Good News, Bad News & The Blogosphere

Legacy blog posts Polling & the Blogosphere President Bush

The last few days have been busy in terms of new national polls released, yet the commentary on those polls in the blogosphere strikes me as typical.  Partisans on both sides (though mostly on the liberal side this time) seized at the several different polls that appear to tell different stories, when the reality — as usual — appears to fall somewhere in the middle.

The gist is that a new survey released yesterday by USAToday/Gallup (story, Gallup report) featured yet another “new low” of 31% for the Bush job approval rating (down from 34% on their survey a week earlier).  Meanwhile, the second survey released by the new CNN/ORC partnership (story, data) showed a slight increase in the Bush job rating, from 32% on a survey conducted two week ago to 34% now.   Of course, neither of these changes were large enough to be statistically significant, although both the Gallup and ORC surveys were conducted on the same dates (May 5-7).   

Meanwhile, yet another survey released by Fox News late last week — this one of registered voters rather than adults (story, results) — showed a Bush’s job approval rating “rebound[ing] slightly” to 38% from a “record low” of 33% two weeks ago.  This change does appear statistically significant, although the job rating on the previous poll (33%) represented a big drop from surveys conducted by Fox in early April (36%) and mid March (39%).

What caught MP’s eye was the way the blogosphere reacted to the 31% result from Gallup.   Not surprisingly, according to USAToday “On Deadline” feature, the Gallup 31% result was “the most-discussed news among bloggers” yesterday afternoon.  And a quick check of that Technorati listing they cited shows commentary on most of the well known liberal blogs and news sites:   TalkingPointsMemo, DailyKos, Atrios, MyDD, Huffington Post, TheLeftCoaster and DemocraticUnderground, among others.   

Not surprisingly, the conservative blogs had little if anything to say about the latest Gallup poll. A quick check shows nothing, for example on Instapundit, Michelle Malkin, Powerline, Captain’s Quarters, Little Green Footballs (although I make no claim of having done a truly exhaustive search).   Polipundit — a site that often features scathing criticism of mainstream media polling — was the one exception I found. 

On the other hand, I was a bit surprised at how little attention the “rebound” numbers in the Fox poll received from conservative web sites.  Technorati shows very few posts that linked to either the Fox story or the results on any blogs, left or right.  Two prominent conservative sites — Captain’s Quarters and Polipundit — linked to the Fox poll, but so did the liberal site MyDD.
 

Nonetheless, the pattern is not uncommon.  Partisan political blogs seem to shower attention on polls that show the most dramatic “good news” for their side, and tend to ignore polls showing possibly contradictory results.  The relatively sparse attention paid to the Fox News survey is probably evidence of a general wariness of polls among conservative blogs a period where all seem to bring bad news for the President (a point made vehemently, if indirectly, in this post by Polipundit’s DJ Drummond). 

Yet as is also typical, the reality of the change in the Bush job approval rating over the last week or so is neither as dramatically dire as the Gallup result suggests nor as hopeful as the apparent “rebound” in the Fox poll.  Check the latest update to Professor Franklin’s graphic (reproduced below) and his commentary yesterday (here, here and here).  Gallup’s 31% is on the low side of the usual cloud of variation, Fox’s 38% is on the high side.  The long steady decline in the Bush rating continues.  Collectively, the polls released over the last few days leave the rate of descent in Franklin’s trend line looking more or less as it did two weeks ago

Mark Blumenthal

Mark Blumenthal is political pollster with deep and varied experience across survey research, campaigns, and media. The original "Mystery Pollster" and co-creator of Pollster.com, he explains complex concepts to a multitude of audiences and how data informs politics and decision-making. A researcher and consultant who crafts effective questions and identifies innovative solutions to deliver results. An award winning political journalist who brings insights and crafts compelling narratives from chaotic data.