interesting to see if those efforts support and sustain the current upturn in approval. If so, the fall elections look rather different than they will if approval stabilizes or starts down again.


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WA Sen: Cantwell-McGavick getting closer?

The Washington Senate race that looked stable until May now looks like it may be a close contest. Incumbent Maria Cantwell won in 2000 by a "comfortable" 2,229 votes out of 2.4 million cast, defeating incumbent Slade Gorton. Now Cantwell faces Gorton's ex-chief of staff and (more recently) Safeco insurance CEO Mike McGavick.

McGavick has climbed slowly through the 30s over the past year while Cantwell has held steady in the high 40s (but consistently below 50%.) The latest two polls taken by Strategic Vision show a notable upturn for McGavick and a smaller but still noticeable downturn for Cantwell. The key question is whether this is a real shift in the trend or just two slightly aberrant polls by a single polling firm. (See the Cook Report and The Fix for expert opinions.)

In the figure above, I fit a local trend to all the polls for each candidate (the solid lines.) I also fit a linear trend (dashed lines) to show a more conservative view of trends in the campaign. Both show some tightening, but the local fit shows a clear hint that the two trends are converging and will do so if the recent trend continues. In contrast, the linear trends suggests that the last two polls have diverged from the general trend. The linear trend suggests a close race but one with Cantwell expected to continue to lead.

From a pure polling perspective, it is a bit risky to put too much emphasis on just these last two polls. While they may signal a significant move in McGavick's campaign momentum, they could also be short term "noise" in the polling. We could be more confident if there were more polls available and from a variety of firms. Alas, Washington has produced few polls. The Elway Poll has reported only two surveys, and they stand out as unusually low readings for McGavick. (One must admit Elway could be right and Strategic Vision wrong, but then the pundits who see this as a close race must also be wrong.) The McGavick campaign is getting into full gear, so some upturn in response is not an unreasonable expectation.

Cantwell must also take some caution from remembering a similar situation six years ago, shown in the figure below. The challenger that year remained in the 30s throughout the summer of 2000, emerging into the 40s and real competition only late in the year. That challenger was Maria Cantwell. Then-incumbent Gorton appeared more vulnerable in June and July of 2000 than Cantwell does today. Gorton consistently polled in the low-to-mid 40s, as opposed to Cantwell's consistent high 40s, a comparative plus for Cantwell this year. Still, Cantwell's late surge demonstrates that challengers can and do move rapidly (especially when spending the kind of money Cantwell had in 2000.) Presumably McGavick will be similarly well funded this time.
























Cantwell's job approval numbers have also been hovering around 50%, depending on who asks the question. (Mean approval=49.1%, inter quartile range=(47-51.5)) . SurveyUSA's 50 state tracking poll (using recorded interviewer voices and response by touch-tone, you have been warned!) finds approval generally above 50% but with a good bit of movement from month to month. Strategic Vision (with genuine live interviewers) finds approval consistently below 50%, but not by much. Neither series seems to show a clear trend, and if anything there has been a slight rise in Strategic Vision over the past 19 months. If we cut SurveyUSA in half, the last seven months have shown a decline while the first six showed a rise. Put them all together and there isn't much trend left. Cantwell does suffer a bit in comparison with Washington's other senator, Patty Murray, whose approval numbers have consistently been a bit higher (mean=54%, inter quartile range=(53-55)) than Cantwell's in both SurveyUSA and Strategic Vision polling.
























There has been a good deal of discussion about Cantwell's record on the war and the potential for her refusal to call for a pull-out date to reduce turnout among lefty-Dems. Cantwell needs large margins in the Seattle area, something she accomplished against Gorton, who dominated the vote in less populous eastern Washington. McGavick's home is in Seattle, however, so he may win some moderate votes there that went to Cantwell last time. Judging from his web site, McGavick is trying hard not to appear too far to the right, while at the same time not reducing his vote among conservatives. It may be as hard for him to pull that off as for Cantwell to turn out enthusiastic lefty Dems. Both parties may suffer pains in their extremities.



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CT Sen: Lieberman down with Dems but not out

It is incredibly rare to see a Senator more popular among opposition partisans than within his own party. Yet that is increasingly the case for Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman. Since late in 2005, Lieberman's approval rating among Democrats has dropped from around 70%, to the mid-50s. In two early June polls, Lieberman fell again, to under 50% approval among Democrats. This was after Democratic primary challenger Ned Lamont's strong showing at the CT Democratic Convention, but before Lieberman made public his plans to run as an independent should he lose the primary. (The data in the graph are taken from Quinnipiac University polls and from SurveyUSA's 50 state tracking poll in Connecticut. The two polling houses track each other reasonably well in CT, so I've pooled the data and won't focus on differences between the two polling organizations here.)

While slowly trending down recently, Lieberman's job approval among Republicans remains in the upper 60s, while job approval among independents has fallen to the mid-to-upper 50s, as has overall approval.

Much of this has to do with opposition to the war and Lieberman's support of it, and an angry and vocal group of Democratic activists and bloggers. Of the 34% of CT Democrats who say Lieberman does not deserve to be reelected, the largest group (30%) cite his support for the war as the primary reason. Most CT Democratic voters tell the Quinnipiac University pollsters that they would be casting a vote against Lieberman (78%) rather than for Lamont (19%). (Quinnipiac poll, May 31-June 6, 2006.)

But hiding in that last paragraph is the reason Lieberman may not be as badly off as the hype might suggest. Only 34% of Democrats said Lieberman should not be reelected. Of those, 30% cited the war. Thus only 10.2% of Democrats appear to be primarily reacting in opposition to Lieberman's war position. Another 13% say he is too conservative and 11% more say he's "too close to Bush". Adding that in amounts to 58% of the 34% opposed to reelection citing ideology and support for Bush or the war, a total of 19.7% of Democrats. That is undoubtedly an intense and activated 19.7%, and in the primary they may have substantial say. But it remains well shy of a majority of Democrats in Connecticut, 56% of whom still say Lieberman deserves reelection and 57% of whom say they would vote for Lieberman in the primary against Lamont. (Lieberman leads with 55% among "likely Democratic primary voters" in the Quinnipiac poll.)

Lieberman's numbers are down substantially from last winter, but Lamont must still overcome very low name recognition numbers. In the June poll, 73% of Democrats said they didn't know enough about Lamont to have a favorable or unfavorable impression of him, and those that did offer an opinion split 11%-6%, not a great start with just two months until the primary (at the time the poll was conducted.) And in a three way general election, Lamont received only 33% support from Democratic voters. Lieberman got 52% (and 56% overall, to Lamont's 18%).

Yet Lamont has risen to 40% support among likely primary voters, despite his low name recognition. Among the larger group of registered Democrats, he trails 32-57. Among self-identified liberal Democrats he narrows this to a 41-49 deficit, almost doubling his 22% support among liberal Dems in May. But even in Connecticut moderate Democrats outnumber liberal Democrats by about 2-1. Among moderate Dems, Lieberman leads 61-26, down from 67-18 in May, but still a very strong lead.

Still, Lieberman has suffered more losses in job approval and especially favorability than he has (as of early June) in vote support or reelection percentage. The figure below shows these trends through the first six months of 2006.
























While Lieberman might well take heart on the "reelect" and primary vote percentages, his declining job approval and especially his favorability ratings, raise the possibility of a rapid decline in personal standing with Democratic voters. (The figure above shows results among Democratic voters only.) While vote support has been a bit slow to follow, the declines in personal evaluations may be leading indicators of further vote erosion.

As we enter the last month before the August 8th primary, Lieberman's embrace of an independent run for reelection may well have hurt his standing among Democrats more. (We should have some more polls next week to help answer that.) Even though he has done well in hypothetical three way races, talk of bolting the party after a primary defeat will likely further erode Lieberman's favorability rating, and perhaps bring more Dems to consider Lamont seriously. Perhaps Lieberman's embrace of the independent option reflects his private polling which possibly shows a situation grown much more dire since the last Quinnipiac poll of May 31-June 6. The SurveyUSA poll of job approval taken June 9-11 found approval at 46% compared to Quinnipiac's 49%. I'd be inclined to write that off to random noise or house effects, but perhaps Lieberman has suffered more in June than these two early June polls indicate.

In any case, it is ironic that Democrats are locked in a fight over the renomination of a Senator who looked like a shoo-in six months ago. It would be ironic indeed if Democrats pick up the six Republican seats they need to take back the Senate, only to have forced one of their own out of the party. An independent Joe Lieberman might possibly decide which party controls the Senate in 2007. Wouldn't that be interesting.


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Approval at new low-- for President Truman

(Click graph twice for best resolution, depending on your screen settings.)

A small footnote to history. President Truman holds the dubious record for the lowest approval rating ever registered in the Gallup poll. But exactly what was that record low? During the low point of President Bush's approval decline this spring, this began to look like a question of some contemporary relevance. And that is when it became clear that this record was not as certain as it appeared.

There was wide agreement that Truman held the record, but was it 23%, as Gallup routinely reported? Gallup's columns, based on the information in Gallup Poll: Public Opinion 1935-1971, explained that Truman's low of 23% occurred in consecutive polls, Nov. 11-16, 1951, and Jan. 6-11, 1952. The latter also registered the all time high of disapproval, 67%, a neat symmetry.

When I wrote a piece in early March on how low approval can go, I ran into a discrepancy in the data. I developed my approval database using data from the public (and free) data at the Roper Center at the University of Connecticut. When I analyzed those data, I found Truman's low to be 22%, not 23%. That low was found for a survey conducted 2/9-14/1952, a month after Gallup's reported low. I added a note to my original post pointing out the uncertainty about the record low, and did a little research.

First, I checked the original data. The Roper Center is an invaluable archive of historical polling data, available to researchers through University memberships with Roper. Thanks to the University of Wisconsin's membership, I was able to download the original Gallup survey from 2/9-14/52 and reanalyze the raw data. That showed that indeed, the approval rating was 22%, or 22.23% if you really want to be picky. Disapproval was 64.56% with 13.21% undecided.

But if the data were clear (and Roper had in fact listed 22% on it's website as well) why did Gallup still report 23%? I consulted the printed source of Gallup data from that period, Gallup Poll: Public Opinion 1935-1971, which turned out be be the source Gallup used as well. It clearly reported that the February 9-14, 1952 poll showed 25% approval, making the earlier November and January data the record, at 23%.

At that point I thought I had reached an impasse, so I contacted Frank Newport, the Editor in Chief of the Gallup Poll and laid out my evidence. He and colleagues at Gallup investigated and reported back that they concurred with my evidence, the dataset from Feb. 9-14, 1952 appeared to be the best evidence, and their analysis of that poll agreed with my results. It appears the printed volume is in error, and was the source of their use of the 23% low figure. Newport explained the process they went through on his Editor's Blog at the Gallup site here. (This is a free section of their otherwise subscription only site.)

What remains a bit of a mystery is why the published volume got the data wrong in the first place. Newport notes some possibilities in his posting. One he doesn't mention but which appeals to me is that the poll between the 23% on 1/6-11 and the 22% on 2/9-14, is in fact a 25% approval rating. It would seem an easy mistake when compiling the Gallup printed volume to have misread the data for the 2/9-14 poll. We can't know, but if this was read from a list of polls and their approval ratings, a slip of only one line would produce the 25% in the printed volume.

So let the record show that the all time low for presidential approval was 22% on Feb. 9-14, 1952.

My thanks to Frank Newport and colleagues for their help and their willingness to go to some trouble to confirm my suspicions. The openness and collegiality of the Gallup folks is a model for the opinion research profession, one that in my experience is widely if not universally shared.



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