Matt Yglesias

Red Reality, Blue Reality

Andrew Gelman and John Sides write about partisan bias in assessing economic conditions:

A good example comes from the research of Larry Bartels. He analyzed a 1988 survey that asked “Would you say that compared to 1980, inflation has gotten better, stayed about the same, or gotten worse?” Amazingly, over half of the self-identified strong Democrats in the survey said that inflation had gotten worse and only 8% thought it had gotten much better, even though the actual inflation rate dropped from 13% to 4% during Reagan’s eight years in office. Republicans were similarly biased about the Clinton-era economy: in 1996, a majority of Republicans thought that the budget deficit had increased. This partisan filter was also evident after the Democrats’ retaking of Congress in 2006. Research by Alan Gerber and Greg Huber shows that Democrats became much more optimistic, and Republicans more pessimistic, about the national economy.

As Ezra Klein pointed out some time ago, Bartels’ research actually suggests that the problem has odd interactions with levels of political information:

For one thing, the gap grows as levels of political information grow. But more interesting is that along most of the hierarchy, Republicans show the pattern you would assume—the more they knew, the more accurate their perceptions about the state of the budget deficit. But among very high-information Republicans, perceptions start getting less accurate. This is presumably because very high information Republicans were able to familiarize themselves with sophisticated arguments about why the apparent improvement wasn’t real improvement.

I assume the way this works is akin to how I was slower than most Americans to recognize that violence in Iraq was dipping not despite being better-informed about the situation in Iraq than most people but precisely because I was well-informed. Well-informed and suspicious! So I was keenly aware of all kinds of problems in the data and its presentation that undermined the dominant—and, it turns out, correct—narrative about an improving security situation.

Voters Think Their Tax Burden Is Fair

Many media reports such as this article from The Wichita Eagle are acting as if the public’s view of the “tea party” astroturf protests is some kind of unknowable mystery:

More than 750 people, including U.S. Sen. Sam Brownback, are expected to gather near Wichita Mid-Continent Airport post office on Wednesday for a taxpayer “tea party” to protest the federal economic stimulus package, organizers said. [...] Supporters of President Obama and the stimulus say the protesters are a small, vocal minority, and that most families will see an $800 annual tax cut from reduced withholding that’s part of the stimulus.

One gets hoarse repeating this sort of thing, but not only do “supporters of President Obama” “say” “that most families will get an $800 annual tax cut,” it’s actually the case that most families will get an $800 annual tax cuts. It’s true that the White House says this and that many of its supporters say this, but lots of people say lots of things. This thing happens to be true.

As for the “small, vocal minority” we saw this morning that 71 percent of Americans say they have confidence in Obama’s economic policies and this other Gallup poll shows that most Americans think their current tax burden is fair and reject the tea party overtaxation argument:

Now how small a minority is Brownback standing with? Well, we’re talking about 30-40 percent of the population. So it’s not that small a minority. Hostility to Obama’s economic policies is slightly less widespread than support for legalizing marijuana—much more than a fringe view, but clearly less than a majority. But in a country as large as the United States, adherents to minority viewpoints can often convince themselves that they’re in the majority. I frequently here people say that marijuana legalization is popular, presumably because it is popular in the sort of circles they/I travel in.

Some Public Opinion With Your Tea?

Tea Parties aside, Barack Obama’s handling of the economy remains extremely popular:

Gallup also reports the following finding that reenforces my general sense that you shouldn’t take public opinion survey data about second-tier personalities and issues at face value:

The partisan ratings of Bernanke have shifted from last year, when he was serving under a Republican president. At that time, the Fed chairman received a 61% confidence rating from Republicans, 43% from independents, and just a 40% rating from Democrats. Apparently, Americans associate the Fed chairman with the particular president he happens to be serving under.

Ben Bernanke was, of course, not only appointed to his Fed job by George W. Bush but he was on the Bush Council of Economic Advisers. But people just have very little awareness of most of what’s happening in the political world, and tend to form their opinions using relatively crude heuristics. People do have strong opinions about Barack Obama, and they see Bernanke appearing next to Obama administration officials and their views shift accordingly.

Conservative Anti-European Rhetoric Reflects Distinctive Southern Attitudes

The fascinating finding in this dKos polling data on people’s attitudes to various locations that frequently serve as right-wing bogeymen is to some extent obscured by the presentation of all the cross tabs. This chart I made boils down the key facts that San Francisco, New York, Europe, and even the dread France are popular among the public at large and even Republicans at large but held in low esteem specifically in the South:

Way back in his 1998 Atlantic article “The Southern Captivity of the GOP”, Christopher Caldwell was warning that “the Republicans have narrowly defined ‘values’ as the folkways of one regional subculture, and have urged their imposition on the rest of the country.”

Like most articles describing why political parties are suffering from deep, structural flaws, Caldwell’s was ultimately undermined by the basic reality that events matter. A combination of poor ballot design, a compliant Supreme Court, and America’s moronic election system put George W. Bush in the White House despite the fact that most people didn’t want him to be president. Then 9/11 changed which issues people care about and led to GOP wins in 2002 and 2004. But you do see that pattern Caldwell identified coming into play a lot nowadays. It’s not really clear why you would think that “disdain for cosmopolitan cities and Europe” should be constitutive of conservatism, but it does seem to be a widespread element of the southern worldview, and it’s increasingly been adopted as the overwhelming posture of conservatism as such.

The Uncaring Public

Everyone’s already said what needs to be said about the most Broderific aspects of David Broder’s latest column but I wanted to take a stab at another angle it contains:

It is the reaction of those swing voters — or the politicians’ anticipation of their shifting opinion — that drives the outcome of the big policy debates. You’ve had an example of this already with Obama’s cap-and-trade proposal for protecting the environment from carbon discharges.

Swing voters aside, there’s just very little reason at all to believe that public opinion has much of anything to do with the cap and trade debate. I got a briefing recently based on a pretty in-depth look at public opinion on climate energy issues and one clear finding is that the overwhelming majority of people have no idea what the phrase “cap and trade” refers to. And they certainly don’t have opinions about questions like auctioning permits or giving them away. People don’t pay that much attention to politics, and tend not to form detailed opinions about policy questions.

If anything, causation is likely to go the other way. If Barack Obama starts talking in high-profile situations about how it would be great if we had some “cap and trade” then people will start forming opinions about the policy based on their opinions about Obama. After all, Obama is something almost everyone has opinions about. People also have opinions about their local elected officials. If Mary Landrieux (D-LA) and David Vitter (R-LA) were to both start telling constituents and local media that there’s an idea called “cap and trade” and it’s bad for Louisiana and likely to kill jobs, then many Louisianans will conclude that this bipartisan consensus probably reflects some larger truth about the Louisiana economy.

Tea Parties

I haven’t said a great deal about the burgeoning “tea party” “movement” because (a) it’s incredibly stupid, and (b) I knew some colleagues were working on some more in-depth efforts in this regard than I could possible stomach. But here’s Lee Fang showing the role of corporate lobbyists in organizing these “grassroots” outpourings of sentiment and here’s Victor Zapanta’s compilation of Fox News’ relentless efforts to hype the tea parties:

Part of the underlying absurdity of this, however, is that it’s just so transparently silly to be pouring so much time and energy into trying to make Barack Obama appear unpopular when he’s not unpopular. There’s such a thing as opinion polling and it can answer this sort of thing pretty conclusively:

People like Barack Obama. Not everyone! 30 percent or so of the people say they disapprove. And in a country of 300 million, that means it’s easy to get together a big meeting of people who really hate Obama. But it’s clearly a relatively modest minority of the population, comparable in size—and probably largely overlapping with—the group of people who approved of the job George W. Bush was doing all the way ’till the end. But even Doug Holtz-Eakin now concedes that the Bush tax cuts should expire.

The Declining Unpopularity of Socialism

Steve Benen observes that one problem with attacking Barack Obama as a “socialist” is that opposition to socialism isn’t as popular as it used to be:

Only 53% of American adults believe capitalism is better than socialism. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 20% disagree and say socialism is better. Twenty-seven percent (27%) are not sure which is better. Adults under 30 are essentially evenly divided: 37% prefer capitalism, 33% socialism, and 30% are undecided.

The generational change here is interesting. I think it reflects the fact that on a basic level “socialism” is good branding. The whole idea is that we should put society first rather than capital, or money. That sounds good! But in the United States we never had a Socialist Party so “socialism” was primarily associated with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics which was not at all good. But to people under 30, there’s less of that old resonance. And saying that Obama, who’s popular, is a “socialist” may simply tend to make people have warmer feelings toward the word “socialism.”

Obama’s Popularity

Barack Obama continues to be popular, as confirmed by a new CBS poll. The story of the year is really the unusual amount of courage that the Senate Republicans are showing in the face of a popular president. Ordinarily, when you’ve got a president with approval ratings in the 60s, you would imagine that legislators representing states the President won—that’s Senators Burr, Martinez, Grassley, Voinovich, Lugar, Specter, Gregg, Collins, and Snowe—would be pretty eager to sign on for a few of his key priorities. And that’s not at all what we’ve seen.

It’ll be interesting to see how this winds up playing out. Obviously, I’m not inclined to share the kind of conservative values that these Senators have generally been pitting against the Obama agenda. But on another level, I admire what they’re doing. It seems to me that most legislators have an irrational overestimation of their own electoral vulnerability and, especially, of the extent to which individual congressional votes are likely to impact that vulnerability. But even as a maintain that view, I understand why members are reluctant to put it to the test. But now many Republicans are. We’ll see.

As for the headline “Poll: Obama Approval Hits New High – 66%” this seems to reflect a lot of the usual pathologies of reporting on public opinion. Broader metrics like the Gallup tracking poll and the Pollster.com average show Obama basically fluctuating around in the 60s since February. That CBS happens to have registered a higher result than past CBS samples have found is very possibly just a coincidence.

The Geezer Effect and Internet Politics

This isn’t really apropos of anything in particular, but over the weekend I was thinking about the fact that a lot of our perceptions about the medium-term implications of digital technology are probably skewed by the fact that, at the moment, there’s a significant generational gap in online activity:

For example, there’s also a significant generational gap in attitudes toward Barack Obama:

This means that at the moment there’s a substantial relationship between being online and attitudes toward Barack Obama. The online population, in other words, is a lot more Obamaphilic than the population as a whole.

This sort of thing has spurred a lot of admiring commentary about the efficacy of progressive internet tools, and some conservative interest in building conservative new media platforms leading to the present-day’s right-wing obsession with Twitter. But it seems very plausible that Obama’s popularity on the internet is driven by completely coincidental demographic factors—the senior citizen cohort contains more white people than does the generation population and white seniors have more conservative attitudes about a number of social issues than do white non-seniors—and the “success” of the online left is thus something of an illusion.

Politico Ponders War With North Korea

Maybe it’s just me, but it does seem to me that if Politico wants to run an article hyping a dubious poll indicating that a majority of the public favors starting a war with North Korea that they might want to devote some coverage to the issue of the possible consequences of such a war.

After all, insofar as people do favor such a step, it’s almost certainly because they don’t understand what it might entail. But a war could easily involve the deaths of millions of people and the destruction of one of the world’s largest cities. South Korea, with American assistance, would undoubtedly prevail in such a conflict but the price paid in blood would be extremely high and the impact on the global economy could be extremely grave. Meanwhile, the world would be left with the very thorny question of what to do with the post-war DPRK. In some very narrow sense of what a “politico” might care about, these issues don’t matter. But even in pretty crass political terms, public opinion would clearly be much more impacted by reaction to the actual consequences of military action than to whatever kind of weird push polling Rasmussen wants to do.

Republicans as Unpopular as Ever

How’s that backlash against Barack Obama’s agenda coming? Not so well according to the latest Democracy Corps poll:

Note that this chart makes it difficult to understand the inclination of some Democratic members of the congress to buck the president and join forces with congressional Republicans as an act of political cowardice. The path of least resistance is for Democrats, who are relatively popular, to stick with the President, who’s very popular, and to stay far away from the very unpopular Republicans. Whatever’s driving them, it’s not timidity.

Obama Still Popular, GOP Still Doesn’t Care

With there seeming to be more Senate Democrats who are wary of Barack Obama’s agenda than there are Senate Republicans wary of opposing it, Washington often takes on the feel of a town with a president whose honeymoon is over. But every time a poll comes out, you see that it’s not true. Today it’s The Washington Post:

Overall, 66 percent of the public approves of Obama’s performance on the job. Back in November, 53 percent of the vote was enough for him to carry North Carolina, Indiana, Ohio, Nevada, and Florida. Given that he’s more popular now than he was then, you’d think that the Republican Senators from those states—along with the ones from Pennsylvania and Maine and New Hampshire—would be running scared. But instead they’re quite boldly marching on.

Do they have some secret insights? Maybe they do. I think public opinion matters less than most people in politics think. That said, the Senate GOP caucus did a marvelous job of holding together in defense of the unpopular George W. Bush’s agenda back in 2007-2008 but all their tactical acumen just got them a bunch of lost seats. So maybe this is madness rather than method.

Forecast

To the best of my understanding, the main leaders of the environmentalist movement have made a conscious decision that whipping people into a state of alarm and panic about the prospects of catastrophic climate change is not the right way to go. Instead, there’s a preference for focusing on the positive and trying to paint an appealing vision of the clean energy future. And though it’s not something I’ve peered into in great detail, the research in social psychology seems to me to back that conclusion up—it really is better to focus on the positive political message rather than trying to freak people out.

That said, the trajectory we’re on right now is actually really frightening. The weather seems like a banal topic, but if you study history it’s clear that systematic changes in the climate can have utterly catastrophic impacts on human societies. And it’s also clear that right now climate-related issues are having a significant negative impact on human lives. If you want to give yourself a good scare, Stephan Faris’ book Forecast: The Consequences of Climate Change, from the Amazon to the Arctic, from Darfur to Napa Valley is all about reportage on this sort of thing and the scary near-future we seem to be heading towards.

Washington Post Claims, Without Evidence, That Public is “Outraged” by Obama Spending

My friend J.T. points out this passage in Lori Montgomery’s Washington Post coverage of the budget:

The moves come as Republicans are pounding Obama for proposing a rapid increase in government spending and taxpayers are voicing anxiety and outrage about the gargantuan sums that Washington is already pouring into the economy and banking system.

I certainly expect RNC press releases to just kind of run everything together like this. But while there’s clear evidence of outrage at the AIG bonuses, opinion on banking system rescue is more mixed, and opinion on fiscal stimulus and Obama’s general economic performance is strongly positive. This is the most recent polling on the big picture that I’ve been able to see:

What’s definitely true is that Obama’s political opponents aren’t acting the way you would expect a minority party that’s lost two elections in a row and is facing popular proposals from a popular president to act. Certainly when George W. Bush and his agenda were popular, Democrats didn’t come close to mounting uniform opposition to it. But one shouldn’t mistake the GOP’s tactical choice to oppose Obama even though he and his agenda are popular with a situation in which he’s failing to get massive congressional support for his agenda because the public doesn’t support him. I think it’s fine for the GOP to say “damn the polls, we’re sticking to our views” but that’s what’s happening.

Ag Subsidies Revisited

I observed yesterday that even though agriculture subsidies are typically discussed as a canonical example of special interests controlling the political process, proposals to curtail the subsidies don’t actually poll very well suggesting a broader political problem. Tom Laskaway responds that the question was worded very generically and people probably don’t understand what’s actually being subsidized.

That’s probably true, but the public rarely has a particularly nuanced discussion of the issues they’re asking poll questions about. My only point was that this issue is often discussed among high-information people as if a politician who ran around the country saying “I’m going to cut agriculture subsidies!” would be greeted with widespread applause, albeit defeated by special interest politics in the Senate. The available evidence, though somewhat meager, suggests that this may not actually be the case. Instead, the farm lobby has its teeth not only in the congress but into the brains of the public, who seem to understand “farm subsidies” to mean something wholesome and good rather than endless rivers of corn and soybeans being transformed into processed foods at enormous cost to the environment and public health.

The Surprising Popularity of Farm Subsidies

Well-known bigot Steven Walt offers up another one of his tawdry conspiracy theories in which U.S. policy is the result of special interest lobbying:

Like other industrial countries, the United States subsidizes a host of agricultural products and erects various trade barriers against foreign imports. This happens because the farm lobby is defending the narrow interests of the farm sector and many democratic systems give small groups (in this case farmers or agribusiness) disproportionate influence. (It’s the usual story: A small group reaps the benefits of this policy while the costs are dispersed across the whole population). This policy makes food more expensive, encourages farmers to grow the wrong crops, squanders energy, and hinders economic development in poorer countries, thereby contributing to political instability. These policies also make it much harder to negotiate multilateral trade deals that would raise prosperity world-wide. So although nearly every detached observer thinks the policy is wrong, they also know that the political power of farm interests (both here and abroad) makes it excruciatingly difficult to change course.

No, actually, this is just what everyone thinks and not a conspiracy theory at all. Indeed, “everyone” thinks it to such an overwhelming extent that we may be overlooking the extent to which lots of people think terrible agriculture policy is actually a good idea. Here’s a recent Pew poll on various aspects of Barack Obama’s budget, a document which, among other things, proposes slicing agricultural benefits:

On the issue of reducing agricultural subsidies, more Republicans say it is the wrong thing than the right thing (57% vs. 34%), while Democrats and independents are more evenly divided.

It would be interesting to know the exact wording of the question here, which unfortunately I can’t find. Still, it seems to indicate that this is a bit more than a question of a narrow group blocking change. What may be happening is that since farm subsidies have passionate defenders in both parties, a wide swathe of people are accustomed to seeing them endorsed by leaders they trust.

Obama Somewhat More Popular Than Bush or Clinton

Gallup finds that Barack Obama’s mid-March approval rating is somewhat higher than that enjoyed by his two predecessors:

In particular, this seems relevant when comparing the present situation to the legislative landscape of 1993. It’s not just that Clinton had a smaller perceived electoral “mandate” but he was actually less popular. At the same time, the less-popular Clinton wasn’t unpopular—those are pretty good numbers he had. But those numbers weren’t good enough to inspire congress to pass an ambitious agenda.

Rank-and-File Republicans Losing Faith in GOP Congressional Leadership

Greg Sargent reads the latest Pew poll and sees that rank-and-file Republicans are getting fed up with the congressional GOP leadership:

The approval rating of GOP leaders among Republicans has plummeted 12 points in a month, down from 55% in February to a minority of 43% now. That’s striking.

Not only that, but approval of GOP leaders overall has dropped to 28% overall — the lowest rating for GOP leaders in 12 years of Pew polling.

In fact, approval of Republican congressional leaders has fallen from 34% in February to 28% currently, the lowest rating for GOP leaders in nearly 14 years of Pew Research surveys.

It’s a bit hard to interpret these findings. Congressional Democrats faced perennially low approval from self-identified Democrats in late 2007 and throughout 2008 because the people who’d put them in the majority expected them to deliver more in terms of stopping the war and bringing the Bush administration to its knees. Is this similar frustration that the GOP hasn’t been able to block more of Obama’s agenda? Or is it frustration that they’re not laying out constructive ideas and cutting compromises?

Making Unionization Easier is Popular

Whatever reason “centrist” politicians may have for being made queasy by the idea of reforming labor law in a more union-friendly direction, please do keep in mind that public opinion isn’t the issue:

Meanwhile, to state the obvious, whatever the merits of the Employee Free Choice Act may be, nobody can deny that increasing union membership would be beneficial to the Democratic Party from the standpoint of narrow partisan self-interest. It’s worth asking yourself if you can imagine a scenario in which Republicans would vote against a bill that enjoys majority support and would serve the GOP’s electoral interests. The answer is that you can’t.

But while it should surprise nobody to learn that some Democrats put their own self-interest ahead of the broader public interest, the really striking fact about certain elements of the Democratic Party is that they actually put the welfare of corporate executives ahead of their own self-interest and the public interest at the same time.

Ideological Self-ID

One enduring and famous result of polling is that self-described conservatives outnumber self-described liberals by a fair margin. But how much of this is just about question-wording? According to some new research from CAP’s new Progressive Studies Program quite a bit. As John Halpin and Ruy Teixeira explain:

Two new studies (here and here) conducted by the Progressive Studies Program at the Center for American Progress breaks down the electorate on a new 5-point scale of political ideology that reflects the primary approaches people ascribe to today. Under this schematic, 34 percent of the country self-identifies as ‘conservative’, 29 percent as ‘moderate’, 15 percent as ‘liberal’, 16 percent as ‘progressive’, and 2 percent as ‘libertarian’.

After moderates are asked which approach they lean towards, the overall ideological breakdown of the country divides into fairly neat left and right groupings with 47 percent of Americans identifying as progressive or liberal and 48 percent as conservative or libertarian and the rest unsure.

There’s much more to chew on in the report, and I’ll almost certainly post more on it. But that, in itself, is very interesting.

Republicans vs Chicoms

Chris Bowers got the idea of comparing the results Gallup got when it asked “Do you approve or disapprove of the way the Republicans in Congress are handling their job” and the results it got when it asked “‘d like your overall opinion of some foreign countries. Is your overall opinion of [see below] very favorable, mostly favorable, mostly unfavorable, or very unfavorable?”

I made the chart:

This is a bit unfair since the question wording isn’t really equivalent. But still.

Public Supportive, But Not Overwhelmingly So, of Obama Economic Agenda

A couple of data points on public opinion. First Gallup on the budget:

Second, a peak at the new WSJ/NBC poll numbers:

Here’s one set of numbers we’re releasing before the entire NBC/WSJ poll comes out at 6:30 pm ET: By a 48-20 percent margin, Americans believe the Democratic Party would do a better job of getting the U.S. out of recession than the Republican Party.

I think this confirms the basic point that the Democrats have a golden opportunity on their hands, but no kind of sure thing. Support for the Republicans has completely collapsed and people are generally supportive of the new administration. But even in the midst of whatever kind of honeymoon Obama’s going to get, these numbers aren’t going above fifty percent. If the Obama administration actually produces a return to prosperity they’ll have a lock on re-election. But if their efforts don’t work, then I bet these numbers will turn around fast. And while I’ve been very pleased with the social policy aspects—health care, energy, education, etc.—of the administration thus far I’m not at all sure that we can see recovery unless we get better finance policy and more effective international coordination of anti-recession efforts.

Scott Rasmussen’s Conservative-Friendly Question-Wording

Politico says that Barack Obama’s foreclosure-mitigation plan is in political trouble because we’re “a nation of Santellis”. The basis for the piece is a Rasmussen poll which asks “Some people say that having the government subsidize mortgage payments for financially troubled homeowners puts the government in the position of rewarding bad behavior. Is the government rewarding bad behavior when it provides subsidies to those who are most at risk of losing their homes?” The results are 55 yes and 32 no.

Bad news for Barack Obama. But at the same time, when The Washington Post asked if people support Obama’s plan over 60 percent said yes. And The New York Times got a similar result. The difference is striking:

The difference, obviously, is question-wording. Josh Marshall remarks parenthetically:

On the question of the quality of Rasmussen polls in general, I’ve been watching them closely now through at least two cycles. The toplines tend to be a bit toward the Republican side of the spectrum, compared to the average of other polls. But if you factor that in they’re pretty reliable. And the frequency that Rasmussen is able to turn them around — because they’re based on robocalls — gives them added value in terms of teasing out trends. But the qualitative questions, in terms of their phrasing and so forth, are frequently skewed to give answers friendly toward GOP or conservative viewpoints. All of which is to say that his numbers are valuable. But they need to be read with that bias in mind. On the separate question of whether robocalls are as ‘good’ as traditional live question polls, I think they’ve held up quite well over the last two cycles. I see little evidence that SurveyUSA’s poll haven’t stood up as well as those done by live phone callers.

To really understand this dynamic, you need to read my friend Dave Weigel’s story on Rasmussen for The Washington Independent. Dave doesn’t editorialize in his reporting, but if you read between the lines I think a pretty clear picture emerges. Rasmussen is a pretty good pollster whose results are within the range of accuracy one wants from a pollster. But polling is a crowded business. And Rasmussen doesn’t also have a daily newspaper or a television network to tout his results. His business, however, requires attention. So how does he get that attention? Well in part he gets it with issue polling that, while basically methodologically sound, has question-wording that’s designed to lead to conservative-friendly results.

Then the results come out and conservatives tout the results as vindicating their position. It’s free PR for Rasmussen, it’s a morale booster and message-driver for the right. And because the basic horserace polling is accurate enough, these kind of shenanigans don’t get Rasmussen dismissed as a surveyor.

And I don’t really think he should be dismissed. But I think we need to understand his “issue” polling as more like message testing than like normal public opinion research. What we’re learning from his result isn’t that there’s a “nation of Santellis” out there outraged about Obama’s plan. We’re learning that support for the plan isn’t so rock-solid as to be immune to leading questions or negative characterizations.

Public’s View of Obama Polarizing, Non-Republicans Still Love Him

Gallup notes a slight downtick in public assessments of Barack Obama’s job performance:

President Barack Obama remains highly popular among the U.S. public at the end of his first month in office. However, the 63% of Americans currently approving of his job performance is down slightly from his initial 68% rating in January. The percentage disapproving has doubled, from 12% to 24%.

The microfoundations of the shift are interesting:

Rather than a broad, mild decline in approval, Obama is actually looking at modest increases in the esteem in which he’s held by Democrats and independents. But Republicans like him less, with conservative Republicans, in particular, taking a sharply more negative view. This tends, I think, to bolster the idea that polarized views of political figures is basically a structural feature of the modern landscape. Obama’s a likable and appealing person, but actually conducting politics and being subject to criticism from his opponents immediately starts pushing the public in a more polarized direction.

Marijuana Legalization More Popular than Key Conservative Leaders

Inspired by this Chris Bowers post, here’s a chart I made comparing public support for legalizing marijuana to the approval ratings for Rush Limbaugh and various Republican Party leaders that I found on PollingReport:

Needless to say, support for marijuana legalization is pretty much a “fringe” view in national politics. And it certainly doesn’t have majority support. And yet put it in perspective and this is what you get.