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As goes Rasmussen . .

by

. . . so go the other polls.

The pollster left-wingers love to hate was the first to show Obama’s approval rating dipping below 50%.   Now the latest CBS News survey, one which normally tilts toward the Democrats, shows only 46% of Americans approving of how the president was handling his job.

Why does that 46% figure look familiar?  Oh yeah, it’s the popular vote percentage John McCain drew in the 2008 presidential election.

Oh, and, the CBS number is consistent with Rasmussen.  And Quinnipiac.  And NBC.  And ARG.

Comments

  1. I’ve said for weeks in here when arguing with the couple liberals still around, that Independent Rasmussen is not only accurate but shows leading edge trends. When you don’t have an agenda, you can give people the raw results. All other polls want to word their poll questions to protect the Dems and the President. All other polls change their sampling percentages to protect the liberals. Rasmussen has a list of Senate seats and GOvernors houses up for grab as well. Not good news for the liberal Democrats. The racist ones and non racist ones.
    http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/obama_administration/daily_presidential_tracking_poll

  2. That Rassmussen was the first to have Obama below 50% could just mean that Rassmussen skews somewhat towards supporting conservatives. The public’s views change with time, as different events unfold, and in the case of Obama, they public generally becomes less supportive of him, as he keeps pushing for socialism, so when Rassmussen had him at 47%, he could have actually been at 51%, but now that more stuff has happened, he could be at 47%, and Rassmussen could have him lower.

  5. “Why does that 46% figure look familiar?”

    Slow down cowboy.
    Obama has 46% approval in this poll, versus 41% disapproval.

    That, if you aint so hot at math, means more approve than disapprove. In fact, 46 and 41 equals 87. In elections, we report percentages that add up to 100%

    What happens if we take 46/87 approval and 41/8\7 disapproval, and normalize that over 100?

    Comes out to 53% approval, 47% disapproval.

    Why do those figures look familiar?

    Oh yeah, it’s the popular vote percentages from the last election.

  6. Oh, and before Dan accuses me of not exactly addressing exactly the point he was making, let me do so.

    Dan’s thesis here seems to be that the following two polls give basically the same result.

    Ras: Obama approval – 46% Disapproval – 53%
    CBS: Obama approval – 46% Disapproval – 41%

    I will leave the choice of adjectives to the reader.

  7. Tano, and your point is? No, I never said (as you implied in #6) that the polls give the same result. I merely showed how the low approval Obama registered in Rasmussen’s poll tracked with that in other recent polls.

    It is interesting to note that the other polls allow for greater levels of “undecideds” than does Rasmussen, but it’s silly to try to normalize. In elections, most pollsters tend to assume those undecideds (or refuse to state) break against the incumbent, thus lowering Obama’s approval even further.

    The point remains that Rasmussen has a pretty accurate read on Obama’s declining approval. And fewer than 50% of Americans approve of the job the president is doing.

    And when polls register this low an approval for an incumbent president, his party tends to suffer in midterm elections.

  8. “The point remains that Rasmussen has a pretty accurate read on Obama’s declining approval.”

    No Dan, that is not THE point, it is YOUR point. MY point, (and, I do believe, THE point) is that Rasmussen remains a gross outlier on the GOP side, and that Obama’s “declining approval” is a myth. Obama’s approval has remained almost completely unchanged since mid-August. Oh, maybe a point or two decline, but not much more than that. Despite the 8,000 or so rightwing news stories about “plummeting” approval or things like that.

    For example – CNN poll, late August, Obama approval – 53/45. Today, the numbers are 51/48. In the interim they have been as high as 58, as low as 48 – so fluctuating around the election night numbers.

    If there is a story here, it is that he seems to have a pretty solid floor.

    “And when polls register this low an approval for an incumbent president, his party tends to suffer in midterm elections.”

    Ah, if only the midterms were next week!

  9. Yeah, if only the midterms were next week, then you’d see. Guess you do like to suffer, given how Charlie Cook keeps painting an increasingly dismal picture for the Dems.

    But, while you twist, turn and gyrate this way and that, every time we see Obama’s declining approval, Rasmussen has a record for accuracy that even Nate Silver (liberal polling analyst) acknowledges. He got the ’04 election right and ’08 and the NJ gubernatorial race.

    Then, go look at the averages on pollster.com or at RealClearPolitics. Yeah, the decline has not been as severe since August as it was up until then, but it continues, with an occasional uptick. Meanwhile, his disapproval has been on a steady upswing.

    Fine, Tano, live in your world where Obama’s numbers haven’t changed since August 24th at 4:37 PM, but you continue to show you have as much command on reality as you do an understanding of conservative ideas.

    Obama has a floor? We’ll see. I saw a number showing that 51% of Americans still attribute the sour economy to George W. Bush. That’s the lowest I’ve seen it. The more that former president fades from people’s memory, the lower that number will go and the more people will attribute the economic malaise to the incumbent, then his numbers will fall even further.

    That is, unless the jobs prospects brightens–and even Obama’s own economists seem skeptical of that outcome.

  10. Now Dan, Tano’s very good at hiding from questions:

    So Tano, ever going to answer heliptrope’s challenge?

    or maybe NDT’s debunking of your health care talking points here?

    Or his exposing you as a liar (again) here?

    Or here?

    Or no rebuttal of this montage of “Tano gets his ass handed to him” here?

    Or how about helitropes smacking of you here.

    Think I’ll just save this and add to it as needed. Just post it in threads where Tano comes in, reads his script and leaves. This way any new readers can know he’s pointless, and save some time.

  11. Oh Tano, Tano, Tano…How many times do we have to explain this to you?

    You are comparing apples to oranges and claiming they prove your lemon is a peach.

    It doesn’t work that way.

    Obama had a 52.8 % approval rating among VOTERS on election day.

    VOTERS now disapprove of Obama by 53% while only 46% approve.

    But since VOTERS have turned against Obama, you now want to disingenuously compare how VOTERS approved of him on election day, to how “all national ADULTS” approve of him today. (national adults being a group that includes illegal immigrants, drug addicts, felons, Jay-Walk-All-Stars, and other stalwart supporters of the Democrat party who are either not legally allowed to vote, recognize they are too stupid to vote, or both)

    The hilarious thing is even among ADULTS his ratings have plummeted. According even to Gallup, at best, only half of your Jay-Walk-All-Stars approve of him. (its been fluctuating between 47-51% since the beginning of December). CBS has him at 46%, Quinnepiac has him at 46%.

    The only one who is still polling VOTERS, the group most likely to match election results, is Rasmussen. And more VOTERS DISAPPROVE of Obama now (53%) than voted for him on election day (52.8%)

    No wonder Obama is still pushing for amnesty for illegal immigrants! He desperately needs their votes!

  12. AE,

    You seem to be under some sort of delusion. That maybe Scott Rasmussen held an actual election the other day, and then reported the numbers. Because you have this silly notion that he is reporting approval numbers from VOTERS.

    Sorry, but the group he reports from are not VOTERS. They are, rather, a group that he handpicked to conform with what he imagines the voters might look like. That is the generous interpretation.

    A “likely voter” screen is, at best, a guess, a hypothesis as to who will vote and who will not vote in a given election. Most all polling firms use these screens in the month or two before an election, because it is almost always true that the people who actually vote are a non-random subset of the general public. But how do you decide who will vote and who will not?

    You ask certain questions – the most obvious being – do you intend to vote? But there are others, more subtle, that can be used to reveal underlying intent. But the reason most firms do not do this at other times, is that there is no election to ask about. What would you ask someone today? Do you intend to vote next November? That is a meaningless question because the answers you get have nothing to do with what people will actually do, 11 months from now.

    So what is Rasmussen’s “likely voter” thing all about, given that he has no direct way of ascertaining who will and who will not vote, and there isn’t any voting opportunity coming up in the near future?

    And, as an aside, this doesn’t even address the more fundamental question of what the relevance is, for a presidential job approval poll, of filtering out supposed non-voters. An approval poll is meant to register the moods and attitudes of citizens as a whole. It has nothing particularly to do with any looming election.

    But leaving that aside, what is Ras’s filter all about? He makes a set of assumptions about demographic groups – old, young, black, white etc etc. and arbitrarily assigns probabilities that these groups might vote, if there were an election looming. In other words, instead of simply doing a random sample of citizens and reporting how they feel about the issue, he does his sample, and then THROWS OUT the responses from X number of people because he doesn’t think they count.

    That is what a likely voter screen, done nearly a year before an election, amounts to. The exact parameters of this screeen – what the probabilities that each group would vote, and thus deserves to be counted – is totally arbitrary, and could be set to any value that Ras feels like setting – or that would give him a result that he would like to publicize. Do you know what those probabilities are? Does anyone?

    This is data fudging of the most blatant type.

  13. Dan,

    “I saw a number showing that 51% of Americans still attribute the sour economy to George W. Bush. ”

    The Quinnipiac poll today shows 55% on that question, versus 20% blaming Obama. So there is a long way to go.

    But I do agree – if the economy sucks all year, then the Dems will have a real problem. If 2010 is a year of falling unemployment, and solid economic growth, then the forecasts we hear now about the midterms will prove to be meaningless.

  14. Spin, spin, spin Tardo, Spin

    Meanwhile, the same Quinnipiac poll that you just cited as authoritative has Obama’s approval at 45% among registered voters.

    Now tell us all how drug addicts, felons, illegal immigrants and people who aren’t even registered to vote that Gallup polls are a better benchmark than registered voters.

    By the way, at the same time you are trying to discredit Rasmussen because he polls people who say they are likely to vote, you are making an ass out of yourself because Gallup and the others you are so desperately cling to, USE LIKELY VOTERS TOO when the election is near and they want their results to more accurately reflect election day.

    You really are going to hurt yourself with these contortions, but in the meantime they are very amusing.

  16. Tano accuses others of lying, though his own lies are documented.

    He accuses Rasmussen of using the same methodology that other pollsters use when they want accurate results.

    Hypocracy, thy name is Tano.

  17. Oh, Tano, since you mentioned normalizing figures and CNN polls, how about handling this one: that left-leaning pollster found that 48 percent of Americans considered Obama’s first year a failure, 47 called it a success. We normalize that to find that 50.5% of Americans consider him a failure so far, that’s up from just 46% who likely assumed he would fail by voting against him in ’08.

  18. “Gallup and the others … USE LIKELY VOTERS TOO when the election is near ”

    I know, that is what I said. IF there is an election looming in a week or two, and you ask someone whether they intend to vote, their answer usually tracks pretty closely with the truth of whether they actually will or will not vote. Or if they say they are not really sure of who the candidates are, or where they stand on the major issue of the day, then you have a good reason to suspect they are not likely to vote. Using a likely voter screen at that point, near an election, tends to work out ok.

    Doing so when there is no election imminent is meaningless. It is an excuse to filter the response pool any way you want to.

  19. ‘Tano, if only 20% are blaming Obama for the economic problems today, then wow, he hasn’t even begun to reach the floor”

    Not quite sure I see your point Dan. I am not claiming that he has some absolute floor that he could never fall below. If he makes a series of decisions that cause the economy, or the war or other factors to go really badly, then of course he can find new lows.

    But in the dynamic of 2009 continuing into this year – given the reality of how the economy has gone and other issues have developed – and given the rabid over the top opposition of the GOP, he seems to be rather resistant to falling below the levels that he has been hovering around for the last 5 months.

  20. “pollster found that 48 percent of Americans considered Obama’s first year a failure, 47 called it a success”

    That was the exact same poll that I cited above, Dan. The CNN poll that found his job approval to be 51/48. Here is the PDF

    So the negative response in both questions is the same, but apparently 4% of the population approve of the job he is doing but consider the first year somewhat of a failure. Go figure.

    Another interesting finding. 46% think he is too liberal. 52% think he is just about right, or not liberal enough.
    Once again, those numbers look kinda familiar?

  21. Wow, Tano, you really are obsessed, spending so much time on my blog to tell us how popular Obama really is. Guess if he’s so popular, he’ll soon be cutting TV and radio spots for the embattled Democratic Senatorial nominee in a state he won with 61% of the vote.

  23. You got to love a liberal Dem who doesn’t think they have any troubles.
    No problems in NJ, VA, MA. Harry Reid is doing fine. No problems in NV.
    hehe
    Why is it Obama looks now like he’s going to cry all the time. How come he won’t have a presser with the state run media.
    Yep, everythings fine in the liberals world. hehe
    Can Tano step and fetch us all a cup of coffee? I’ve always wondered if Tano was a negro? Does he have a negro dialect? Just some questions I’m sure B Clinton or H Reid would ask so…..
    hehe