Public Policy Polling for Daily Kos & SEIU. 10/13-16. Registered voters. MoE ±3.1% (Obama trendlines 10/6-9, all others 9/2-25):
Two weeks ago, Barack Obama's job approval rating stood at an abysmal 41-54, mired near his all-time lowest rating in the Daily Kos/SEIU poll. Then, last week, his numbers unexpectedly jumped, and quite a bit at that—all the way to 44-50. At the time,
I wondered aloud whether we might be seeing an outlier—a poll that, simply due to the vagaries of statistics, simply came back with numbers that didn't reflect reality. It seemed plausible, particularly since other pollsters weren't seeing a contemporaneous bump in their own surveys.
But while you can always speculate, you should never draw conclusions based on a single poll, especially when you get fresh data every week. If I had done so seven days ago, I'd have lost a lot of money, because I definitely would have bet that Obama's numbers would come back down this week. But not only have they not done so, they've gone up again. Indeed, in the first two weeks of October, the president's job approval has gone from -13 to -3, a jump of ten points. Such dramatic movement is generally quite rare, except in the face of major news.
And again, we haven't seen confirmation from other pollsters. Gallup (which runs a daily tracker) has shown Obama pretty steady over the last month. Few other organizations poll as frequently as we do, though, so we still need to wait to see whether we get any kind of confirmation here, or whether our numbers will continue to stick out like... well, I can't really say like a proverbial sore thumb, since these are positive!
It may be that we're on to something here, something that Gallup is in fact missing. Maybe Obama sticking it to Republicans over the jobs bill is paying dividends. Maybe the message of the Occupy Wall Street movement is generating new-found enthusiasm on the part of Democrats. Or maybe we're just wrong, and our numbers will soon fall in line. Time will, indeed, tell.