Via Newsbusters. New poll out from PPP: With Gary Johnson running as a libertarian, Romney’s lead over Obama is down to two — in Montana. Meanwhile, over at Survey USA, Obama’s got a cushy four-point lead against Romney — in North Carolina.
Alternate headline: “Blogger drinking in the daytime again.”
Over at Nate Silver’s site, guestblogger John Sides has an interesting bunch of graphs suggesting that Obama’s more popular than he should be. What’s that mean? Well, they took 60 years of quarterly presidential job approval numbers, factored in economic data, scandals, wars, and time in office, and came up with a rough assessment of what any given president’s job approval “should” have been for a particular quarter. Funny thing about The One: Given the protracted crappiness of Obamanomics, he overperforms. A lot.
In fact, he is more popular than expected, and consistently so throughout these three years. His quarterly approval ratings are, on average, nine points higher than expected…
Only two other presidents have experienced a discrepancy between expected and actual approval in their first terms that was larger than the discrepancy in Mr. Obama’s first three years. One was George W. Bush, and this arises largely because the model doesn’t fully anticipate the quickness and size of the “rally effect” that took place after Sept. 11, 2001. The other was Ronald Reagan, whose first-term approval ratings exhibited more fluctuation than Mr. Obama’s but were about 10 points above the model’s expectations, on average.
Sides offers two possible explanations that I’ve flagged here before, more than once — personal likability plus the fact that, even now, a lot of voters out there still blame Bush for the state of the economy more than O. Some readers grumbled at me the last time I mentioned the likability gap between Obama and Romney on grounds that The One simply isn’t that likable and that personal appeal is wildly overrated when voters buckle down in October and do some hard thinking about whether they want four more years of this. I agree that few will vote for O simply because they like him more, but likability may skew their critical judgments of his policies just enough for swing voters to give him the benefit of the doubt on a second-term economic recovery, meaningful deficit reduction, etc. That is to say, likability and the “blame Bush” phenomenon aren’t completely distinct factors. Some people may be more inclined to blame Bush because they like Obama personally. Which, of course, is why his campaign is spending time doing moronic “slow jam the news” segments on Jimmy Fallon. No one with an ego the size of Obama’s wants to spend three minutes playing straight man to a late-night B-lister, but if it helps widen the likability gap, he’ll grin and bear it. (The Obama campaign’s obsession with the Seamus story is the flip side of this, of course.)
Exit question: Is that Survey USA poll trustworthy? Follow the link up top and you’ll find this in the crosstabs:
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