WP Poll over time shows Bush strong disapproval is near constant (~36%)

[BurtWorm]

while his strong approval is extremely soft, fluctuating from the high 30s to the mid 20s.

It looks like the strong disapproval started to harden around January 2004. Perhaps the nonstop attacks from the Democratic candidates in the primary had an effect? Perhaps Democrats should take a lesson from this and not let up? You think?

A PDF of the poll is here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/polls/postpoll050607.pdf

[warrens]

1. That approval figure corresponds

With the percentage of people on the hard right who keep telling us they are the majority now. The internals always show somewhere around 27% to 31% taking the hard right position. That is also pretty close to the number of people who claim to be hardcore fundamentalists, leading to the suspicion that they are one and the same.

[LightningFlash]

3. It also reaffirms the election fraud.

The fundamentalists are outnumbered and therefore feel threatened, so by manipulation of their own machines (they that is falwell et. al own the voting machines) it is able to extend their presence making them feel "unstoppable." Thus now a majority, a much stronger moral values party and so on. Party using dirty underhanded thievery.

[helderheid]

8. AGREED

http://udpc.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=15

[sinkingfeeling]

2. Well, my strong disapproval of Bush started in Jan. 2001 and has

never moved!

[petepillow]

4. Ditto. n/t

[Zinfandel]

6. It started for me when Bush was two years into Guv of Texas, I watched

from here in California, how hard the republicans and the ultra-right wing Texas pigs (and Limbaugh) were trying to force this Howdy Doody puppet for their corporate fascist agenda, down our throats as the national spokeman and huckster (president) way back then.

They knew they would probably have to steal the election, no big deal to them, and they did.

[Lexingtonian]

5. an easier answer

Is that Democrats' unity rarely existed during the Nineties and the residues got blown to bits by the Lewinsky affair, Florida 2000, and '9/11'. Since then it has slowly reassembled around the liberal line, which is principled opposition to the present hardline conservative Republican policy agenda. January 2004 is about right for the unity achieved in opposing Administration policies

If you really watch the polling in detail, the dealing with terrorism is the last thing Indies approve of in the way of Bush policies. Once that dies- and it is in decline- 'strong disapproval' will climb quite a bit higher, because the pain inflicted by the economic policies and the social policies (aka culture warfare) and Iraq is getting pretty darn high.

[BurtWorm]

7. Well, Dems seemed to have considered attacking Bush off limits

until Howard Dean went full steam ahead in the summer of 2003 and the other ones noticed he was the front runner. Then the debates began, and suddenly all the Dems were pounding on Bush. The Republicans complained that the Dems were the only news in town, and that once the primaries were over, Bush's approval ratings would go back up. There was some truth to that, yet, the strong disapproval numbers have never strayed far below 35% since then while the strong approval ratings have gone up and down.

[Lexingtonian]

10. You're very literally

giving the rooster the credit for the arrival of the sunrise.

Prominent Democrats didn't attack Bush because until the lack of WMDs was obvious- and that really took most of the year, especially the Niger uranium forgery scandal- since moderate Democrats still generally agreed with invading Iraq, and Iraq was the prominent thing in the public mind.

I'm not sure Dean fully understood the pollings involved, or the luck of the situation that Iraq was the last of five or six major policy areas moderate Democrats still supported Bush and the policy on. He did see opportunity. The Democrats who forced the Niger uranium story into the open and pressured the 'weapons investigators' and found the British conclusion of April or May '03 are the real causes for the swing away from Bush. Sure, it helps that Dean called him a liar, to drive the point home, but establishing the facts and getting the Bush people into inethical behavior (remember Condi's proven lying about the documents?) decided it. So I'd give more credit to the Senators who forced the Administration hand than Dean.

Right now Independents/nonpartisan voters are down to supporting Bush solely on the apparent efficacy of his anti-terrorism policy working. If Howard Dean goes out and starts a massive PR barrage about Guantanamo Bay and the travesties there, are you going to insist that his talking is why Indies give up on Bush? Or will you give it to the people who at great personal and political cost dug up, compiled, analyzed, verified, proved, and summarized the facts? Or the ones who did likewise in four or five other policy areas, and convinced Indies that Bush Administration policy has failed by Indie criteria, bringing them to hang on Guantanamo Bay working?

The reason the Dean-associated movement got the label 'Deaniacs' in 2003 was that, despite being plausible on the facts, they insisted on going beyond reason. There was the occultic group behavior and the treatment of Dean as a Magus, as a man who could speak words that changed reality. That was magical thinking and the willpower-centered, reason-dismissive doctrinaire behavior associated with the group is of a piece.

[BurtWorm]

11. I'm insisting that if no one calls attention to the Bushists' shortcomings

the media won't report it and the numbers will favor Bush. This is not an either/or situation, as you seem to think it is. Both fact-finders and "roosters" as you call them (and Dean wasn't the only one), are essential to the turnaround.

[Lexingtonian]

12. I'm not too sure of that

People aren't that insecure anymore; the national groupthink problem after '9/11' pretty much vanished in the runup to the Iraq War- Republicans peaked it on Election Day 2002. These days people only need some public assurance that they're not alone in drawing the obvious conclusions. Everyone sees the Bush policy agenda failing, the issue is only when in public discourse the facts are sufficiently established to say so, and by what criterion. (That's why 'government reports' seem to be the be-all and end-all of reporting these days.)

The Schiavo story, for example, doesn't fit your theory. What Democrats said or did didn't make any difference. It was seeing the Republicans lying and pontificating and moralizing hypocritically on an issue that didn't warrant any of it that registered.

Of course, Republicans have had to respond to the overt problem in the reality by tightening up groupthink on their side. So far they've been pretty good at keeping moderate Republicans in overall agreement, stopping further polling number decline, but there's a hollowing out effect. And since the media needs to keep as many Republicans as possible buying their product- advertisers love them more than Democrats, as conformists and ignorant but with enough money-, the media has to keep on treating the Republican line with formal respect and diligence.

I think everyone's used to the media bias now. Enough gets through for Indies, being practical people, and moderate Republicans are tired of the happy talk invariably followed by disappointing results.

It's not 2002 or 2003 anymore.

[BurtWorm]

13. Well, you're right about the need to credit people's ability to read

the news correctly. Or I should say, *enough* people's ability.

[KittyWampus]

15. I Like The Point You Made About People Needing To Feel "Not Alone"

in their perceptions of how country & POTUS is doing.

[lonestarnot]

9. No...I dispute this number as the correct number is actually

Turdy-Tree and a Turd!

[blm]

14. bump

.