It depends on what the meaning of ‘holding steady’ is

January 30, 2007

I don’t intend to hold one conservative post a day up to ridicule, but following up on yesterday’s item about the left allegedly being in “denial,” I thought I’d highlight a post from PowerLine’s John Hinderaker about the president’s national popularity.

We hear a lot of hysteria in the press about the American people deserting President Bush. Every time a new poll is released, it is trumpeted as documenting a new low in the President’s approval rating. But these polls follow a variety of methodologies, most of which appear to be flawed….

It appears to me that the problems in Iraq over the past year have eroded Bush’s support only slightly; indeed, his position on immigration may have damaged him more. While the President would no doubt like to see his approval rating higher, he continues to command the loyalty of the large majority of America’s core, the center-right. Of the 50% plus who disapprove, I would guess that 10 to 15 points represent conservatives who disapprove of Bush’s centrist policies or believe that he is not pursuing the war aggressively enough…. Bush is not in a great position going into his last two years, but not in a terrible position, either.

To bolster his assertion, Hinderaker points to Rasmussen Reports results, which tend to cast Bush in a more positive light.

It’s not entirely surprising given Hinderaker’s often-fawning support for the president, but it’s fair to say that his analysis of Bush’s public standing is a little off. OK, more than a little.

First, it’s a little self-serving to take 19 pollsters and eliminate 18 because they offer results you don’t like, while sticking with one that makes you feel better. Indeed, when 18 polls say the same thing and one doesn’t, most of the time the oddball is an outlier to be rejected, not embraced.

Second, while I like Rasmussen, the firm uses automated callers instead of people, which sometimes leads to questions about their results. It’s why National Journal ignores Rasmussen entirely.

Third, take a look at this chart. Notice the trend line. Are all the discouraging polls suffering from a flawed methodology?

Fourth, Hinderaker ought to ask himself a question: if there were 18 polls showing the president with soaring approval ratings, and one that showed him with sub-par numbers, would he still question the 18 and favor the one? (I have a hunch I know the answer to this one.)

The fact is, Hinderaker’s spin is all wrong. The proper response for Bush supporters is to say that the president is like a misunderstood artist/genius, who is so far ahead of his time that he’s shunned and rejected by his contemporaries. Americans don’t appreciate Bush now, the argument goes, but in time we’ll all come to see how great he is. History, they say, will vindicate him.

But to suggest that the polls really aren’t that bad is silly. “Not in a terrible position”? He’s fallen to 30 or below in more than one respected national poll. Bush is not just unpopular, he’s historically unpopular. He’s Nixon-during-Watergate unpopular.

Better sycophants, please.

hmmmm, “He’s Nixon-during-Watergate unpopular.” i like the sound of that! mental picture forming……….wouldn’t it be fun to watch if events unfolded for this prezidint in the same way they did for nixon…….

  • The fact is, Hinderaker’s spin is all wrong. The proper response for Bush supporters is to say that the president is like a misunderstood artist/genius, who is so far ahead of his time that he’s shunned and rejected by his contemporaries. Americans don’t appreciate Bush now, the argument goes, but in time we’ll all come to see how great he is. History, they say, will vindicate him.

    As Atrios would say – “Heh, indeedy”. Good one, CB.

    Perhaps for those who came in late, or who don’t regularly follow the wingnutty blogs the way CB does as a regular course, this particular star-struck Bush-worship argument is one that Hinderaker has (in)famously made in the past.
    This partticular notorious nugget was posted back in those halycon days in the Summer of 2005 before Katrina exposed all pretense:

    “A Stroke of Genius?

    It must be very strange to be President Bush. A man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius, he can’t get anyone to notice. He is like a great painter or musician who is ahead of his time, and who unveils one masterpiece after another to a reception that, when not bored, is hostile.”

    it only gets worse from there…

  • Hopefully it will translate into some success for us at the polls in ’08. Look at this,

    early Quinnipiac poll out of Ohio today shows Hillary Clinton looking quite strong against the GOP’s top contender in hypothetical general-election match-ups. Clinton leads McCain by four (46% to 42%),

    and look at that other Newsweek poll. Does it mean that right now people generally heavily favor the Democrats, or does it just mean that right now Democrats more decidedly favor Democrats that at other times? Will the undecided people in the middle still fall the same way for those psychologically tinged campaign ads once they start running as they did in ’04 and other times?

    It’ll be great to see the GOP unpopularity swing, if that’s what it is, adeptly translated into a good lead for us at the polls come November, and not ineptly squandered somehow. Defeat from the jaws of victory, and all that.

  • I don’t remember him complaining when Bush was in the 70’s approval range. I guess Cheney doesn’t know what effect another terrorist attack would have on the polls or something might have been arranged already. Wouldn’t it be interesting if the Oklahoma bombing occurred in this political atmosphere today.

  • “But these polls follow a variety of methodologies, most of which appear to be flawed….” – Hinderaker.

    Yeah, these polls ask the opinions of people who hate America. If you ask the people who love America, like Hinderaker or Cheney and the voices in their heads, you’ll find that 100% of “real” Americans abolutely love the president. It would appear that the majority American public is getting a well-known liberal bias. Hinderaker isn’t wrong, the rest of the world is.

  • I like the fact the Hinderaker is doing these in-denial arguments; it means his side really doesn’t comprehend what is happening to them.

    It’s not as if presidential approval is this simple binary property, where voters flip from approval to disapproval and that’s the end of the story. There’s an intensity factor as well. It makes a big difference if you have voters feeling mildly against a president versus despising him and writing him off completely. In the latter case, the voters are not only unlikely to ever come back around to the current president that they loathe; they are also likely to carry their animus into future elections. A radioactive president will poison not only his own prospects, but also those of anyone in future carrying his party’s banner, or his political positions. Further, in the case of younger voters, antipathy to a president’s party early in life can lead to lifelong identification with the opposing party.

    As Hinderaker and his compatriots minimize Bush’s disastrously bad polling, they’re missing the long-term damage this rogue president will do to the GOP. Just as they don’t comprehend the long-term damage their reactionary policies are doing to the country as a whole.

  • From time to time, I follow (often closely) the Ramussen Report’s “Bush approval poll.” I can NOT confidently say that Rasmussen doesn’t “cook” their polling. Rasmussen has a history of being one of the most favorable of poll to Bush. There are times that a bad Bush “trend” will unexplainedly dissipate or the numbers will “jump” positively for Bush. Rasmussen claims to “recalibrate their polling from time to time to account for shifts in party identification”; that seems quite a opportunity to skew the polling.

  • I think you’re on to something CBR. I can imagine these desperate wingnuts saying something like this:

    “Hey, man, you don’t talk to the Colonel. You listen to him. The
    man’s enlarged my mind. He’s a poet-warrior in the classic
    sense. I mean sometimes he’ll, uh, well, you’ll say hello to
    him, right? And he’ll just walk right by you, and he won’t even
    notice you. And suddenly he’ll grab you, and he’ll throw you in
    a corner, and he’ll say do you know that ‘if’ is the middle
    word in ‘life’? If you can keep your head when all about you are
    losing theirs and blaming it on you, if you can trust yourself when
    all men doubt you — I mean I’m no, I can’t — I’m a little man, I’m a little
    man, he’s, he’s a great man. I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across floors of silent seas — I mean –“

  • You know, according to law schools, law students who make it in to even the lower-rank schools are among the top 10 percent of their college graduating class. So even if they’re assholes, like most lawyers are (having gone to law school for a year before realizing the only reason to put up with it was to become a millionaire, and the only way to do it was to be nice to the assholes – who are a higher percentage of the class than the normal number of assholes in the overall population), they’re supposed to at least be intelligent assholes.

    But then there’s Hinderaker and the rest of the quarterwits at PowerLine – who all like to make a point of being lawyers – and Instaputz (can you imagine the kind of lawyers that graduate from a law school that would hire him?),not to mention the rest of the Bushites like Gonzales, Yoo, Adington and the others (not to mention the entire membership of the Federalist Society), and you can certainly see that Blackstone was right when he said “the law sharpens the mind by narrowing it.” How these guys ever graduated in the top 10 percent from anything more than Southeast Texas State Teacher’s College is beyoooooooonnnnnd me.

    Methinks the law school propaganda about who goes is about as worthwhile as the public opinion poll Ass-rocket cites.

  • I always wondered what happened to all the drugs Limbaugh was buying. If he took them all, he’d be dead. I guess now we know where the excess are going.

  • What I want to know, is what in the hell you have to say around here to get your comment deleted. I have dropped more F bombs then I care to remember.

  • angry young man,

    Is your quote the Dennis Hopper character speaking in the movie “Apocalypse Now” about Colonel Kurtz?

    Do yourself justice and add a link.

  • Keep re-arranging those deck chairs Mr. Hindrocket.* My favourite is his dismissal of the [more] unfavourable polls because they appear to be flawed, without addressing what exactly makes them flawed. But then I already know: It isn’t the methodology (which I doubt he understands), it is the result.

    Mr. SexMissle* doesn’t like the results, therefore they must be wrong. Typical ShrubWit approach to anything, be it the situation in sagging polls, Iraq or global warming. Clap harder!

    tAiO

    *If you haven’t been to PowerLine, it is worth the trip just to check out ButtLauncher’s avatar.

  • Bush is holding as steady as his drinkin’ hand.

    My favorite quote by Dennis Hopper came in a commercial, “And I don’t sleep that much.” which means nothing unless you know about Hopper’s persona.

    I think I’ll put Apocalypse Now on the player tonight.

  • From time to time, I follow (often closely) the Ramussen Report’s “Bush approval poll.” I can NOT confidently say that Rasmussen doesn’t “cook” their polling. Rasmussen has a history of being one of the most favorable of poll to Bush. There are times that a bad Bush “trend” will unexplainedly dissipate or the numbers will “jump” positively for Bush. Rasmussen claims to “recalibrate their polling from time to time to account for shifts in party identification”; that seems quite a opportunity to skew the polling.

    This isn’t the answer. Rasmussen bounces around because they put it out daily, and have much smaller sample sizes in order to accomplish that. If you are looking at Rasmussen, a three- or five-day moving average is the only way to do it. That they are the most favorable poll to Bush is not because they’re in the tank; it’s because different sampling methodologies and different question wordings will produce different answers. Someone has to have the methodolgy that’s most favorable to Bush, and Rasmussen is it.

    Charles Franklin, of the University of Wisconsin, has a blog that analyzes poling.data. One of the things he does is to use local regression to get a value for the average of all the polls. His trend line currently estimates 33.2% approval for Bush. Yes, there have been numbers in the twenties, but these appear to be outlier results from polls least favorable to Bush. That’ll happen, which is one of the reasons to throw everything together and estimate.

  • Scott W (#14) asked: “What I want to know, is what in the hell you have to say around here to get your comment deleted. I have dropped more F bombs then I care to remember.”

    F-bombs have nothing to do with it. You have to be the Scientologist White Supremacist who has been trolling here for the past two weeks, using what I understand are several out-of-country computer IPs to get around the IP banning our dear Carpetbagger keeps nailing him with. Some psychopaths are “over-persistent.” Too bad mommy doesn’t go down in the basement and remove his computer.

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