Wampum

Job Approval

Lots of people think that a President's job approval rating polls is the best predictor of reelection success or failure. Matthew Dowd, a senior strategist for the President's campaign has has said "repeatedly that the president's eventual vote percentage will track closely with his approval rating."

Larry Sabato has written :

Unless President Bush's job approval ratings soar solidly above 50 percent by Election Day, he will not win a second term; that much, history teaches without question.

Charlie Cook notes:

Somehow, almost mysteriously, a president's job-approval ratings ...begin to become predictive during January and February. And each successive month tends to be a more accurate indicator than the previous month of how that president will fare on Election Day.

With those comments in mind, I clicked over to Real Clear Politics to check out President Bush's job approval rating. RCP has Bush job approval listed at 48.8.

I follow the polling pretty closely, and that seemed high to me.

I decided to do my own average and see how it compared to RCP. I located the job approval number from six of the most recent national polls (excluding tracking polls) that report job approval. Those are as follows (approve/disaprove):

The Economist 44/52;

Pew 44/48;

Democracy Corps 47/50;

NBC/WSJ 49/47;

Fox News 49/44; and

CBS/NYT 44/48.

The average of those six polls is 46.17 approve, 48.17 disapprove.

I think that spells trouble for Mr. Bush unless those numbers improve in the next 13 days.

Posted by Dwight Meredith at October 20, 2004 09:41 PM | TrackBack