Pollster.com

that's a jump from their last poll. i guess they were excited about the stupid afghan war strategy

Party id is off.

Not according to FOX! Remember, in their world there are equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans.

I remember about a month ago when the idiots over there were complaining about a poll because it had about 9% more Democrats than Republicans in it (which was accurately reflecting the actual proportion of partisanship). The howls were incredible. How could you have a poll which had more of one subgroup than another? Clearly this was deep seated liberal bias!

More R's than D's AND Obama is still +5????

That's a head-scratcher, even for Fox.

More R's than D's AND Obama is still +5????

That's a head-scratcher, even for Fox.

Fox's poll seemed a bit more favorable to Obama than PPP which is supposed to be Democratic this time around.

Just FOX keeping fair and balanced...Why not sample a few more republicans. Still amazed at the 50% approval.

Fox and Friends must have infiltrated their polling service. They ACTUALLY polled equal reps to dems? I'd love to see why they chose that in their methodology.

Those criticising the even party ID: you're missing the point. The crucial number that signals what's going on is not the gap between Democrats and Republicans: it's the proportion of independents. Most pollsters have independents at around 30-40%. Fox's figure is 18%, which suggests that they are pushing independents harder than other pollsters to commit to one party or the other.

The reality is that in the present climate, independents as polled by other organisations are generally sceptical toward or disapproving of the administration and its policies. If you push those independents to commit to one party or the other, it stands to reason that the effect would be to reduce the gap between "Democrats" and "Republicans". If you look back at the polling history for Fox, this poll really isn't any different from their previous polls. Their polls from the last three months show independents at 17-23% of the electorate, and a gap of around 4 percentage points.

In short: many of the numbers in this poll strike me as being fairly middle-of-the-road and credible.

However... I think the problem with Fox's polling is that they ask about a whole bunch of different issues in succession. There is clear evidence to suggest that when mega-polls are done, previous questions or responses to previous questions can "poison the well" for later questions, so to speak. That's because they may "prime" the respondent to take a negative view toward the President (for example). Hypothetically, if you were asked "are you concerned by the possibility that future generations will be paying off our debt", you would be far less likely to respond well to a later question along the lines of "do you support the health care reform bill", purely because your mind has been primed in negative ways. This effect may help to explain why Obama's approval numbers - the very first question asked on this poll - seem to be out-of-sync with the response to the health care questions, which came 30 questions later after a flood of questions on the deficit and Afghanistan.

stevie has it right - these numbers just look bizarre with POTUS at 50/44 in general and 44/46 on the re-elect question even with equal party id for D and R. Plus, i'd be really surprised to see independents only identify as 18% unless there were some pretty loaded questions in this poll prior to identifying party id...