What I can't understand is how so many people still think the economy is rotten. Poll after poll shows that. Now I generally take all polls with a grain of salt, but I'm begining to worry that the MSM has been successful in planting that meme in enough people. And the Bush 2004 team has done a terrible job in getting their message out so far.
Depends on how the question is phrased -- or in what context. Notice how consumer confidence surveys -- which are done professionally, sans political bias -- show pretty bullish sentiment. Yet media 'horse race' polls shows the opposite. Both can't be right. Odds are the media polls are really push-polls whose questions are fashioned in such a way as to yield results that fit the media's 'Bad-economy' template. If people thought the economy was as rotten as the media polls say they do, the economy would screeched to a halt.
THing is you need to take them with more than a GRAIN of salt. Polls don't just spin, they lie. The Blowout of '02 convinced me of that. They showed the rats even or even ahead in most of the senate races and they got their butts handed to them.
I think these polls are just to give sKerry talking points. As Hewitt so pithily put it, they don't pass the Laugh Test.
On one occasion a while back my well-off, lib sister was going on about how things were awful, and it's so hard about this and that. I became exasperated and finally asked her how she herself was doing. She had to admit she was doing pretty good. Then I asked her why she complained about so many things. She didn't have an answer, but I knew it was mostly due to the fact that Bush was president.