Just a few moments ago, CNN released its latest public opinion survey with new approval numbers for President Obama. The numbers are 49% approval and 48% disapproval. That’s a significant notch up from where the president has been in recent months but it’s also almost identical to data released yesterday by ABC/WaPo, which had President Obama at 49% approval vs. 47% disapproval.
What’s more, there is additional information suggesting that the President’s jobs push and especially the stand-off over the payroll tax holiday are boosting President Obama at the expense of his Republican rivals — both on the Hill and in the upcoming presidential elections.
Let’s look at some trends.
Here’s a trend chart and current TPM Poll Average that has the president with a net -4.7 disapproval rating.
Now the important thing to note is that the overall trend and average is heavily weighted toward the two organizations that run daily tracking polls — Rasmussen, which tends to run unfriendly to the president and Gallup, which is generally more favorable to him. Tracking polls only have full, non-duplicated data every three to five days (depending on the tracking poll). And our average takes that into account. Still, though, these two outfits are just generating a lot of data. And so the average is significantly biased in favor of their combined methodologies.
But let’s see what the numbers show if we remove Gallup and Rasmussen from the mix. It’s pretty different. The average goes to net -.6 disapproval. And as you can see the trend is moving quickly in the president’s direction.
This isn’t surprising. If you look at the non-tracking poll numbers for the President from December they are +2, +1, -10, +3, -2, -1, -2, -1, -1, -5.
There’s now a lot of evidence that the President’s approval numbers are rising after bottoming out at the end of the summer after the debt deal debacle. But they’re rising toward an almost total polarization. 50% for, 50% against. Very little middle ground.
