Obama approval hits a milestone on Gallup’s daily tracking. Open-ended questions show two very different nomination contests brewing. And the nation is bitterly divided by those who think the Patriots cheated and those who don’t care. This is HuffPollster for Tuesday, January 27, 2015.
GALLUP: OBAMA APPROVAL HITS 50 PERCENT – Frank Newport: “Less than a week after President Barack Obama delivered his State of the Union address to Congress, his job approval rating reached 50% in Gallup Daily tracking conducted Friday through Sunday. This is the first time the president’s rating has returned to that level in Gallup’s ongoing three-day rolling averages since June 2013….His approval recovered slightly to 42% by the time of the Nov. 4 midterm elections. Following the elections — after announcing executive actions on immigration and benefiting from an improving economy and falling gas prices — his approval rating has gradually improved, averaging 44% in December and 46% thus far in January. Even if Obama’s job approval rating doesn’t hold at the 50% level, it has consistently registered in the mid- to high 40s throughout January, earning him the highest weekly averages he has seen in more than a year. His weekly average for the seven days ending Jan. 25 was 49%, up from 46% each of the prior three weeks, and from 44% in late December.” [Gallup]
Follows growing economic confidence – More from Newport: “Notably, the recent uptick in Obama’s weekly job rating follows a period of significant improvement in Americans’ confidence in the U.S. economy. Economic confidence started improving in September. It then intensified in late December when Gallup’s Economic Confidence Index crossed into positive territory for the first time in more than seven years, and it has since remained positive. Americans’ ratings of Obama appear to be catching up with their improved economic views. It is not entirely clear why Obama’s job approval rating has been slow to rebound relative to improved economic confidence, but one reason could be the political blow Obama took in November over his party’s sweeping midterm election losses. Another could be the racial tensions that engulfed the country late last year over certain police interactions with young black males.”
Other polls show similar trend – Obama’s current rating on in the aggregate of all polls depends, as it has for the last month or so, on how much we trust the most recent surveys. The default trend line of the HuffPollster chart, which tracks and combines all of the publicly available national polls, estimates Obama’s current approval rating at 45.1 percent, up just over two percentage points since late October. His approval has risen over six percentage points, to 48.8 percent, when we set the chart to “less smoothing,” an option which makes the trend line more sensitive to shifts in opinion. As HuffPollster noted earlier in the month, two factors argue that the “less smoothing” setting is more valid: First, most of the new polls released over the last few weeks show an approval percentage above the default chart’s current 45.1 percent value. Second, over the first six years of the Obama administration, the “less smooth” trend introduces little or no variation that appears truly random, while picking up real movement that the default trend misses. [Pollster chart, HuffPollster 1/15/2015]
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-Niraj Chokshi and Jeff Guo chart how the one percent captured America’s income growth by state. [WashPost]
-Is it “data is” or “data are”? [The Mendoza Line]
-Xkcd does p-values, accurately. [Xkcd via @Protohedgehog]
