Pollster.com

The 2012 numbers seem more likely than Rasmussen's lastest BS. Notice the approval number isn't great either so please don't anybody cry bias because PPP are Dems.

Well everyone knows polling for 2012 president is nonsense at this point.

Whats notable in this poll is the approval, 50, the same as Rassmussen has him today. And according to PPP he istrending downward in all groups of support.

Maybe PPP (D) is up to soemthing, who knows, but if I were an Obama supporter, I would stick with the ABC/Post (D) poll for today!

I go with them all in their totality. The average is clearly mid to high 50s. Seems to be more likely.

Gallup has Obama at 61% today... but, hey, don't mind then... they are a schlock organization anyways, right?

Interesting. It is obviously on the high and adults as opposed to likely voters but they have the track record going back forever. So who are we to believe?

I go with Rasmussen. Not. I mean his state polls leaned to McCain throughout the year. He had McCain leading on the economy several times very late on in the cycle. Late into October he had McCain within a point in the popular vote. He had Bush approval consistently higher than everybody else by about five points (the exit poll proved this when it was about five points worse for Bush than Ras had been saying) while he now has Obama approval much lower than anybody else. This year he is the only pollster to show Repub leads on the generic ballot and negative numbers for the Sotomayor nomination.

I really don't know why anybody takes him seriously except for his final popular vote number which he now knows he has to be accurate with after he blew it in 2000 by having Bush win by double digits.

Another interesting point. The IVR firms (Ras, PPP) and the internet polls (Harris, Zogby, YouGov) all have lower numbers approving while the others with higher numbers (Gallup, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, FOX, Pew, Ipsos etc are all phone polls. Why? Discuss.

Its bias man, bias. It makes perfect sense for Rass to have numbers favorable to republicans....and hte others to have numbers favorbale to Dems....there's always the anomoly like today's PPP poll.

To me this isn't very complicated. The pollsters are trying to move public opinion their way...CNN will always favor Dems more than Rass does, Rass will always favor GOP more than CNN does....because there politcal biases are going to come into play.

If you really thin kthere is such thing as an unbias pollster, then save yourself time and jump off a bridge.

Polling is just another weapon in hte arsenol of the politcal party establishments. In other words, its all a game...unless there is an election, there is absolutely no way to determine the accuracy of a poll.

Its politics as usual...........all news outlets have a bias, tv, radio, newspapers....why do you think polling firms are any different?

Rasmussen's results may in fact be suspect (It is 2009 after all.), but the real thing that separates the two polls is sample size.

Rasmussen: 1000
PPP: 577

That PPP number is really low for a national survey. And you can see the effects of that when things are broken down by region. Obama actually sweeps all four Republicans in the South. The northeast maybe, but not the South.

As you know I don't buy that argument. Why would the Wall Street Journal fudge numbers? FOX? Gallup have been around since at least the 1940's and have the reputation that goes with that longevity. Ipsos are an independent company that businesses up and down the country use for public opinion on all manner of un-political issues. I think there is more to it than simple bias.

Good point Josh. That is low. Then again Romney may have problems in the South because of his religion. They also seem to have very few independents in their sample though the spread doesn't look completely out of whack.

NBC has been around for decades too and there is no question NBC has a left wing bias....you dems don't see bias in most forms of media the way everyone else does, so I don't blame you for not buying the argument.

You guys jmp all over Rass fo rbeing bias, then when someone like me sees the same thing in a NBC poll, then I hear how great NBC and how reputable they are.

C'mon, its a game. There's no doubt Rass is going to skew his numbers just as left leaning pollsters will do it.

Where you Dems fall short o nthis is that you fail to see that groups like CNN, NBC, ABC, etc are indeed left wing bias....most of you see them as mainstream and see Rass and Fox as the only bias news outlets, when in fact, they are all bias......................

People jump on Rasmussen because he is way out of the mainstream with his numbers. Everybody else, including NBC/WSJ, is inside the same general ballpark with Scott standing somewhere under the bleachers.

Perception, perception, perception. What you see as mainstream, cnn, nbc, abc, cbs, etc I see as left wing bias....which is why Obama's approval is not 61 where gallup or some of the networks put him and its not 50 where rass puts it, its i nthe iddle....

You will not agree with me until you come to terms that most of the media and in turn, most of these pollsters hav e aleft wing bias. If talk radio hosts start doing polls then it might balance it out, but until then there are simply many more left wing polling firms than right wing....so its easier to dismiss rasmussen as the outlier....the truth is simply somewhere probably right in the middle fo what Rass has and what some of these D firms have like cnn, etc.

But ya, you will disagree until you can admit to yourself that the bias exists in most of these "news" agencies.

Forget the news media then for the sake of argument. I guess PPP and Democracy Corps aren't allowed either because even though they generally have numbers on the low end they are alined with Democrats. No can do there then.

Harris and Zogby also trend lower. YouGov are British based so obviously they will have a "socialist European" perspective on things.

Not allowed Research 2000 because Markos pays them to conduct polls even though he has no further input.

Quinnipiac and Marist (the latter again having lower numbers) are "evil" liberal universities so we exclude them.

That leaves Gallup, Pew, ARG, Survey USA and Ipsos. What on earth would they have to gain from fudging the numbers?

I would also be willing to put money on Repub firms like Public Opinion Strategies, Moore, Strategic Vision and Resurgent Republic having more reliable numbers than Rasmussen who can get away with it by pretending to be "non-partisan".

Hmmm, going abck and reading thru my posts I don't see where I said they don't count. You just have to take there polls with the bias they bring to the numbers...its no different than how you reat Rassmusen. You guys are so convinced bias only exists on the right that you cannot see it when its clearly present o nthe left.

In addition polls often lean favorable to whoever is paying for the poll to be conducted.

I guess I could just give up and agree with you, only Rass is bias, everyone else is unbias and full of purity....let it rai ndown white flowers and the tulips shall grow i nthe desert.....let cats live with dogs in peace and harmoney.....no bias exists in these poll numbers unless its a Rassmussen poll.

These pollsters running al lthese polls do not have any partisan employees who are "sensivite" to the numbers they put out....nope, never....

Put your harp away conspiracy and open your eyes.....heck, even your name conspiracy tells the story right there, its a game!!!!!!!

Well, my username refers to the Kennedy assassination but that is a whole other kettle of fish!

A couple of points, PPP and rasmussen both tend to have lower approval numbers for all canditates (perhaps due to IVR) but like almost all pollster have shown a trend of significant decline but hardly a meltdown in Obama's numbers (much in line, if not better, than other presidents at this time in political/economic cycle)

A second point toward Stillow,

'like I said we all know recessions occur and are normal and healthy, but all his spending i making it worse'

Whilst a normal economical cycle recession (or preferably a slow down of economic growth) might be considered 'healthy', what is occuring at the moment, which was caused by a massive finicial crisis shock, is not. Furthermore without some sort of stimulus package it could of (and might still) turn into a dangerous recessionary spiral.

On the one hand while I agree the number of job 'saved' is a fantasy number, equally to say the stimulus package is a failure because jobs are still be lost is also unreasonable. The critics of the stimulus package, (and it did have its share of flaws), have yet to come up with either an alternative policy or a properly researched alternative outcome (i.e. how many more jobs would have been lost without the stimulus package compared to the amount of money saved) to the package.

IMO, most polls have bias. Maybe not intentional, but its there. Differences in methods, how questions are phrased. Look at the ABC/WP poll posted here earlier. Do you really think that by the time they rattled off that paragraph on health care any respondents could remember the question in its entirety? That poll is worthless because by the time they finished asking they are lucky if anyone knew what the question was.

Reminds me of some lib politicians. If you can't dazzle them with your brilliance, baffle them....

How else they gonna pass health care reform?

I did download the health care reform bill, the house version. Not that I read all 1000+ pages. But I did Cntrl F and search for 000,000. I was amazed at how many hits that got, and it always had other numbers in front of it. The dollar amounts in that bill are staggering.

@John

Actually critics of the stimulus hav ebeen screamign an alternative. We already had a formula we know works to reverse a serious recession. The economy Reagan took over in 1981 was much worse than this one....higher unemployment, higher intrest rates, the misery index was thru the roof, etc. reagan cut taxes and got g'ment the heck out of the way....and it lead to the biggest epace time boom in american history.

So the formula was already there....we also had a formula for what not to do...FDR when he inheirted Hoover's collapse increased g'ment spending and did most of the things Obama is doing and the depression lasted well over a decade and it finally took WW2 to get us out.

So you had a formula for success and one for failure, Obama went with the one that supported failure....numbers don't lie!

I was just looking at a graph of unemployment on bls.gov. It always goes up at a sharp rate and then slowly sinks back down. With one exception. It came down it 82-84 just as fast as it went up in 80-82. Maybe that guy Reagan really was on to something.

Rasmussen was the most accurate in predicting the 2008 election. It was spot on.

I think the deviation in the current approval numbers is in whom they poll. Rasmussen polls 'likely voters' while Gallup, USA Today, NBC, ABC poll 'Americans' or all respondents.

>>Rasmussen was the most accurate in predicting the 2008 election. It was spot on.

Yeah, if you ignore the fact that they inaccurately predicted a ton of states.

The 1980s recession really has to be looked at with the backdrop (and primary factor which caused the recession) of the tight monetary policy that existed at the time. There is (at least in theory) a short-term inverse relationship between inflation and unemployment hence why, at least partially, the unemployment number increased rapidly. GDP over the period barely changed. Indeed calling the period 1980-82 a recession is not really accurate although it is usually named as such.

Given the completely different causes and circimstances of now and the 1980s recession, I think it is a bit of a jump to say the same policies will definitely work now.

Now one can certainly argue that lower taxes leads to higher economic growth in the long run, (shown by the late 80s boom although another factor to bear in mind is that tax rates (especially for the higher earners) were much higher then), that is slightly beside the point, the stimulus was meant to reduce and hasten the end of recession in the short run before it could spiral out of control. The New Deal is also not a particulary apt comparison as it was enacted over 3 years into the depression.

In my opinion, there is little overall difference in where the stimulus money came, whether government spending or tax cuts, (both have benefits and drawbacks), but what annoys me is when critics, to the stimulus, either complain about the deficit without acknowledging that a 100% tax cut stimulus would lead to similiar problems, or pretend that without any stimulus package that the US economy wouldn't be in a worse position and hence have lower tax revenues and an even greater deficit problems in the long run.

ps numbers may not lie but they can be misleading, hence what is great about this site.