Bush Job Approval Update

This week brought a slew of new national surveys, but the trend in the Bush approval rating appears to be essentially flat since mid-June. 

The new surveys are from Gallup/USA Today (story, results, Gallup reports), NBC News/Wall Street Journal (story, results), CBS/New York Times (CBS story, Mideast results, Bush/Congress results, NYT story, results), Diageo/Hotline/Financial Dynamics (release, results, slides).  The table below shows the results from this week as compared to comparable surveys conducted in mid-june, also including results from automated pollster Rasmussen.  This nearly apples-to-apples comparison shows two slightly up, two slightly down, all within sampling error and the overall average unchanged (38% approve, 58% disapprove).

As usual, Professor Franklin takes a far more sophisticated and graphical approach and reaches the same conclusion.  The direction of the most recent trend depends on how sensitive he sets his regression model to catch short term changes.  His standard and more stable blue trend line shown below (which did not include the latest Hotline poll) shows the recent increase in Bush’s approval rating continuing but flattening, while the more sensitive red line shows it down slightly since mid-June:

Franklin’s updates the chart to include the Hotline numbers and concludes:

[Bush’s job approval] looks like it has been pretty stable since June 11, despite three polls that reached 40% or more. While my standard blue trend sees some slight continuing increase, the more responsive red line estimator sees flat and a very slight recent decline. But I mean VERY slight. None of these estimates is clear enough to be willing to declare a trend has begun either way.