Posts Tagged ‘polling’

The headline of a London Telegraph story reads: Barack Obama sees worst poll rating drop in 50 years.

That’s pretty ominous and fatalistic sounding, but there are a few details that make it somewhat misleading.  Here is the bottom line of the story:

Gallup recorded an average daily approval rating of 53 per cent for Mr Obama for the third quarter of the year, a sharp drop from the 62 per cent he recorded from April.

His current approval rating – hovering just above the level that would make re-election an uphill struggle – is close to the bottom for newly-elected president. Mr Obama entered the White House with a soaring 78 per cent approval rating.

 Yes, he is taking on water, no question, but when there is an artificially high expectation, the grind of Washington, D.C. is going to take a heavy toll.  Obama’s election was a watershed moment in U.S. history: we elected the first African-American in our history.  That’s a big deal, and with his campaign of “hope and change” most people’s expectations were very high.  Even many voters who cast a ballot against Obama had high expectations.  Think about it, his approval was at 78 percent on inauguration day.  That is a remarkably high number for a President when there isn’t a national crisis that rallies the nation (e.g. Bush 41’s approval in the 90’s after Desert Storm and Bush 43’s approval in the 90’s after 9-11)

So, of course Obama’s numbers were going to come down.  Yes, he certainly had something to do with his own slide in popularity. The American people are very uneasy with the rush of government involvement in huge swaths of our economy (stimulus, auto bailout, bank bailout and now the march toward a government takeover of health care) and the incredible amount of money that is being shoved out the door to pay for all this.  Remember when Clinton was President and we (read Republicans) were screaming bloody murder over a budget deficit of $300 billion?  That’s chump change.  This year the U.S. budget deficit is an eye-popping $1.75 TRILLION.  That’s almost SIX TIMES larger than Clinton’s deficits.

So, yes, Obama has seen huge fallout in his numbers, one, because he started so high, and two because he is trying to too much too fast and Democrats in Congress are not helping him.

“The only poll that counts is the one taken on Election Day.”  It’s a line used thousands of times a year, and I’m pretty sure it was first used by the late Stephen Shadegg – campaign extraordinaire and father of Arizona Congressman John Shadegg.

So the latest poll to pop up, showing Goddard wiping the floor against any Republican in next year’s Governor’s race, should be taken with a grain of salt… or better yet, with a salt lick.

Here is the totality of what you need to know about the efficacy of the poll:

“The pollster is known as a Democratic firm, and the survey was automated and done via telephone.” (emphasis added)

So this was an autodial, robo-call?  It is a known fact that Republicans have less tolerance for automated phone calls than Democrats (ok, maybe not a “known fact” but anecdotally, it takes more calls to Republican households than Democrat households to get the same number of respondents on a robo-call survey – trust me, I’ve seen it.)

Given that this was an autodialed robo-call, (which would cost all of about $500 to conduct) I find it a little surprising that Arizona Republic reporter Matt Benson would write on it – and wait until the 11^th graph of the story to indicate that it was a robo-call survey. 

I’ll make Matt a deal – I’ll commission a robo-call survey of 600 Arizonan’s and I’ll give him the exclusive to write the story – which I expect to be as long as this one.

You’ve got my number Matt.