Friday, June 22, 2007

Bush Approval: ARG at 27%, Trend at 29.1%
























A new American Research Group poll, taken 6/18-21/97, finds approval at 27%, disapproval at 67%. This puts the approval trend estimate at 29.1%, continuing the decline that began in late April.

This is in line with Newsweek's 26% and NBC/WSJ's 29%, and is within range of Gallup's 32%, the three most recent polls. My post on the Newsweek result yesterday is unchanged by this result. None of the recent polls is an outlier, all falling within the +/-5% confidence interval around the current 29.1% estimate.

By popular request, I've added a plot to my standard approval post contents: The fourth graph contains both the standard "old blue" trend estimate, which is more likely to be correct in the long run but which is slower to detect change, and the "ready red" estimator which catches change quickly but is easily mislead by random noise that isn't actually a change in trend. Now you can see both as part of these posts. The blue line is plotted second, so when the red agrees closely with the blue estimator, the red line is covered up by the blue line. So where you can see red at all is where the estimators disagree. Otherwise red and blue are tracking together.