It’s Monday morning, and I’m still reeling from a week of trying to balance blogging, Passover travel and the ever present day job. But here is a quick roundup of things worth reading this morning from the world of political polling:
- The Hotline’s (subscription only) “Wake-Up Call ” is reporting this morning on a press release from Gallup that shows President Bush’s job approval rating returning “to last month’s all-time low”: 36% approve, 59% disapprove. Presumably, we will see more from Gallup later today.
- Gallup’s David Moore has also posted some free-for-today analysis on recent trends in opinion on the Iraq War, particularly their measures of whether Americans consider the war a mistake and whether they view it winnable. Read the analysis now, before it disappears behind the Gallup subscription wall, although the data from the April 7-9 Gallup survey is available to all via the Polling Report. For background, see my earlier post on the ongoing academic debate behind these numbers.
- A front page story this morning by the Washington Post’s Charles Babington (with an assist by MP friend Chris Cillizza) asks the $64,000 question with respect to the 2006 mid-term elections: Will “intense and widespread opposition to President Bush” as measured in recent surveys translate into “a turnout advantage over Republicans for the first time in recent years?” Even GOP pollster Glen Bolger seems to agree that:
“Angry voters turn out and vote their anger . . . Democrats will have an easier time of getting out their vote because of their intense disapproval of the president. That means we Republicans are going to have to bring our ‘A’ turnout game in November.”
- On the Post‘s op-ed page, Polling Director Richard Morin tabulates recent survey data by state and finds that:
States that were once reliably red are turning pink. Some are no longer red but a sort of powder blue. In fact, a solid majority of residents in states that President Bush carried in 2004 now disapprove of the job he is doing as president . . . According to the latest Post-ABC News poll, Bush’s overall job approval rating now averages 43 percent in the states where he beat Democratic nominee John Kerry two years ago, while 57 percent disapprove of his performance.
Morin’s analysis confirms the trend in evidence in the thematic map originally created a few weeks ago by this DailyKos diarist using the 50-state data from SurveyUSA (hat tip to DemFromCT and Andrew Sullivan):
