probably true. BHO’s approval ratings were underwater from 2013 until March of this year. My personal theory is that when the American public got a good look at who BHO’s potential successors were, he looked a lot better in that light.
In today’s political context, Obama’s 50% approval rating is actually quite remarkable for a major political figure. Certainly no Republican can boast anything near that. Biden’s favorability of 51-37 is also excellent. All they have to do is to persuade 1-2% who voted for them and like them but are not yet ready to vote for Hillary.
Obama’s at Reagan-level approval for his fourth September after re-election. And as Lantern said, in this day of extreme polarization, that is remarkable. In fact, the only president who had higher approval ratings in the past 50 years at this point in their second term was…wait for it…wait a little longer…Bill Clinton. Heaven forbid *that *guy stumps for Hillary. Also, Joe Biden has pretty good numbers too.
I could think of a lot worse people hitting the stump for Hillary. Granted, she needs to step up her own game between now and Nov 8, but your spin on BHO, JB and WJC being a cadre of mediocrity is somewhat laughable.
Obama and Biden are good surrogates for Clinton to some audiences. However as to the general tone of the election and current tie, the reference to Bill Clinton 2000 shows the lack of any paradox in Obama’s approval rating v (Hillary) Clinton’s struggles. (Bill) Clinton’s approval avg over first half of 2000 was higher than Obama’s first half of this year, but Gore struggled.
Bill didn’t campaign for Gore.
Good analysis, but your problem here is that you are using numbers, facts and logic. This simply will not work on certain folks, and they do not habitually use these tools, and actually think that they are the work of the devil.
They prefer to use feelings, and what others have told them. This is how they know that Obama is hated by everyone, and that Hillary Clinton is the Antichrist.
Clearly, you are unfamiliar with Scripture. Obama is the AntiChrist, Hillary is the Whore of Babylon.
I hear ya. But over that same time period, other than my disgust with various aspects of my nation’s policy, I’m not sure how I was personally disadvantaged. My job was never in danger. Our history of always living well below our means allowed us to sustain our course. My investments took a dump around 08, but then came bounding back. And since then, I landed in an even better paying and more secure gig.
Just saying, I’m definitely not voting based on my personal self interest. W made America a less pleasant place to live IMO, and worsened prospects for my kids/grandkids and those less fortunate than me. But it is all too often the case that I personally find my day-to-day life doesn’t change terribly much depending on which presidential candidate wins.
In a perverse way, Trump could actually be so bad as to essentially incite some drastic changes. Well, I guess I’m a tad too cautious to advocate breaking things just in the hope that something better will be constructed afterwards. Or maybe I’m just too complacent…
Here’s something interesting about the 538 numbers…
538’s polls-only assessment of the national polling puts it at Clinton +1.2. This number would actually be higher if 538 stopped considering the *pre-*deplorables/pneumoniagate polling. After Hillary’s “bad weekend,” her average polling is actually better than the average that includes the prior polling (at least when you use 538’s weighing system).
If you take just the polls in the field since September 15 (which is the last 24 polls) and that are recorded in 538, you get the following stats:
Simple average w/ 538 adjustments: Clinton + 1.43
538 Weighted average w/ 538 adjustments: ** Clinton +1.48**
Simple average no adjustments: Clinton +2
538 Weighted average w/ no adjustments: Clinton +1.88.
[By comparison, the RCP Avg. for the same period is Clinton + 1.7]
Does this suggest that she was not, in fact, hurt by the polling emerging after the “bad weekend”? Sure looks like it. And that’s what the RCP average seems to show too.
538’s now-cast now has Trump: 50.3, Clinton 49.7. That’s the first time it’s had Trump ahead since July.
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Trump is just running as a publicity stunt and will drop out after the first primary debate.
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Trump can’t win any primary states.
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Trump’s ceiling is 35%.
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Trump won’t be the nominee.
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Trump can’t catch up to Clinton in the polls.
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Trump can’t beat Hillary in the debates.
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Trump won’t become emperor of America.
We’re one terrorist attack or dank meme away from living in some sort of Upton Sinclair fanfiction. I’ll blame the Dems for putting up the most establishment candidate ever in an anti-establishment year. Heck of a job.
Well I’ve been sick with how this government operates- we could be doing more, but instead our country is crumbling due to the gridlock. If the economy crashed, I’m sure I’d be fine. IT can’t be 100% outsourced- how do you expect someone to physically fix a server (or a client PC) from parts unknown (especially where I live)? Clinton could be just a bad for the economy, though, since either candidate would have to figure out a recession. I’m not worried.
Now cast [del]stands at 51.1% for Trump to win.[/del] has flipped. 50.6% for Clinton to win.
EDIT: @marshmallow:
- Not likely.
- Trump will win primary states.
- He’s already the nominee for president…
- He’s done it many times.
- We’ll see tonight.
- You mean President? We’ll see in November.
Yeah, it tells us that Hillary has access to the best talent on the planet. I remember when that was supposed to be Trump’s strength, and then he went and hired/fired/hired/fired a collection of utter nutcases.
Until I did the calculations above, I had not realized that 538’s national average reaches so far back. Fully a third of the polling average reported today comes from polls that are more than two weeks old.
I had been thinking of 538 as the most aggressive/responsive of the popular models, but it’s actually more complicated than that. Instead, it is short-term aggressive but a little more blind to medium-term trends. That is, it highly weights recent polls and uses them to project trendlines forward making it quick to catch onto a short-term change, but it includes a ton of months-old data, so some of the observed changes in the model aren’t a result of the new data but are instead the result of phasing out old data that most of the qualitative analysis had already assumed was no longer relevant.
In some ways you have a perfect storm today for 538 because you have both a handful of bad polls which will move 538 in the short-term more than it does Upshot or PEC or even RCP, but also you have 538 still phasing out convention bump polling, which some of the others had already done. So it may be that things seem artificially grim on the 538 forecast today because of these weird short-term and medium-term responsiveness issues. If you used their exact method and shortened the look-back period of polls, what you would have seen instead (at least in the national polling) was a pretty crappy late August and early September, but relatively better performance post-9/11.
538’s latest update w/ Ipsos state polls, has Hillary ahead in NC, FL, & OH, but behind in PA & CO. Odd.
Also, while it hasn’t hit 538 yet, the latest NBC/Survey Monkey poll has her at +5 nationally in the 4-way, and +7 in a 2-way.
Trump: “I have only the BEST people! THE BEST”
(Trumps people turn out to be absolutely terrible, and/or in the pocket of Russian oligarchs)
Trump apologists: “Trump is amazing at doing this alone! He needs nobody, unlike loser Hilary!”
44 state polls put up on 538 just now from Ipsos (A-), some surprising to me.
Of note:
-Ohio is unadjusted to Clinton +3 (previously Ipsos had Clinton +4)
-Florida is unadjusted to Clinton +4 (previously Ipsos had Trump +4)
-Pennsylvania is unadjusted to Trump +1 (previously Clinton +2)
-N Carolina is unadjusted to Clinton +6 (previously Clinton +3)
-Wisconsin is unadjusted **tied **(previously Clinton +3)
-Michigan is unadjusted Clinton +1 (previously tie)
-Colorado is unadjusted Trump +2 (previously Trump +3)
-Georgia is unadjusted Trump +3 (previously Trump +8)
-Oregon is unadjusted to Clinton +2 (wtf?!) (previously Clinton +3)-- Ipsos has really been an outlier in Oregon. Everyone else has Clinton up 8, 9, 10, 13, 15…
All-in-all, these new polls have moved 538’s Polls-Only up a teeny bit to 54% for Hills. Seems like a lot of pollsters are purging their pre-debate numbers before the big show tonight in an effort to do a comparison in a week or so.
I’m pretty sure those Ipsos state polls are a subset of their national poll, and not corrected for things like demographics, which means they are just barely better than useless. A new thing (I think) this year is the big pollsters also releasing state subset numbers when they do a national poll, but the samples are too small for many states to correct for demographics and other things.
Oooh, yeah if that’s the case, then bah.
Who can gauge the changes in the Apathy Party? The people who either don’t vote or don’t really think about it until crunch time, and maybe not even then? Don’t the polls mostly target people who vote, as a regular thing? “Likely voters”, “registered voters”, so on and so forth?