Posted on 06/16/2011 4:23:17 PM PDT by radioone
There are a lot of numbers being thrown around about the NBC poll today. On Morning Joe they point out Obama’s is given a 49% approval, but there are some internal numbers in this poll that you need in order to understand that approval figure and where we actually are. So lets examine the internals.
We’ll start with the splits:
Strong Democrat …………….. 19
Not very strong Democrat ….. 13
Independent/lean Democrat …10
Strictly Independent ………….14,
Independent/lean Republican ..10
Not very strong Republican ….11
Strong Republican …………….13
Other (VOL) …………………… 8
Not sure ……………………….. 2
So this means that the skew of the poll to begin with is 42% dem vs 34% GOP. Gee do ya think an 8 point difference in party affiliation might have something to do with the numbers? I’d say polling nearly 25% more democrats than republicans might help the democrats bottom line figures a tad.
Now lets see how those people voted last time
Yes, Voted
Voted for Barack Obama ….. 42
Voted for John McCain ……. 32
Voted for someone else ……. 5
Not sure ……………………… 3
No, Did Not Vote …………… 18
Not sure ………………………. -
The spread of Obama voters vs McCain voters in this sample is 3 points greater than his actual 2008 election spread but lets look deeper:
Nearly 1 in 5 of the people who answer claimed they did not vote last time in an election that drew huge turn out, so lets extrapolate those figures without the 18% that claim they didn’t vote. What kind of spread does that leave us compared to the actual 2008 results (52.9 Obama vs 45.7 McCain)?
Voted for Barack Obama ….. 52
Voted for John McCain ……. 40
Voted for someone else ……. 6%
In the last election President Obama got 52.9% of the vote so the poll reflects that figure within 1% but John McCain got 45.7% of the vote. This means this poll under-represents McCain voters by over 11%
But if the McCain numbers were under-represented by almost six points how is it that Obama’s numbers are within 1% of his actual figure. Look at the “voted for someone else” figure 6%. In the election only 1.5% of the electorate voted for a non-major party candidate. How on earth does this poll manage to oversample that group by a factor of 4?
How is it possible? Well I’ve interviewed thousands of people over the past 18 months from all over the country. I have talked to many people who voted for McCain and were proud of it, but have not talked to a single person who voted for McCain who regretted it. I’ve talked to plenty of people who voted for Barack Obama as well, but I’ve also talked to many Obama voters who were very apologetic about that vote who now regret it.
I submit and suggest that quite a few of those who were “not sure” or “did not vote” or “voted for someone else” in this poll were actually Obama Voters who didn’t want to admit it. This would be consistent with both my interviews and the trends that we will discuss later on.
Now lets look at this set of numbers of registered voters and how they say they’ll vote in 2012:
Probably vote for President Obama ………………45
Probably vote for Republican candidate …………40
Vote for other party (VOL) …………………….. …2
Depends/Depends on who opponent is (VOL) …..11
Not sure …………………………………………….. 2
In the internals of the polls you can see that the 45% figure (with one exception a 43%) has been steady since Feb. I submit that this is a ceiling for the president. Consider in a poll with 42% self identified Democrats only 45% will “probably” vote for President Obama.
Meanwhile in a poll where you had only 32% republicans 40% say they will probably vote for the GOP. This tells you where the independents are trending.
Finally lets tackle that 49% approval number.
There are two items that needs to be addressed. The first is the approval trends that I have alluded to before.
In this poll for approval the choices are not “Positive” “Negative” and “Neutral” they are “Very Positive” “Somewhat Positive” and “Somewhat Negative” and “Very Negative”"
If you look at the tend numbers for the first 4 months of his term he was over 40% Very Positive (Max 47%), for the following three months he was over 30% Very positive, since then “Very positive” has been below 30% (27% this month) Meanwhile the “somewhat positive” has remained between 18-23% throughout his presidency while “Neutral” has ranged from 9-15% (14% this month) This means that the trend since inauguration has been a full 20% of support slipping into disapproval.
Finally consider these demographics:
White ……………..75
Black ………………11
Asian ……………… 2
Other ……………… 3
Hispanic (VOL) …… 7
Not sure/refused … 2
It is not up to me to speak for the black community but I’m telling you that people of various nationalities tend to be less likely to critique on of their own publicly than privately. You will find this in families and in almost every ethnic group. You are even less likely to see an ethnic group publicly “disapprove” the first of their own in any particular job. The black community runs 90-95% Democratic and voted that way last election. If you think that more than one in 20 black Americans are going to tell a national pollster that they disapprove of the first Black President you are absolutely out of your minds.
One can spin it any way you want but if you look at the internals of this poll the bottom line is Barack Obama is hemorrhaging his popularity and barring some cataclysmic failure on the GOP side or incredible success on his side he is not going to win re-election.
Standard Pollster deceit and deception.
Taking polls this early is just a waste of time.
Paying attention to them is dumb.
I don’t buy these polls. No one I talk to will vote for him or can stand him. That’s the only poll that I believe; the one that I hear for myself.
Newscorp owns the WSJ and FOX..so why does the WSJ keep doing polls with NBC?
b
Does not matter who votes but who counts the vote. RATS steal things. Including elections.
i.e. Romney nomination.
You can bet FNC polls are skewed to make Mitt look good.
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