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May 11, 2007

Bush Approval: AP at 35%, Trend at 34.8%

By Charles Franklin

A new AP/Ipsos poll taken 5/7-9/07 is out today with approval at 35% and disapproval at 61%. With this addition my approval trend estimate stands at 34.8%.

There is not much to discuss here. The approval trend estimate has remained in the 33-35% range since January, and is still there. Once or twice we've bumped into those limits, only to promptly return to the range. At the moment we see a slight upward trend, but earlier this week saw a slight DOWNward trend. So I'd say the evidence so far gives no reason to think approval is doing anything other than remaining flat, with poll to poll variation bumping the trend up or down briefly.

Everything looks pretty normal in the diagnostics below, so I'll not add any more commentary. See the earlier posts on approval this week for more analysis, all of which holds true in light of today's AP poll.

By Charles Franklin on May 11, 2007 8:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

POLL: InsiderAdvantage SC Primary

By Eric Dienstfrey

A new InsiderAdvantage/Majority Opinion automated survey of registered voters in South Carolina (conducted 5/8 through 5/9) finds:

• Among 500 Democrats, Sen. Barack Obama runs at 31%, Sen. Hillary Clinton runs at 27%, and former Sen. John Edwards runs at 16% in a statewide primary.

• Among 500 Republicans, former Mayor Rudy Giuliani leads former Speaker Newt Gingrich (22% to 15%) in a statewide primary; former Gov. Mitt Romney trails at 10%, Sen. John McCain at 9%, and former Sen. Fred Thompson at 8%.

By Eric Dienstfrey on May 11, 2007 8:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Iraq War: Losing or Lost?

By Mark Blumenthal

Thanks to Washington Post blogger Dan Froomkin for tipping me off to this exchange from yesterday's press briefing by presidential press secretary Tony Snow that leads indirectly to some fundamental questions regarding public opinion and the Iraq War:

Q Tony, you mentioned the polls, and talked about the Republican support. All the polls also show that big majorities of the American public do not support the war. Have you heard the President talk about how difficult it is to fight a war or prosecute a war without the public's support?

MR. SNOW: The President understands the importance of public support. What's also interesting is that you see numbers coming up again on, do you think we're winning or do you think -- for instance, a pretty strong majority now, when asked, do you think we're losing, say no. That's an important data point. When it talks about, would you like the Americans to succeed, the answer is yes. So you always have mixed feelings.

[Emphasis added]

Is Snow right? Have the numbers really "come up" that much? Snow is presumably thinking about two nearly identical results asked on two recently released national polls:

• CNN/ORC (5/4-6, n=1,208 adults): "Do you think that the U.S. war in Iraq is lost, or don't you think so?"

41% lost
55% don't think so
4% don't know

• Quinnipiac (4/25-5/1, n=1,166 registered voters): "Do you think that the U.S. war in Iraq is lost, or don't you think so?"

41% lost
49 don't think so
11% unsure

Putting aside a quibble about whether those results amount to a "strong majority," they certainly show more Americans rejecting than accepting the notion that the war "is lost." The pollsters asked these questions after Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid told reporters on April 19, "I believe ... that this war is lost, and this surge is not accomplishing anything."

As first glance, these new results certainly seem like a big change from a question traced by the ABC News/Washington Post poll: "All told, do you think the United States is winning or losing the war in Iraq?" As recently as January, a nearly two-to-one margin (57% to 29%) believed the U.S was "losing," a five point increase in the "losing" percentage since December:

So have opinions on the war changed really that much in just a few months? I doubt it. The more likely explanation is that, in the context of the Iraq War, some Americans are interpreting the "losing" and "is lost" very differently.

Consider the most recent results of questions tracked by the Pew Research Center and CBS News:

• Pew Research Center (4/18-22, n=1,508 adults): "How is the U.S. Military effort going in Iraq?"

7% very well
31% fairly well
34% not too well
25% not well at all
3% don't know

• CBS News (4/9-12, n=994 adults): "How would you say things are going for the U.S. in its efforts to bring stability and order to Iraq? Would you say things are going very well, somewhat well, somewhat badly, or very badly?"

2% very well
29% somewhat well
30% somewhat badly
36% very badly
3% unsure

So both organizations, in surveys conducted just before and just after Reid's remarks, show the same general pessimism reflected in the January ABC/Washington Post "is losing" results. By roughly two-to-one margins, Americans say the War effort is going "badly" or "not well."

More important, while both CBS and Pew show a slight up-tick (roughly six percentage points) in March and April as compared to December through February, the long term trend has been to greater pessimism. And the current overall results essentially match the reading of the January ABC/Post poll about the direction of the war. The following chart shows the results for the Pew survey. The CBS trend data (available via Polling Report) shows the same pattern.

Again, my hunch is that Americans interpret the words "is lost" very differently from "is losing," though the bigger issue is whether this semantic distinction has political consequences. A lot of conservative commentators seem to think so, given their reaction to Reid's remarks. Tony Snow is likely right that most Americans want our military to succeed in Iraq. However, if the seemingly contradictory results cited above are about a subset of American who believe that the war is not winnable yet perhaps not yet completely "lost," then we have a distinction without much difference.

Consider, for example the recent NBC/Wall Street Journal Poll (4/20-23, n=1,004 adults) that reported 55% saying it is "not possible" to achieve the U.S. goal of "achieving victory in Iraq." Now recall that academics that have studied public support for wars past and present - including one that has been advising the Bush White House - believe that "prospective evaluations of mission success" are the key to continuing support for the Iraq War.

All of this suggests some things my media pollster colleagues might want to test on future surveys. First, the issue of whether my hunch is right regarding the meaning of "losing" vs. "is lost." A survey could confirm this easily enough with an experiment that divides the sample randomly for a side-by-side test of two questions:

• Do you think that the U.S. war in Iraq is lost, or don't you think so?
• Do you think the United States is winning or losing the war in Iraq?

It might also be useful to try to get individual respondents to decide whether "lost" or "is losing" better describes their opinion. In other words, ask if they believe the U.S. "has won," "is winning," "is losing" or "has lost" the Iraq war. Do those who believe the U.S. "is losing" in Iraq but has not yet "lost" see any hope of winning in the future?

UPDATE: Professor Franklin sends along a slightly improved version of my "how are things going" chart of Pew Research Center data that adds the very similar results from CBS News and plots a smoothed regression line through the points. Click the image below for the easier-to-read full size version.

By Mark Blumenthal on May 11, 2007 6:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (51) | TrackBacks (0)

POLL: AP-Ipsos Approvals

By Eric Dienstfrey

A new AP-Ipsos national survey (story, results) of 1,000 adults (conducted 5/7 through 5/9) finds:

• 35% approve of the job President Bush is doing; 62% disapprove.

• 35% approve of the job Congress is doing; 60% disapprove.

• 45% approve of the job Speaker Nancy Pelosi is going; 42% disapprove.

By Eric Dienstfrey on May 11, 2007 4:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

May 10, 2007

Even Polls About Baseball...

By Mark Blumenthal

Let's take a break from political polling controversies and focus on something of hopefully broader interest. A controversy involving a poll on baseball.

Larry Brown, who blogs MLB Clubhouse on AOL, posted scathing criticism a few days ago of a poll on Barry Bonds released over the weekend by ESPN and ABC News (hat tip to alert reader David Pinto of Baseball Musings). Brown sees evidence of a cooked poll:

If anyone actually bothered to read the poll, it says an oversample of 203 African-Americans were questioned out of 799 baseball fans. Considering only 12.8% of the population is African-American (according to the U.S. Census Bureau), and potentially a far lower percentage of baseball fans are African-American, I would say that the 25% mark of African-Americans used to conduct the study is designed to mislead the public and generate racially charged results.

Not exactly.

Pollsters sometimes "oversample" a survey sub-population in order to increase the reliability of the results for that group. More interviews means less potential random sampling error. Before tabulating the data for the full sample, however, they "weight" back the oversample its correct proportion with the larger sample.

I checked with Gary Langer, the director of polling at ABC News, and he provided a few additional details. The ABC Polling Unit started with a nationally representative sample of 1,803 randomly selected adults interviewed between March 29 and April 4. Of these, 660 described themselves as baseball fans (on the survey's first question). Of these, 64 were African-American.

The pollsters wanted a bigger and more reliable sampling of African-Americans. So they continued calling from April 5 to April 22 and interviewed another 476 randomly sampled African Americans, of whom 139 were self-described baseball fans.

Thus (adding everything up), the ESPN/ABC survey interviewed 799 baseball fans, including 203 among African Americans. Before tabulating the data, however, they weighted the combined sample of 2,279 (the original 1,803 plus the oversample of 476 blacks) in a way that reduced the proportion of African-Americans to its correct value as determined by the U.S. Census.**

This practice is not at all unusual. The intent is to generate more statistically reliable results by race, not -- as Brown puts it -- to "generate racially charged results."

One thing I will say in Larry Brown's defense. The two-sentence methodology blurb at the end of the ESPN was not entirely clear. For one thing, it said that the total sample of 799 baseball fans included "an oversample of 203 African-Americans." Technically, it included an oversample that increased the sample of African American to 203 interviews.

More important - and here is a message for all who write poll releases - it included the term "oversample" without any description of the weighting procedure. A sentence like this one (quoting from Gary Langer's email reply to me) would help reduce the confusion:

The combined sample (1,803 gen pop, oversample of 476 blacks) was weighted to Census norms, reducing the proportion of African-Americans to its correct population value.

**The US Census reports African-Americans as 11% of all adults. Browns 12.% statistic is the percentage African Americans among the full population, including children.

P.S.: And speaking of ABC Polling Director Gary Langer, the site Freakonomics posted some intriguing comments from Langer yesterday on the subject of whether polls have historically overstated support for minority candidates. It includes this accurate and well-deserved compliment from Freakonomics author Steven Dubner:

Gary is a force of nature. He not only runs ABC's polling but has become the network's top cop for keeping bad data off the air, vetting many of the surveys, studies, and polls that producers and reporters plan to use in their stories. I don't know of any other news organization that has such a resource. I am sure he is occasionally a thorn in the side of a reporter who's dying to cite some sensationalistic study from some biased organization ... but as consumers of news, we are all the better for it.

By Mark Blumenthal on May 10, 2007 10:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)