Bush’s Job Rating Falls to Its Lowest Point — But Up Against Kerry
NYT — Bush’s Rating Falls to Its Lowest Point, New Survey Finds [RSS]
President Bush’s job approval rating has fallen to the lowest level of his presidency, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll. The poll found Americans stiffening their opposition to the Iraq war, worried that the invasion could invite domestic terrorist attacks and skeptical about whether the White House has been fully truthful about the war or about abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison.
A majority of respondents in the poll, conducted before yesterday’s transfer of power to an interim Iraqi government, said that the war was not worth its cost in American lives and that the Bush administration did not have a clear plan to restore order to Iraq.
The survey, which showed Mr. Bush’s approval rating at 42 percent, also found that nearly 40 percent of Americans say they do not have an opinion about Senator John Kerry, the likely Democratic presidential nominee, despite what have been both parties’ earliest and most expensive television advertising campaigns. Among those who do have an opinion, Mr. Kerry is disliked more than he is liked. More than 50 percent of respondents said that Mr. Kerry says what he thinks voters want to hear, suggesting that Mr. Bush has had success in portraying his opponent as a flip-flopper.
Americans were more likely to believe that Mr. Bush would do a better job than Mr. Kerry would in steering the nation through a foreign crisis, and protecting it from future terrorist attacks. Support for Mr. Bush’s abilities in those areas has declined in recent months, but the findings suggest that Americans are more comfortable entrusting their security to a president they know than a challenger who remains relatively unknown.
Even so, the poll was scattered with warning flags for Mr. Bush, and there was compelling evidence that his decision to take the nation to war against Iraq has left him in a precarious political position.
A mixed set of results indeed: President Bush is at his lowest point and people still prefer him to the only real alternative.
UPDATE: Strangely, CBS puts a different spin on the same poll — Poll: White House Race Tightens Up
Despite concerns about his handling of Iraq, and an overall approval rating of 42%, George W. Bush is still running neck and neck with Democrat John Kerry as the choice of registered voters. Growing public optimism about the nation̢۪s economy has helped lift support for the President.
Kerry is the choice of 45% of registered voters, Bush the choice of 44%. This is a sharp turnaround for the Bush campaign in the span of just one month; in May, Kerry had opened up a wide 8-point lead over Bush. The race has been close since April.
A much more positive interpretation of the poll results–and seemingly more accurate, in that the presidential horserace is the more interesting issue at this point.
The actual text of the poll is available only in a cutesy javascript presentation. There is a separate How the Poll Was Conducted essay, which explores a rather interesting (and apparently Zogby-inspired) methodology:
The sample of telephone exchanges called was randomly selected by a computer from a complete list of more than 42,000 active residential exchanges across the country. Within each exchange, random digits were added to form a complete telephone number, thus permitting access to listed and unlisted numbers alike. Within each household, one adult was designated by a random procedure to be the respondent for the survey.
The results have been weighted to take account of household size and number of telephone lines into the residence and to adjust for variation in the sample relating to geographic region, sex, race, Hispanic origin, marital status, age and education.
Residents of 18 political swing states were oversampled for analysis and then weighted to their proper share of the population.
Based on the 2000 presidential vote, residents of heavily Republican counties, heavily Democratic counties, and politically competitive counties were weighted to their proper share of the population.
In theory, in 19 cases out of 20, overall results based on such samples will differ by no more than three percentage points in either direction from what would have been obtained by seeking out all American adults.
