More on Gibbs and Gallup
Emily Swanson | December 10, 2009
Topics: Barack Obama , Daily Trackers , Gallup , Gallup Daily , Robert Gibbs , Trend lines
Our own Kristen Soltis and Charles Franklin have more on Robert Gibbs' verbal scuffle with Gallup posted at Politico Arena.
Here's how I think of Gibb's dismissal of the Gallup numbers: you're driving a car and the gas tank is almost empty. Are you really addressing the issue if you assert that the gas gauge is unreliable, smash the glass and move the needle back to "full"?There's a big difference between bad data and data that brings bad news. While daily tracking polls have limitations, Gallup's numbers have actually been some of the more favorable ones for Obama. Just take a look at the work by Charles Franklin that shows how each pollster's numbers line up against the averages; Gallup's daily tracking is almost always above the Pollster.com average. Gibbs may pretend he doesn't care about these numbers, but I guarantee folks in Obama's political shop do. It's one thing to criticize a poll's methodology, it's another to dismiss it just because you don't like what it says.
Gibbs' "EKG" analogy for President Obama's approval level is typical rhetoric of any administration in trouble with the public. First imply the polls are "all over the place" and then assert that the president doesn't govern based on polls. Dems and Reps alike reach a point in their approval ratings when they trot out these chestnuts.Sadly, both assertions are false and administrations that truly ignore public opinion are in more trouble than they know.
Day to day variation in individual polls such as Gallup and Rasmussen are meaningless because daily change is virtually never outside the margin of error for the polls. Opinion almost never moves dramatically over a day or two (9/11 being a dramatic but rare exception). It is instead the long trend in approval that matters, and this is common across all polling on Obama. Some polls run hot and others cold on his approval (see this) , but all are trending down and that is the important and reliable opinion finding that the administration must pay attention too.
For more, see our previous posts by David Winston and myself.
By Emily Swanson | December 10, 2009 3:48 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)
