I am trying to replace Pollkatz for the nonce - and so have collected a snapshot of Bush#s between 2/10 and 2/20 using the same polls that Pollkatz used to (sob!) collect.
http://americanresearchgroup.com/
http://www.POLLINGREPORT.COM/bush.htm
According to the 6 polls taken during this time:
(Fox, CBS, ABC, Ipsos-Reid, ARG, CNN/Gallup), Bush's mean Approval has bee 49% even, while his mean Disapproval has been 44.5%, yielding a spread of 4.5%
Pollkatz' spread chart (going up to the end of December http://www.pollkatz.homestead.com/files/image003.gif shows that this is by far the worst Bushie has done during his term of office.
If you check out the pattern of Bush's A/D numbers, yiu see that his popularity decays with a steady slope over time, except when there is an event to scare people into making him more popular. There have been three of these so far (9/11, Iraq invasion, Saddam capture), each one being progressively LESS effective in rallying W's popularity.
The key observation to make is that THERE IS NO PERIOD WHERE BUSH'S POPULARITY IS STEADY !He is ALWAYS losing ground unless he's scaring us or diverting us.
And if I'm not mistaken, a plotting of the last set of points on a Pollkatz scatter plot suggests that the slope of his decline has recently ACCELERATED.
I solicit predictions as to what this means and what it portends.