Approval of President Bush is at 34% in the latest Gallup/USAToday poll, completed 1/12-14/07. Disapproval stands at 63%. The CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll completed 1/11/07, just after the President's speech, found 35% approval and 62% disapproval. An AP/Ipsos poll completed just BEFORE the speech placed approval at 32% and disapproval at 65%. (ABC and CBS did post-speech polls. CBS' was a call back to previously interviewed respondents, not a new sample, and ABC's new sample did not include overall approval of Bush's handling of his job.) See my poll comparison plots at Pollster.com here for the trends in each poll.
With these new polls, the approval trend stands at 34.0% (33.98% if you don't believe in rounding.) The trend remains vulnerable to a relatively small number of new polls in January. The trend has bounced from 33.5% to 34.9% to the current 34.0%. A couple more readings would be welcome, but saying approval is 34% +/-1% would be a pretty confident estimate.
The impact of the troop surge speech has appeared modest in the four post-speech polls we've seen so far. Most of these have found a point or two upturn in Iraq specific support, but flat or declines in some other measures. Certainly no large effects (either way) have been consistently found. I'll have more to say about that a bit later.
