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More On Gallup

While looking over the internals of the Gallup poll, which are posted here, there is some additional bad news for Mr. Bush.

Gallup has Mr. Bush's overall job approval rating at 51% favorable and 46% percent unfavorable. His approval rating tracks almost exactly with the horse race number.

That is to be expected since it is an ancient political axiom that an incumbent's vote share will equal his job approval rating. An incumbent is likely to win with approval ratings above 50% and is likely to lose with ratings below 50%. Since Mr. Bush is at 51% favorable, what is the bad news for him?

Gallup's internals break the states into three group. The first group consists of the states that Mr. Bush won by more than five percentage points. In those states, the red states, Mr. Bush is doing very well with an approval rating of 59% approval and 38% disapproval (as an aside, that is down from 64-34 a week ago).

In the states that Al Gore won by more than 5%, the blue states, Bush has an approval rating of 46-51 (up from 41-58 a week ago).

The bad news for Mr. Bush is that in the 16 battlegound states, the purple states, Mr. Bush's job approval is now exactly the same as in the blue states 46-51 (down from 48-50 last week).

It would be unusual for an incumbent to to win a group of states with an approval rating at 46%. Unless the "battlegound states" that Bush has already conceded (Oregon, Washington, Maine, and, perhaps, New Hampshire) have very poor approval numbers, it is likely that Mr. Bush is trying to pull out a victory in states (Pa., Ohio, Florida, Wisconsin, Iowa) in which he has an approval rating somewhat below 50%. To win those states, Mr. Bush would have to run significantly ahead of his own approval ratings.

Not impossible, perhaps, but not likely.

Posted by Dwight Meredith at October 25, 2004 10:04 PM | TrackBack