Approval Gap
By Gerry Daly Posted in Elections — Comments (4) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
A new phrase is about to become prevalent in the election year lexicon; "The Approval Gap" is simply the difference in support the President gets in the election match-up ("horserace") question in polls, and his job approval rating. Republican pollster Fabrizio, McLaughlin, and Associates did a (very flawed, due to an unacceptably small sample size) analysis of Approval Gap voters. Rasmussen will be doing a more comprehensive one within a few days.
I have written an article about how approval gaps have held up in the past when they have appeared, but cutting to the chase for Red State readers, there is a tendency for an incumbent President's actual Election Day support to either be close to or above his election year average job approval rating. The only two Presidents who underpeformed their average polled approval rating for the year by more than a typical poll's margin of error were Bill Clinton and Dwight Eisenhower. President Eisenhower's approval rating was so high that there was almost no way possible for his election day support to reach that level; it would have been unprecedented in modern times for a candidate to get that large of a portion of the popular vote. With President Clinton, the likely explanation is his personal favorability numbers; with the race not being close voters who simply did not like him as a person found no reason to hold their nose.
Every single other incumbent President since the advent of the Gallup poll has either gotten more support on election day than his election-year average approval rating in the Gallup poll, or come very close (within the typical poll's margin of error).
As of today, President Bush's average approval rating in the Gallup poll for 2004 stands at 51% (and the current reading is 49%). It will be difficult for Democrats to drive this average down, as Bush has been more successful than any President other than Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy at avoiding low approval ratings. His lowest Gallup rating has been 46%. Eisenhower's lowest was 48%, Kennedy's was 56%, and every other President since then has fallen below 38% at some point.
This suggests that the floor for his Election Day support would be right about what he got in 2000, but more likely he will get more than 50% of the popular vote.
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Approval Gap 4 Comments (0 topical, 4 editorial, 0 hidden) Post a comment »
. . .has some interesting thoughts on this general topic.
All I can say is, this election is worth too much for us to get cocky under any circumstances.
Another interesting thing about Bush's approval numbers is the extremely low undecideds. For nearly 50 years, from Truman to Bush-41, undecideds averaged 13%. Every president during that time had double-digit average undecideds, ranging from Reagan's 10% to Ford's 17%. Then Clinton averaged 9% in his first term, and only 5% in his second. Bush has averaged 5%, but only 3% since the war in Iraq began. No president ever polled as low as 3% undecideds until the 1990's, and Bush has maintained that level for over a year.
Gallup says they've been asking the question the same way the whole time, so it would seem that we're as polarized as we've been in a long time.
but this sounds like wishful thinking.
Although, with Wilson being discredited, Berger stealing documents, and Clarke being blasted as a partisan limelight seeker by the 9/11 commissioner, things may start to look better.