PrintAugust 31, 2009
It's going to get worse for Obama (updated)
More grim news for Obama from the Rasmussen Daily Presidential Tracking Poll. The Net Approval (strongly approve minus strongly disapprove) index is minus 11. Overall, only 46% of the likely voters polled strongly or somewhat approve of Obama. AT political director Richard Baehr calls the chart below a "shockingly fast decline. It suggests this guy got elected because the stars were aligned, that plus 3/4 of a billion dollars and billions in free positive media coverage."
News editor Ed Lasky passes along this article by Jim McTague of Barrons, noting the damage that liberal Massachusetts is about the inflict on Obama, as the state appoints a Democrat to succeed Ted Kennedy in the Senate, necessitating a change in the state law that Kennedy engineered in order to assure a Democrat in the Senate the last a potential vacancy loomed with John Kerry running for President, with a Republican governor sitting in the State House on Beacon Hill.
Beacon Hill is a hotbed of delicious scandal. The national press will home in on the tawdry operation, presenting Democrats in Washington with a Category Five public-relations problem. The president, the Senate and Massachusetts political corruption all will be bound up in one sound bite. Journalists will remind us of the fiasco that ensued when Illinois Democrats hastily appointed Roland Burris to fill Obama's U.S. Senate seat. Burris faces a Senate ethics investigation for failing to disclose information about his relationship with former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who was indicted on federal corruption charges. This sort of publicity likely will harm Obama's already wobbly popularity numbers.
Ed Lasky has long predicted that Deval Patrick's record in liberal Massachusetts foreshadow the difficulties Obama will experience in office, with voters rapidly becoming disillusioned with the failure to keep the campaign promises engineered for both men by the campaign manager they shared, David Axelrod. McTague notes:
Update from C. Edmund Wright:Patrick's popularity, like Obama's, is plunging. He's running for a second term in 2010, but a Boston Globe poll this summer found that only 23% of the voters trust Patrick's handling of the state's economic problems. A poll of 400 likely voters by the Rappaport Center for Law and Public Service at Suffolk University Law School in Boston found that 47% of them believe that ethics have worsened in state government over the past 10 years. Asked to rate the level of ethics, 2% said they were excellent; 10% said they were good; 49%, fair; and 40% said they were poor.This is extraordinary. Massachusetts voters are strongly Democratic and historically very forgiving.
The evolving yet telling Give A Damn Index -- an unofficial iteration of numbers complied by Scott Rasmussen in his widely respected Daily Presidential Tracking Poll -- still show that the President is running out of room with the American public with regard to his poll numbers.
The index is designed to show a number of things, among them how many people are seriously engaged in the political issues of the day and how this informed attention is likely to weigh on the President's upcoming poll numbers. Obviously huge events and media coverage will impact this and all polls --and this index is a mathematical distillation of other poll numbers. My use of Rasmussen's Daily Tracking Poll is out of my respect for his methodology and concepts. The idea sprang from my lack of respect in how media pundits and RNC political consultants analyze poll numbers. Both groups tend to focus simply on numbers with little or no regard to intensity or depth of feeling.
Today's Rasmussen approval index number is -11, with 41% of the country strongly disapproving while 30% strongly approve. That makes Index A of the Give A Damn Index 71%, meaning that only 29% of the country has less than strong feelings about the President. That is a thin sliver indeed with which to overcome a -11%.
Further, Index B of the Give A Damn Index further boxes Obama in statistically. Of the 46% that at least somewhat approve of him, some 65% feel strongly. Of the 53% that at least somewhat disapprove of him, 78% feel strongly. That makes Index B of the Give A Damn Index -13. (Yesterday we reported that Index A was 74% and Index B was -20%. That was mistaken on B. Yesterday's Index B was -13%.)
Conclusion: from a statistical point of view, the President is close to a point of no return with regard to opinions held by the Americans who care the most. Additionally, it is far more likely that Obama's numbers will drop from this point as opposed to improving. The longer people hold strong opinions, the more difficult it is for them to be moved by events or media. The less than strong opinions are far more easily swayed by events or media.
