Greg Sargent, Political Wire, and others have cited numbers from Public Policy Polling to argue that President Obama's approval ratings among self-identified liberals remain quite high. According to PPP, President Obama's job performance among self-identified liberals is still a robust 85%.
However, there is a serious flaw in citing these numbers: they are only based on a subsample of between 125-130, which gives them a margin of error of plus or minus 8.9%. That is, they are only based on a subsample of 125-130 registered voters if PPP's new national survey is anything like their national survey from last month, when 19% of their overall sample of 667 voters self-identified as liberal.
By way of comparison, across the last four Gallup weekly approval polls, which have a combined sample of 14,346 respondents, President Obama's job performance among self-identified liberals has only averaged 74%. With Gallup identifying 20% of the electorate as liberal so far in 2010, that would mean a liberal subsample of 2,869, that would mean a margin of error of only 1.8%. That makes the Gallup numbers far, far more reliable than the PPP numbers.
Looking across all other job performance polls taken over the past month, only one organization, YouGov, produced crosstabs based strictly on ideological self-identification. There are literally no other polls that released such crosstabs-only PPP, Gallup and YouGov.
Across 899 self-identified liberals surveyed in their last four polls, YouGov's does show President Obama's approval rating at 84%. That number is much closer to PPP's result than to Gallup's. Also, the subsample only has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.3%, which means that random error alone cannot account for the difference between the Gallup and YouGov numbers. Further, both Gallup and YouGov are sampling "all adults," and cell-phone onlys, so the difference cannot be found there either. That YouGov is conducted over the Internet might be causing problems, but Polimetrix, which actually conducts the YouGov polls, actually has a decent track record.
So, where does Obama's approval actually stand among self-identified liberals? While PPP's sample size is too small to be taken seriously, it would be unwise to look for "The One, True Poll," and completely ignore either YouGov or Gallup, both of which have good sample sizes. Personally, I am a big believer in simple poll averaging as a way of providing an accurate snapshot of electoral preference, and the numbers back me up on that belief. I see no reason why simple poll averaging can't be applied in this situation as well, which would peg President Obama's approval rating among self-identified liberals at around 79-80%.
Those are not very good numbers for President Obama among self-identified liberals. However, they are too be expected given his overall approval rating of 44.6%, which is itself not a very good rating. Also, until the Obama administration and Congressional Democrats start passing public policy that has a more immediate, positive impact on the lives of most Americans, it is unlikely that this rating will improve. That is the case no matter the "political reality," and no matter much anyone sneers, or does not sneer, at progressives.
In an interview with The Hill, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs goes after the left:
The press secretary dismissed the "professional left" in terms very similar to those used by their opponents on the ideological right, saying, "They will be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare and we've eliminated the Pentagon. That's not reality."
Of those who complain that Obama caved to centrists on issues such as healthcare reform, Gibbs said: "They wouldn't be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president."(...)
Progressives, Gibbs said, are the liberals outside of Washington "in America," and they are grateful for what Obama has accomplished in a shattered economy with uniform Republican opposition and a short amount of time.
Oy, on many levels.
If the White House really doesn't think it has any problems among self-identified liberals or progressives, and that all the complaints are coming from a grasstop elite, it needs to look at the data again. From 2008 to 2010, President Obama has suffered far more erosion of support among self-identified liberals than among self-identified moderates or conservatives:
In 2008, according to exit polls, 89% self-identified liberals voted for President Obama. Over the past four weeks, according to Gallup, President Obama's approval rating among self-identified liberals has averaged 74%. That is a decline of 15 points.
In 2008, according to exit polls, 60% of self-identified moderates voted for President Obama. Over the past four weeks, according to Gallup, President Obama's approval rating among self-identified moderates has averaged 54%. That is a decline of 6 points.
In 2008, according to exit polls, 20% of self-identified conservatives voted for President Obama. Over the past four weeks, according to Gallup, President Obama's approval rating has averaged 24% among self-identified conservatives. That is an increase of 4 points.
So, according to Gallup, disapproval among self-identified liberals accounts for the majority of President Obama's approval rating underperformance compared to his 2008 vote share (from the perspective that the smaller decline among moderates is partially canceled out by the small gain among conservatives). If it were not for President Obama's decline among liberals, there would be virtually no difference between his 2010 approval rating and 2008 voter performance.
Maybe the White House knows that its problem among self-identified liberals is not confined to the grasstops. Maybe it is "reaching out" to liberals in this insulting manner because it figures that while it has lost more support among liberals than among any other group, those liberals are still going to vote Democratic anyway.
Many progressives--myself included--have argued that once once the economy starts creating jobs, Democratic electing fortunes will improve. Well, economists predict that the economy added 513,000 jobs in May, the most in well over a decade. And yet, May has not been a good month for President Obama''s approval rating, which is actually on the decline.
Here is the Pollster.com trend from May 1st through today: (more in the extended entry)
Wall Street reform: Reid sounds ready to file cloture: Reid on the Senate floor about 30 minutes ago:
Sen. Reid ready to pull the cloture trigger on financial overhaul: "This cannot be delayed any longer," he said as the Senate opened today.
This would mean the first cloture vote is Wednesday. After that fails, the second will be on Thursday. And then the next day, and the next, until it passes.
Pennsylvania Senate: Raining tomorrow in Philadelphia: The conventional wisdom is that Arlen Specter needs big turnout tomorrow, especially in Philadelphia, in order to defeat Joe Sestak. However, not only is Democratic turnout down this year, but the forecast tomorrow in Philadelphia is for rain.
2010 elections: No Democratic Senate candidate receiving 10% of the vote among Obama disapprovers: Public Policy Polling has some eye-opening numbers with huge relevance to the 2010 elections. No Democratic Senate hopeful is receiving even 10% of the vote among people who disapprove of Barack Obama's job performance. If this holds, Democrats will need Obama's approval to stay positive through November, and even then will have a difficult time winning in red states.
the combination of Wall Street reform and the May 18th primaries reaching a climax will have big implications on the 2010 elections. I will be following these stories closely as they unfold this week.
There are indeed glimmers of hope out there, but the broad indicators do not yet show enough movement toward Democrats to suggest a trend. Over the past month, Democrats have gained about 2% net on Republicans in the national generic congressional ballot, while President Obama has gained about 3% net in job approval. Here are the six month trends from Pollster.com, removing Zogby interactive polls from the mix:
Six month trend, National Generic Congressional Ballot
Six month trend, President Obama job approval
The electoral environment has been pretty stagnant over the past six months. This recent 2-3% improvement for Democrats could be the start of an actually upward trend of Dems, or it could be yet another small, possibly random movement well within the margin of error for polling averages (which is, according to my research, 1.8% total error at 50% confidence, 6.0% total error at 95% confidence).
Even if the electoral environment is static (and it probably is), it does at least feel like there is more to be optimistic about as a Democrat lately. The Republican rise has at last been stopped, the economy probably is going to keep slowly improving, primary challengers are making things interesting for both parties, and legislation, however watered down, is starting to pass. It all lacks the epic feel of the 2008 elections, or of the health insurance reform fight, but it also lacks the apocalyptic feel of the special election for Massachusetts Senate. It seems likely that Democrats have already hit rock bottom, and 2010 will only keep getting better from here on out.
One fairly common narrative in left-wing media is that Democrats will suffer in mid-term elections unless they excite "the base." "The base," we are told, is so disappointed in President Obama and the Democratic Congress, that it will stay home, thus resulting in widespread Democratic losses in 2010.
Q.11 Do you approve or disapprove of the way Barack Obama is handling his job as president?
Likely Voters
Registered Unlikely Voters
Approve
47%
59%
Disapprove
48%
35%
Despite the small sample size, this is not an isolated finding. Previous Democracy Corps polls in November (Approve 61%--32% Disapporve) and January (61%--33%) have also found President Obama with a sky-high job approval rating among people who are registered to vote but who are considered unlikely to vote in 2010.
How can "the base" be so disappointed in President Obama that they are deciding not to vote, when registered voters who are considered unlikely to vote overwhelmingly approve of President Obama's job performance?
The argument that "the base" is not going to turn out because they are disappointed in Obama does not hold up to available empirical evidence. And Democracy Corps is, to the best of my knowledge, the only polling organization that is tracking President Obama's job approval rating among people who are registered to vote but considered unlikely to vote in 2010. Other organizations have asked tangential questions, but not the basic questions, such as job performance. That's too bad--every polling organization that publishes likely voter results should publish crosstabs on unlikely voters, not to mention asking the unlikely voters open-ended questions about why they are unlikely to vote.
A better explanation is that the Democratic base is relatively youthful, and younger people don't turn out for midterm elections. Both of these are empirical observations, not conjecture. Until there is better and more frequent polling about what unlikely voters think, it remains the most demonstrable hypothesis on the market today.
STATE BLOGS
Powered by: SoapBlox