Yes, we all know that Obama's favorability numbers are going down. We see it on the front page here at dkos every week. Many are assuming that the big reason this is happening is because Obama is not fighting hard enough for the things we want to see happen. The theory is that if he is loosing his base, he's in trouble. Even Keith Olbermann was pontificating that there might be a primary challenge in store for Obama in 2012 if he doesn't stop this slide.
We all know that numbers can be deceiving. So it pays to look closely and see if there is some message in the polling. I did a little of that today and found some interesting information.
Much has been made of the most recent R2k poll.
OVERALL: - 10 (From 49 to 39)
DEMOCRATS: - 17 (From 84 to 67)
INDEPENDENTS: - 12 (From 48 to 36)
REPUBLICANS: No Change (From 4 to 4)
In this often tumultous summer, the Democratic Party brand name has taken a bit of a beating with Independents. But the real hemorrhaging has been with their Democratic base, and it has been a fairly recent convention: more than half of that seventeen point dip has occurred in the last three weeks.
And that does speak badly about what is happening to the Democratic Party. But we'd have to look much deeper to see how individual states and districts feel about their particular legislator. For instance, I'm pretty stoked about what Senator Franken (love typing that!) is doing. With Senator Klobuchar...meh, not so much.
But what's the story with Obama? I'll go to Pollster.com for this since its an aggregate of many polls. Here's how Obama's favorability trends look nationally.
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That doesn't look good. But the question is, where is he loosing support. We know the Republicans have never liked Obama and likely never will. We also know that they are an increasingly small proportion of the electorate, so lets not bother with them. Here's what the trend looks like for Independents.
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What I see is approval dipping slightly while disapproval is soaring.
And finally, here's what it looks like for Democrats.
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Yes ladies and gentlemen, 84% of Democrats approve of the job Obama is doing...a number very similar to what it was in February. If you look at the disapproval ratings, they have risen from less than 5% to almost 11%. So perhaps that's the slippage from the "base." But the folks at Public Policy Polling would dispute that. They have found, over the last month, that Obama's approval with liberal Democrats is 94% nationally.
Where Obama's favorability ratings are dropping is with Independents. As the folks at Public Policy Polling say elsewhere:
Obama's losing favor with conservative leaning independent voters. These seem to be the folks who health care is giving him the hardest time with- only 13% of them say they're with him on that issue and the price to pay for that is a drop in his approval with them from 31% in April to now 16%. The question you have to ask yourself about these folks is whether Obama had any chance of not losing their favor if he actually pursued his policy agenda- maybe he could have kept them happy by doing nothing, but then what's the point of being President?
So if we look outside the confines of progressive bloggers, what the polling data tells us is that Obama, in loosing support among conservative leaning independents, is using his political capital to get health care reform. I'd say its a pretty good use of that capital.
And next week we have the big speech to Congress. Nate Silver shares some interesting information about Bill Clinton's speech to Congress on health care.
When Bill Clinton delivered his big speech to the Congress on health care 16 years ago, his approval rating shot up by 10 points almost instantenously.<...>
But Obama's timing is better than Clinton's, coming toward the end rather than the beginning of the process, and at a moment where the press corps is exceedingly skeptical and where expectations may be unrealistically low. And even a temporary bounce might prove sufficient, since the health care bill has already passed out of 4 out of 5 Congressional committees and doesn't have that many more hurdles to clear.
I'm not usually one that thinks politicians should be guided too much by polls. But if we want to know more about Obama's strategy, I find this information very helpful.