It's About Mathematics, Stupid
posted by Gary Gross
Let Freedom Ring (Throughout the World)
The LA Times ran a headline Sunday reading "Bush Approval a Low for Two-Term Leaders," which was written by the AP's Will Lester. The headline didn't surprise me. I can't even say I was surprised that they mentioned the AP-Ipsos pollitorial that put President Bush's job approval for Iraq at 42%. What DID surprise me was this little piece of information:
The partisan divide for Bush is stark, 80 percent of
Democrats disapprove of his overall performance while
nearly 90 percent of Republicans approve.
Let me set up my question this way: The country is evenly split with 37% of registered voters being Democrat & another 37% being registered Republicans with 26% being Independents. That Ipsos poll shows that Independents are roughly split 60-40 against President Bush against President Bush's handling of the war.
If that's the case & they polled 1000 people, how do they arrive at a rating of 42%? If 90% of 37% (Republicans) of 1000 think he's doing a fair or good job, that's 333 people. If another 20% of 37% (Democrats) of 1000 people think he's doing a good job, that's another 74 people. If 50% of independents, who make up 26% of registered voters, think that the President is doing a good job, that's another 104 people. By my math, that's 521 people support President Bush's handling of the war, a 52.1% job approval rating on Iraq.
In other words, the only way they could've come up with that 42% support figure is if they vastly oversampled Democrats & Independents & that's what's called fishing for a result you like. In other words, the AP-Ipsos poll is more scientific than an online multiple choice poll like Bill O'Reilly runs but it isn't a truly scientific poll like Scott Rasmussen or Gallup or reputable pollsters do.
By the way, I don't have a problem with Bill O'Reilly's polls because the disclaimer is there that this isn't a scientific poll.
Charles Black, a veteran GOP strategist & close Bush
ally, said Republicans are sticking with Bush for two
reasons: personal affection & loyalty. "I haven't seen
anything like it since Reagan," he said. "Bush follows
through on issues that are largely popular with the base,
even when it isn’t popular with the general public to do
so." Bush may have a hard time pushing up his numbers
because issues like the violence in Iraq & gas prices are
largely out of his control. But Bush's efforts to put
conservatives on the Supreme Court & overhaul the federal
tax code are likely to please his conservative base.
The Republican base is growing, too, so that means, in very real terms, that his policies are popular except with hateful moonbat Democrats. Accepting Mr. Black's statement as fact is yet another reason ignore the AP-Ipsos poll. In fact, as long as 90% of Republicans support him, his approval ratings can't go below 45%. There's no reason to believe that support will wane because he's been pulling that type of support almost from the day he announced his candidacy for president.
Presidential scholar Charles Jones cautioned against
reading too much into low poll ratings for a president at
a given point of his term. "Truman got some of the lowest
poll numbers any president ever got," said Jones, a
senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. "Now when we
look back on Truman, he's the highest ranked of the post-
World War II presidents."
That's because he was a leader, not someone given to sticking his finger into the wind to make up his mind. While daily polls don't always reward strong leaders, history almost always does. Another example of this is Winston Churchill, go got run from office right after the war. He certainly wasn't popular then but he's rightfully revered by historians now for being a great leader.
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